• moog@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    “…he sought funding from the private sector to start Celera Genomics. The company planned to profit from their work by creating genomic data to which users could subscribe for a fee.”

    Fuck this guy

  • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    I’m not even sure what he’s talking about. Open access journals are the ones who charge authors to publish.

    If you publish in a journal that has closed access, there is generally no fee to publish. If you want your paper to be open access, you can tack on an additional open access fee so that your paper doesn’t end up behind a paywall. The last time I looked - and this was several years ago - the going rate for making your paper open access in a closed access journal was about $2-3k. We always budgeted for publication fees when we were putting together our funding proposals.

    The fee structure is similar for open access journals, except that there’s not a choice about paying them. For researchers whose work isn’t grant funded, it generally means they’re paying out of pocket, unless their institution steps in.

    I had a paper published in a small but (in its field) prestigious journal, and the editor explained to me that he only charges people who can afford it, and uses those funds to cover the costs of the journal. He explained that he had a paper from a researcher who couldn’t cover the publishing fee, and he let me know that I was helping out the other person, too.

    What I don’t understand is how anyone how has gone through academia doesn’t know this.

    • QZM@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      If you publish in a journal that has closed access, there is generally no fee to publish.

      What field are you in? In the life sciences, there’s normally a fee to publish closed-access and a higher one for open-access. My last paper was open access and costed about 3500, compared to 1500 pay walled.

      • SatanicNotMessianic@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        My background is in theoretical biology, but I was mostly publishing in public health, physics, and computer science journals. We paid for every paper because I feel very strongly about research being made available to everyone, especially in the case of publicly funded work. I just make sure to budget for it.

        I had a couple of papers in one of the PLOS journals, which afaik are fee-only pubs.

        It’s been about ten years since I’ve had to worry about publishing, as o decided to sell out and join a commercial company, and they’re pretty averse to publishing. My information might be out of date.

        I do think the academic publishing industry is atrocious, however, and I have always encouraged people to check on sites like arxiv, the personal web page of the lead author, and as a final attempt contacting the lead author directly. Most journals that I dealt with permit authors to upload preprints to sites like arxiv, and if you do it with your final revision the only difference would be the formatting. Of course, that doesn’t count as a publication for academic purposes, and it doesn’t get around paying fees for the journals that charge them, but it is an avenue for people to make their research more globally available for free. I’m sure you know of that, I’m just mentioning it for students looking for a copy of a paper.

    • iAvicenna@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      This guy probably lives in his own small world. If you want to publish in PLOS as a researcher from say Turkey or Uzbekistan or any other country where the value of your money is nil, you might easily have to pay your yearly salary or half of your funding to get a single paper published.

  • lugal@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Tbf he evolutionarily developed that genome all by himself. That’s how capitalism works

    • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      He also had a history of being screwed by people. The guy did a lot of good work, and arguably his attempt at patenting it was instrumental in preventing it from being patented. I don’t think that was his intention, but good came from it.

  • Sloogs@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    1 year ago

    Surely there has to be a cost to the infrastructure of publishing and curation though. And possibly all the work of setting up and organizing the peer review process. So they probably charge the institutions or authors submitting the paper instead of their readers. But perhaps we should treat scientific journals as a public good, like libraries, or at least have a publicly funded option. Or have universities and institutions fund it for the public good.

  • Sanyanov@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    As a person who just paid a fuckton of money to publish in open access (literally half an hour ago), that HURTS.

    Open Access is good, but first we have to abolish an entire publisher industry that lays insurmountable costs - either on readers or researchers themselves. Their work is not remotely worth that money. By making it a public good, we can cut down on so much unnecessary expenses.