The rising costs university libraries are paying to access journals have implications far beyond the ivory tower. From new cancer treatments to debates about foreign policy, new information enters the public domain through academic studies. Now libraries are having trouble affording the subscriptions.

    • sik0fewl@kbin.socialOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      1 year ago

      Ya, but it really seems like there ought to be a nonprofit organization that will peer review and publish articles.

      • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        11
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        It should be an unconditional requirement that the day your university receives a penny of public funding your papers must be public domain.

        The issue isn’t that no free options exist. It’s that using them doesn’t get you the reputation needed to be funded.

        • Sinnerman@kbin.social
          link
          fedilink
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          1 year ago

          It should be an unconditional requirement that the day your university receives a penny of public funding your papers must be public domain.

          Some grants do have this requirement. So publishers just charge you extra to make your article “open source”.

          Truly, academic publishers are vile people who make the world a worse place.

          • conciselyverbose@kbin.social
            link
            fedilink
            arrow-up
            2
            ·
            1 year ago

            Because it’s some. It’s not a universal requirement.

            You obviously can’t just take away IP rights for academic research, but you can make all federal funding conditional on literally every academic paper written by any employee of the university being public domain. Schools can preserve their ownership by completely funding themselves, or they can recognize that most of them couldn’t exist without massive federal funding and that they’re not entitled to privatize the proceeds of that investment. The journals would have no capability to abuse their position because there would be no content left eligible for them to prey on.

      • GlowHuddy@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        1 year ago

        Agree completely. Tbh I was very surprised that YOU need to pay to get published. I think it should be the other way around, as publishers should care about publishing the most quality content possible and not reaping researchers off just because they are considered ‘prestigious’.

        SciHub is nice (and unsurprising in this ecosystem), but there should be a legal/not copyright infringing way to provide access to scientific papers.