Submitted title was "MIT Press has granted full access to all its journals". What's the source for that? It's extremely important to be accurate with this kind of thing. The discussion below is all based on assuming that that title is literally true.
I've changed the URL from https://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showPublications, which doesn't explain anything, to the press release which, although it's a press release, sort of does. Nevertheless it's hard to figure out what exactly is being announced here.
Well the title was true. There is full access to the journals. People seem to think that means open access though. The new link is about all new monographs being open access, which isn't the same as read access to mit journals.
I think it is important for folks to recognize how hard this must have been and how many heated verbal battles were exchanged inside of MIT over this. Thank You. And thank Aaron, always a champion in spreading the world's knowledge to the most people possible. We should empower everyone as much as we can with the bits we have available.
Ah man I forgot about Computer Music Journal, thanks! I got a copy of one issue from a colleague some years ago and it had lots of interesting stuff. Guess now I can get a digital copy (among the rest of the back-catalogue), haha :)
The ACM did this with their digital library to support people during working/studying remotely during COVID but seemingly had a change of heart and put the paywall back up a short while after receiving all the positive publicity despite the pandemic still interfering with education and work habits.
Fortunately someone managed to scrape the entire thing and there's a 500Gb torrent out there with the full content of all the journals and conference proceedings.
It seems slightly weird to me that university presses and learned society journals aren’t generally open access. I thought the point was to aid the university’s research. Surely it helps the name of the university to have important widely accessible journals with the university’s name on them. Maybe the presses tend to have been spun off as commercial enterprises, or maybe the university really loves the income. Or maybe they are really expensive to run for some reason. I know the press at my university has a pretty large building but I’d figured a lot of it was a warehouse. Maybe it’s full of salespeople negotiating with librarians.
I don’t think there’s much hope of the commercial journals owned by Elsevier or Springer opening up, but I do hope that the trend of journals flipping (where the entire editorial board resigns and forms a similarly named open access journal) will increase.
Perhaps another problem is that in those fields that are already closest to open access (say because they use the arxiv), there is less incentive for people to jot publish in commercial journals as everyone who matters will have already read the preprint in the arxiv.
“Or maybe they are really expensive to run for some reason”
That reason is people. Journals don’t just create themselves. Lots more happens to make it so than just having an email inbox to accept submissions.
You need to be able to fund the enterprise, and often you want bigger/popular journals to subsidize the really esoteric stuff that’s important intellectually to humanity but still requires a base number of people to run it independent of the sales. It would also be nice for these people to make real money for their time so people who are good at it could make a career of it.
Elsiver etc are a different beast as they’re companies disconnected from a larger university. So their self-preservation goals are quite different, and accordingly, their appetite for organizational profit versus covering expenses.
I know of open access journals which are run very cheaply. Basically they need web hosting, a web site, and some hosting of papers. There are even arxiv overlay journals which host the papers on the arxiv. Obviously they can be more expensive if papers are printed and distributed.
I don’t know about other fields but in mathematics the editors and reviewers are not paid (and I think this is the norm in science but not sure about medicine. I think sometimes the chief editor gets some relatively small payment). But it seems to me that these are the most valuable parts of the journal. So where is all the money going?
The journals don’t do copy-editing (anymore?) or if they do they are not very good at it. The journals also don’t do the formerly technical work of typesetting anymore, mostly just bunging papers into some kind of template and requiring authors to do half the work of following journal style.
I think the journals aren’t acting as some kind of spam filter before papers get to the (unpaid) editors, except maybe for the biggest journals.
I don’t really buy the argument that big journals fund the little ones because the little journals are given large price tags and libraries do not get the option to exclude them from subscriptions.
FWIW my theory about the large university press building for my university is that it contains a lot of printed material waiting for shipping, possibly contains (or was designed to contain) printing presses, and is enlarged by a business printing some (high school level) examination papers that are used by many schools internationally, though I’m not sure the press prints them and not some other business.
In contrast, having submitted to a number of biomedical journals recently:
- The EIC is paid - not a huge amount, but a non-trivial amount.
- Graphics work may be done to make figures conform to "house styles"
- There is absolutely copy-editing done. Heck, I usually end up fighting with them about copy editing.
- We don't use LaTeX, so papers need formatting (and generally, IMO, end up superior to those formatted via LaTeX templates)
Finally, for university presses for books, there are people who evaluate whether a book is worth pursuing, who coordinate peer review, who hound faculty who haven't turned their chapters in yet (something I'm guilty of), etc.
This hurts your point more than it helps. Why should anyone care about propping up a journal composed of glorified copyeditors and graphic designers, quibbling over Word formatting to fit their preferred in-house look and feel?
So this is the heavy-hitting work that's supposed to justify closing off knowledge except to those who can pay: because someone might see a paper that had insufficient formatting?
No wonder the reputation for closed-access journals is so thorougly poisoned, when this is exactly the kind of misdirected attention and gatekeeping that's killing it.
Also, libraries can and do exclude journals for cost reasons. My university is starting to do more and more of this. They haven't gotten rid of anything critical to what I do, yet, but there are certainly journals I don't have access to (thank goodness for arxiv).
A major complaint about Elsevier is that they would do ‘big deals’ bundling in lots of journals that libraries didn’t really want along with the journals they did.
At least in my area of mathematics, journals still do some copy-editing, mostly to conform to journal style and fix obvious grammar / spelling mistakes.
Journals do sometimes advertise, and that can be expensive. It's also one way to get a large impact factor etc.
About university presses: I don't know how they're funded internally (despite being faculty at a university), but I would not be surprised if they have to fund themselves. It's hard to see student tuition dollars supporting a university press, nor can research dollars flow that way. It's possible some public funds (at state universities, at least) can be used to support university presses, I guess.
> Obviously they can be more expensive if papers are printed and distributed.
As someone who knows absolutely nothing about this: isn't that the kind of thing that can be easily outsourced? Today, even books can be printed and delivered in low volumes. Online printing shops compete for such jobs.
As long as universities keep evaluating academics based on the journals they publish in, then the top journals are going to keep charging big bucks.
There is a significant movement against this now
https://sfdora.org/read/
- and I hope it succeeds, but it's an uphill battle against a lot of systemic pressures.
The solution is for funding bodies to insist on open access publication. This isn't just a pipe dream. [0][1] All government funding should have this requirement.
I think it does. If all publicly funded research is published open-access, and none of it is published in traditional paywalled journals, the signalling value of publishing in traditional journals will go away by necessity.
As less and less high quality modern research ends up behind paywalls, the bargaining power of traditional journals diminishes.
That would be preferable to the current norm, but I agree it wouldn't be ideal. With further terms attached to government research funding, that could be addressed too. The resulting work shall not be published in an outlet where fees exceed $X. That would also close the door on researchers being tempted to spend their own money on publishing in a more impressive publication.
A similar approach could be taken to prohibit publication in journals with embargo periods, i.e. paywalling for a couple of years before permitting open access. [0] For publicly funded research, that isn't acceptable either.
If such rules are applied consistently from all funding sources, the game would change quickly, by necessity. Collective bargaining where the government holds all the cards, essentially.
That's how I see it, at least. I'm not a researcher, and I'm not an expert on open access.
The current norm strikes me as plainly outrageous. Huge sums of tax money being handed over to publishers who make it their business to withhold tax-funded research from the people who funded it. It also strikes me as fixable. It's a tragedy of the commons, and the government has the power to force the matter and resolve the problem.
On the plus side, it looks like there's a real push to do this kind of thing. [1]
In my world (I am a researcher btw) I think expensive open access already is the current norm. But you're right, funders could start to impose limits. (Though I'm sure someone would raise an objection if they did, and I'd be interested to see what that was: your move, publishers!)
On a related note, reviewing work is highly skilled and usually unpaid. If (and that's a big if) we wanted to fix that, we'd have to make fees higher again.
> reviewing work is highly skilled and usually unpaid. If (and that's a big if) we wanted to fix that, we'd have to make fees higher again
I'd be ok with that. Off the cuff, the way I see it there are a few options:
1. [Perhaps acceptable] The party behind the submitted paper pays the reviewers for their efforts. This might be done via the publisher, but that's just detail. The reviewers' employers do not treat reviewing as a work activity, i.e. reviewing work is done out of hours.
2. [Acceptable] The reviewers' employers pay the reviewers, treating review work as a routine part of their scientific duties.
3. [Acceptable, likely preferable] (Combining 1 and 2) The reviewers' employers pay the reviewers, treating review work as part of their scientific duties. The party behind the submitted paper pays the reviewers' employers, in compensation for the time spent on reviewing. This has the advantage that reviewing work can be neatly accounted for by all parties, and that, ideally, reviewing work need not be viewed as an additional professional burden atop ordinary working hours. (Whether that's likely to really work out given general academic career pressures, I'm not qualified to say.)
4. [Unacceptable] The reviewers go unpaid for their efforts, and only do the work out of an economically perverse sense of noblesse oblige
- Occasionally, society-level journals are being expected to subsidize the society itself, in terms of the annual meeting, student scholarships, etc. They're often also outsourced to commercial publishers, because even fairly substantial societies are run on shoe-string staff.
- If you're NIH, Wellcome Trust or some other organization funded, there's a mandate that the manuscripts become open access after (typically) 12 months. That lessens the pressure somewhat to open up journals.
For that to make sense to me, I'd have to believe that Aaron died for his beliefs, or that his death caused others to take up his fight.
I don't believe either of these things are true.
Aaron died because he took his own life in the face of an overwhelming situation at the hands of a cruel system. Aaron's death did not further his cause. It was just a tragic combination of humans and inhuman actions.
Aaron was not a martyr. He was an idealistic but troubled good person who got ground up by forces he did not understand, and should never have had to learn.
It's a loss. His ideas and spirit live on in others, yes. But his death was not required or helpful, and he did not die for his cause. It was a senseless tragedy, but merely adjacent to his beliefs.
Do the work. Miss Aaron. Be inspired by him. But I don't believe he died in the service of something larger than himself. I think that take diminishes the real tragedy here, which is that humans like Aaron are sometimes victims of the systems that we create.
There already is an Aaron Swartz day on November 8th (date of his birthday). There are international hackathons organised in his memory: https://www.aaronswartzday.org/
Lots of comments here about academic journals. This announcement is about monographs, not journals. Monographs are books. Usually small print runs, as they are niche and targeted for specific academic disciplines. The target audience is other academics and distribution is heavily through academic libraries. Think of dissertations when you’re completing a PhD.
The 'full access' in the title here made me frown. Some publishers like to use that term when they let you read the article, without making the licensing open. It seems like the journals are released with a mix of true open access and read access. There is yet some way to go sadly.
We need Elsevier's revenue to decrease enough so that some benevolent billionaire can buy it and make everything open access.
Elsevier's has plenty of ways to reinvent itself make money. Scopus is a good search engine and libraries would be wiling to pay for it unbundled from journal access.
Isn’t this a regulation problem? So much stuff that is funded with government money (partially or fully) ends up pay walled. Can’t governments regulate to stop that?
The US govt already requires publicly funded publications be shared publicly. Some agencies like NIH and DoD have their own archives you need to put the article in. The law allows up to something like a limit of one year paywalling.
Very cool. I followed a link to their Evolutionary Computation Journal last week and wondered why they were letting me read the articles for free - now I know why.
Am I supposed to believe that “donating to the suicide prevention foundation” has something to do with stopping future suicides? Because I don’t see why I should jump to that conclusion.
It shouldn't be a far mental leap, though. There are people who work in suicide prevention (hotlines, counseling, awareness + outreach, etc) and their employment and operations requires funding. Unless one believes that all efforts to prevent suicide are entirely futile...?
> Unless one believes that all efforts to prevent suicide are entirely futile...?
I don’t even need to think that. I can just think that it’s “hard” to differentiate between organizations that are “good” at stopping suicides and those that are “bad” at it. Or, I might think that state of the art suicide prevention is prohibitively expensive, eg maybe it costs on average $1,000,000 to stop a single suicide.
Sorry, but I don't understand your original comment. The person above you suggested a donation, because obviously this thread has HN readers thinking about how to prevent suicides (if you don't understand why, you may research Aaron Swartz). A donation is a common way for people who care about an issue, to indirectly have some effect on it -- by empowering others who directly devote time to it.
Certainly, one may choose to research the institutions they donate to, if they don't trust them by name. That is not unique to suicide prevention, therefore it's an unnecessary qualifier in the current discussion.
Likewise, perhaps it's expensive. But even a single ad that reaches someone in need, leading to that person seeking professional help, is something.
> Certainly, one may choose to research the institutions they donate to, if they don't trust them by name. That is not unique to suicide prevention, therefore it's an unnecessary qualifier in the current discussion.
I agree that there are many claims regarding “donations” that suffer from the same defect. But the fact that many claims have the same problem doesn’t indicate that it’s not worth pointing out the problem. In fact, quite the opposite possibly.
You haven't explicitly stated that there is something wrong with the suicide prevention foundation's operations, and definitely haven't provided any reason (even anecdotal) you have to believe so. I don't think your comments are "claims", valid or otherwise.
I think no one here understands what you are trying to say.
I think the burden is on the person suggesting I take an action (eg, donate money to charity X) to provide evidence that the action will have some desired effect.
My position is that all actions have mostly unintelligible effects until demonstrated otherwise.
The HN guidelines specifically ask you not to rewrite titles unless they are misleading or linkbait: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I've changed the URL from https://www.mitpressjournals.org/action/showPublications, which doesn't explain anything, to the press release which, although it's a press release, sort of does. Nevertheless it's hard to figure out what exactly is being announced here.