[off-list as "no fun"] * Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> [Mar 16. 2012 16:28]:
This is only one symptom of a much larger disease -- the exorbitant cost of higher education -- very little of which money ends up in professors' or grad students' pockets.
I do think a specific issue, even if part of a larger problem, should be (usually) addressed as such. Case in question: addressing the whole issue at once makes it easy for lobbyists to paint you as having a dubious agenda (think "communist").
The solution to the journal problem is "just say no" & publish only in open journals.
Apparently this is problematical for young scientists in some areas where the top journals are just the expensive ones. Personnaly I can live with low-price journals (such as, a random example, the Fibonacci Quarterly) that 1. allow to put the preprint online 2. have their older volumes open access (with moving wall) Some highly reputed Journals offer an open acess option as well, you just have to throw in about 3000 Dollars. arxive is a must, but how many entities view arxiv "preprints" as equivalent to "published" even if in a perfect shape?
Tell your politicians to make govt-sponsored research available to all w/o the Elsevier tax.
Europe is on the brink of eating ACTA, SOPA, the US (software/ideas) patent system. It is (in my opinion) optimistic to assume that the open access issue can be communicated to a nontrivial amount of politicians (actually any issue that requires the activity of two functional brain cells for five consecutive minutes). The EU committee on legal affairs (my translation from "EU Rechtsausschuss") just had a vote regarding orphaned works and the decision was highly surpring in that participation in the vote was 113 per cent. The vote will not be repeated.
Make your research available via Wikipedia & the Khan Academy.
Activities like this (Khan Academy, arxiv, and others) will in the end replace the current system of publications (and partly teaching). However, I do not expect to see the complete change in my lifetime. Wikipedia is certainly no place to publish scientific results (and "original research" is an explicit no for the articles).
It took years, but U.S. patents finally became available on the internet, so there is no reason why other innovation publications can't do the same.
Very different thing (patent's are issued by state bureaucracy). Journals are company owned: even if everything would be published as open access starting tomorrow we'd still have to wait 75(?) years to even have the theoretical chance to make the existing corpus (of today) freely available. Sorry for the all-over-the-place-ness I am a bit to lazy to rearrange everything (I'd likely mess things completely up in the process). Regards, jj
At 02:37 AM 3/16/2012, Joerg Arndt wrote:
[OT, because this is not a "fun" subject]
http://www.thecostofknowledge.com/
I got aware of this through the (German, not in-depth) news article: http://www.spiegel.de/unispiegel/studium/0,1518,820819,00.html
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