Knowledge and information is an asset - it takes time and money to develop these things. As such, in the current North American environment, the expectation for those who create knowledge and information should be entitled to recover their costs and earn a living from their work.

So, I guess, if the public is truly funding the work, then yes, they deserve to have the results.

But the, what about private research?

I think there is a lot at play. While ideally knowledge should be a public good the truth is that private costs are incurred to create it. Then, we are stuck with how those private costs are recovered (through government subsidies, through subscription revenue from Science magazine, etc.).

Technically, this is a common issue in economics and is very comparable to the social costs of pollution/environmental damage (from an inverse perspective)

@Lando

But, here's the thing.

Let's say I'm a scientist. I'm doing research and getting paid through grants. I write a white paper and publish it in "Nature". I don't get paid by "Nature" to publish my paper with them, but "Nature" gets to charge an obscene amount of money for publishing other people's work.

Now, Academic Journals serve a real purpose. They add context and weight to research. They should be compensated for this. But, should that compensation really include essentially exclusive access to work, especially when the authors aren't receiving much tangible in return?

If the research team receives public funding for their research then they have to publicly release their results. I want to know what the fuck my tax money is going towards.

That said, in the private sector, there is an incentive to patent and copyright creative and intelligent work (after all copy right was amended into to constitution of the USA to "promote the arts and sciences"), so I would understand if you spent billions researching something you would want money for people to access those documents.

Right, I think I replied on the wrong topic.

I agree that information should be public access good because it would provide a huge social benefit. However, the issue is how to do it in the current economic environment.

I have little experience with how academic journals work. Judging by your explanation I see that there is probably an issue in there. Do the journals not have to spend anything to gain the right to publish the journals?

Scientists get grants to perform research. These cover their costs. Do they also provide income to the scientist/company performing the research?

Well, Journals need to pay publishing costs, plus they have extensive staffs of editors and reviewers.

I really have no idea how commercial research works. In medicine, you get a patent for 10 years or so and then you have to release it, which seems fine to me. I'm talking more about general academic research that may not even have clear economic value.

Grant providing organisations need to allow for the costs of open access publication in their allocation. It is iniquitous, for example, that publicly funded research is published for profit only to those who pay a subscription.

I am fine with limiting discussion to public research. It seems like the for-profit side of things is much more intuitive. To me, anyway.

My question was more does "Nature" have to pay royalties to the article's original author? If not, why does "Nature" get to publish the article and not one of the many other journals?

"My question was more does "Nature" have to pay royalties to the article's original author? "

AFAIK, no.

"why does "Nature" get to publish the article and not one of the many other journals?"

Because, as a scientist, you *want* your papers published in Nature, or Science, or Physics Review. They are very prestigious and will in turn help you secure more grants.

To be clearer, as I scientist, I would chose where to submit my work to be considered for publication.

Once a strong open access system was in place for publicly funded work, it would only be a matter of time, scientists being scientists, that the vast majority of privately funded work would follow suit. This would not prevent suitable patents etc. being obtained where applicable. It is only the vested interests of the publishers which prevents this from happening now.

If that is the case, abgemacht, it seems that fulhamish has a response for that problem.

" It is only the vested interests of the publishers which prevents this from happening now."

I don't think this is true. If scientists really didn't like the system, they just wouldn't publish in those journals and they would collapse. I think they like the prestige that comes with getting published in "Nature".

Also, who pays the reviewers for open access journals?

KILL SOPA

That is all.

@ Lando, some people stick rigidly to the status quo because journals have differing ''impact factors'', Nature being at the top of the tree. The higher the impact factor the better it is for the researcher career-wise. It is a system that favours multiple authorship of papers and, in my view, does little for the advancement of science. Another yardstick is how many papers you put your name to. Again this too does little to progress science. I believe, for example, that Prof.Higgs of the God Particle fame, published nothing in the 3 years preceding his landmark paper in the early sixties. Today he would be in line for the sack!

@ Abge ''Also, who pays the reviewers for open access journals?''

Do reviewers normally get paid? I think not. As regarding your general point I have already said this:
''Grant providing organisations need to allow for the costs of open access publication in their allocation.''

I thought reviewers got paid. I may be wrong.

Knowledge of the natural world should be free. The medium by which it is presented, not so much. If a person takes effort to record that knowledge into a book or other form of communication, they have every right to charge for it. At that point, the written word becomes art as well as a means of conveying information and, as such, should be just as protected as music, movies, TV, plays, literature, or any other form of art (just to avoid the argument of museums, you can't take the art in the museum home, but music, movies, books, scripts from plays, tv shows, etc you can and that is where the payment comes in, payment to view it any time you like as many times as you like in the comfort of your home or car).

Now, with regards to inventions, not discoveries, that should be protected for a time under IP but then be freely available for use for profit. How long? I don't know. But a reasonable period of time for the person to be compensated for their invention/idea.

@ abge '' I thought reviewers got paid. I may be wrong. ''

On that specific point - http://www.talkingbrains.org/2011/01/should-peer-reviewers-be-paid-for-their.html

On the more general point, it wouldn't really matter anyway if you went by this maxim:
''Grant providing organisations need to allow for the costs of open access publication in their allocation.''

Publicly funded research obviously should be open sourced.

As for privately funded research, while you are all thinking about hard sciences, I am thinking about the social sciences, where there is significantly less money at stake in the form of patents, copyrights, etc. Journals serve many functions. They filter out the bad papers from the good, and are a source of peer revision. They prevent bad research from getting out into academia. I don't know if researchers gain any royalties from their work (I would assume they do) but how else would private research be rewarded? Being published in a peer-reviewed academic journal is a source of pride and a means of securing employment in higher level institutions.

As for the case of the recent death abge brought up, JSTOR deserves to charge so much for subscriptions, because JSTOR has to in turn subscribe to the thousands of journals that it has access to, plus host I don't know how many servers needed to store all of that.

"''Grant providing organisations need to allow for the costs of open access publication in their allocation.''"

Yes, I can read. Repeating yourself doesn't improve your argument. It's an easy thing to say, but harder to implement, especially with everyone trying to cut funding. Plus, it creates a situation in which more well off scientists are better able to publish, which is not at all a good thing.

@ draug ''If a person takes effort to record that knowledge into a book or other form of communication, they have every right to charge for it''

As things stand scientists do not got paid for articles they write for scientific journals. Open access is the way forward with publication costs looked on as being an intrinsic part of the research funding, rather than providing profit to third party middle men. Particularly, as I have said, with publicly funded research.

@Draug

I'm not sure I understand your point. What does it even mean for Knowledge to be free if the means to transfer it are not?

@ful - But they have a choice not to release it to those journals, don't they? If they *choose* to go publish privately, they can charge for it. The social scientists (i.e. psychologists/psychiatrists) often do publish books, do they not? And software engineers (and other engineers/inventors) *can* get paid for articles submitted to journals and magazines. I would bet the guys who write for Psychology Today (rag though it may be in some circles' views) get paid for their articles.

@abge - It means using that knowledge and passing it along in your own words is free provided it isn't part of a process that is protected for the limited period of time under patent law.

@Draug

We aren't talking about Psychology Today or Scientific American. We are talking about serious academic journals.

Well, most reviewers aren't even paid in closed access journals. The thing that is wrong with scientific publications is the following:

The researcher needs to be published in journals with a certain reputation IF she wants to remain researcher and climb the latter in an academic career. So she has a clear incentive to publish even for free, even for some amount (if it is a book), because overall more she has published, more chances she has to stay in academia.

The universities are attracting research funding (public or private) as well as students with strong spending through reputation. One of the simplest measures of reputation and the most pertaining to funding are published articles per faculty, department, etc. So they have a strong incentive to further raise the incentives of their researchers to publish in journals - no matter how they are funded. And indeed, requirements of publication per year have become a common part of the job.

Reviewers usually don't touch that much money - the incentive again is here the need of reputation to attract funds and/or advance in academic career. Reviewing is just part of the game.

Most academia then needs to stay in touch with current research, so besides going to conferences, they need access to journals. So there is also a guaranteed buyer base.

So now we have the conditions why publishers have the possibility to retrieve so much money (because the research come in for free and most editorial stuff is outsourced without equivalent to the researcher and reviewers) out of the system and why they have an interest in pursuing the strictest possible copyright application possible. I have read some estimates that a big academic publishing house has a margin of 37±2%.

The case of JSTOR and Swartz is a little different. JSTOR is not a publisher but a platform, that facilitates the access to online content, working on a non-profit base. Their move against Swartz seems to have been mostly precautionary, so that their job will not be hampered through due diligence suits, etc. As far as I know, both parties agreed.

In case of public/private research, access varies hugely across subject. In social sciences the more private the research the more it is free. In some natural sciences general access is mostly assured for free (but without the review part). In turn, private research is rarely published in those subjects (except for the patent files). The whole discussion is therefore not so easily solved by the public/private argument, but rather how to assure good quality research (f.e. through a continued review process and incentive to make use of it) and affordable access at least to the most interested parts (students, libraries and users). Open Access seems to me the best option, as most participants are already working "for free", which allows these huge margins of publishers. Except for this tricky problem called reputation (or "grading"). Another way could be to limit the copyrights on articles to 2 years or so. This would lift the load on many mid-class universities and small scale research institutions as well provide some compensation to the "evaluators" for their work. In consequence, much money could be saved at institutional level that could be reinvested into more research (or grants, etc.), while preserving up to date research access.

@abge - So? If a person wants to get paid for their ideas, there are places to publish that will pay. Just because the academic community looks down on them doesn't mean they don't exist. And if more of the community started wanting to get paid for their publishing opinions, then the scientific "journals" from the halls of academia would have to change their plan of charging massively yet giving nothing in return to the scientist writers who provide their material.

I'm less interested in the "should" in this case and more in the "will". Knowledge, because it begets power, will never actually be free, even if many people are able to obtain it for almost free in one way or another.