Can someone explain me why the researchers themselves don't publish their work for free? The article says they are not paid for the articles so I don't see why they couldn't do that.
For the $1000-3000 that a single OA application costs I can pay for a new computer, or send one or two students to conferences, or pay for part of a stipend, finance a temporary web design guy, etc. Now I try to publish 10 papers per year - that's $10-30,000 out of the window for no "return" to our group. For $30,000 I can send everyone to several conferences!
Conferences are more important to a scientific career than an OA paper. The people who hire you will in all likelihood have access to your paper even if it's behind a paywall.
>Paper publications make or break early biomedical research careers.
Yes, but that has nothing to do with the OA-status of those publications - if it's a high-impact journal, then it makes the career, if it's not, then not.
For some it is because the publishers take the copyright. For others it is just because the authors don't really care, don't know about it, or don't really think about it.
I am a professor and I was at a meeting a couple weeks ago that talked about open access publishing. There were people from many departments and there was one professor there who asking questions that made it clear he didn't know anything about online publishing (he was asking things like "where are the papers stored?" and said something about how "all this online stuff is like Big Brother")
Because researchers depend on funding which depends on publications in prestigious journals which charge fees for access.
Every researcher I know would publish for free if it wouldn't ruin their career to do otherwise. They want their results disseminated as widely as possible.
> Every researcher I know would publish for free if it wouldn't ruin their career to do otherwise.
Why can't the national/international associations in each field set up simple publishing operations (or pay a U. press to do it), with the same people doing peer review, and use their power to designate the presitage of each journal: 'this will be our tier 1 journal, this one a tier 2, etc.'
Whatever it costs, it would cost far less than the existing setup. I'd think the U. libraries would be happy to share some of their enormous savings to fund the operation.
Most journals withhold the copyright, and the scientists happily relinquish it. They can distribute preprint copies of their article (very few do in life sciences) but not the article itself.
I would not say that most scientist happly relinquish it, but they trade off the prestige gained from publishing in the journal for the copyright.
The real problem is the use of journals as an arbiture of research quality. If it didn’t matter to your career if you published in Nature or PLOS One then everyone would publish in PLOS One. If you are more likely to get a job or grant by publishing in Nature then people will do almost anything to get their work into Nature. We are trying to solve the wrong problem by worrying about journals controlling copyright.
Sorry, i find it hard to imagine a scientist feeling sad that he will publish a Nature paper. You are spot on that we need a new arbiter. It's 2016 and we rely on this ancient system, it's no wonder that the elseviers of the world take advantage of it.
But the control of copyright is a real problem, and i think we underestimate how much it hampers science (esp. considering the wonderful things one could do with machine analysis of the texts)
I have not met a scientist (including myself) that was happy about giving up the copyright, but it is viewed as the cost of publishing in a “prestige” journal. Nearly all scientists would prefer to retain the copyright if they could and make their papers widely available to everyone interested provide it did not exclude publishing in a career advanacing journal.
