> It takes work to produce human knowledge. Writing a book, creating educational materials, and writing research all takes time, just like it takes time to build a house.

My understanding is that most / all articles in academic journals are written by researchers who are not paid by the journal. Then, the articles are peer reviewed by another set of researchers - who are also not paid by the journal. Then, those same researchers are charged by the journal if they want to have access to the article. It's very unclear what value the journal actually brings - outside of slapping a particular well known name on the publication they don't do much. All of the people that actually do the hard work receive no direct compensation.

Your basic assessment is correct, however, you're forgetting a key detail. Every journal I know of also charges the author a fee to submit papers. So the author pays to submit their work, volunteers review it, the author does corrections, and then it might get published behind a pay wall. For any university research, the work itself is paid for mostly via government and private company grants.

That sounds weird; all journals I know are paid either by readers or by the submitter (the latter is called gold open access).

The journals I'm familiar with require both.

The reader pays for access (or more commonly their university/research org/public library/employer pays for it), and often is only available in bundles, such as multiple unrelated journals or forcing a library to maintain print and digital access even if they only want digital access.

The submitter is usually required to pay a submission fee to cover/subsidize the cost of review. Some do allow you to pay a surcharge for open access, and in many cases (at least the grants I was working on) grants and funding cannot be used for these costs.

I am overjoyed to see that it's becoming more common to have fully open access journals, or that the open access fee is reduced. And the endorsement of more open access journals for fields that have historically had a dominant closed access journal (such as the American Astronomical Society and it's introduction of new journals like the Planetary Science Journal).

Look up Chesterson’s Fence. It’s always a good idea to figure out why the fence exists before tearing it down.

Researchers who publish in these journals can publish anywhere, but they choose to publish in these for-profit journals.

Do you know why?

A massive majority of the time it's because the name once held meaning and had a strong reputation. In plenty of cases this still holds, even if the pricing model has turned predatory. Plenty of people review for an article due to the prestige, and a journal can become well known for having quality reviewers.

When I was in Radio Astronomy, publishing in APJ meant something, but when someone would publish an article pertaining to Radio Astro in Nature or some other publication, it was often looked down on as having less merit since it wasn't in APJ.

Personally, I know of a lecturer in my undergrad university who published in a more well known journal because when they suggested publishing in a less well known journal that was more niche and in-line with the field of their research, the chair of the department leaned on them and "strongly advised" that publishing lesser journal could lead to loss of funding for their research group.

I'm a big fan of the Chesterson's Fence idea - maybe not applied slavishly, but as a general principle. And I have no idea where the journals came from. Nor do I have a suggestion for what to do about them. What I would be interested in reading about is any type of value that they bring to the process other than a name that was established long ago. I have yet to find much in the way that explains their current value for advancing academic knowledge.

Their value is very similar to that offered by Ivy League schools - prestige. The journals have the reputation for only publishing the highest quality, high impact papers. They act a filter.

Getting a paper in Nature will help you get tenure or win you that grant you need. Publishing in a no name journal is barely better than not publishing at all.

Because these journals are so prestigious, they can charge a lot for access. Every top school will buy access because it would be embarrassing if they didn't.

There is nothing stopping researchers from publishing in their favorite open access journal. In fact, they'd probably have a better chance of getting it published. However, they don't want to - those journals aren't prestigious enough. And without enough prestigious papers, they'll never make tenure.

All knowledge should not be free. The comment above mine wrote knowledge should be free and easily accessible. They are talking about all knowledge, not just academic journals, and that makes no sense.

It does make sense. You're just misreading what they said.

They did not say information should be unfunded or creators demonitized. They said information should be "free" as in liberated, as in freedom.

Valuable information is virtually costless to copy and yet you can be locked away in a cage by men with guns for accessing it. It's not far off from how North Korea handles people found with Western media. That's what the commenter above is advocating against.

Have some perspective.

Please don't reply to every one of my comments with the same points, you are spamming.

I'm simply countering disinformation spam with correct information.

Have a moment of self awareness for one second and consider this: if I had to make the same rebuttal multiple times to counter act the same argument then who is the spammer and who is just setting the record straight? Hmmmm

This is the equivalent of “If you want this conversation to end, why don’t YOU stop talking?” You already know the solution to the problem you’re having, which is to either make better points or stop inviting more replies.

I'm a researcher. I write the articles in their books. They don't pay me for that. All of the articles are written by people like me. All of the articles are reviewed and edited by people like me. I even do the typesetting. I get paid by a tax-funded university. Publishers (such as Springer) use their money not to produce knowledge, but to sue people, market their conferences and journals, and pay their administrators and shareholders.

Hmm... so you get nothing for it, you do all the work and yet you continue to do it?

I presume you must be getting something out of the arrangement, else why on earth do you continue?

As many of us doing research, writing, reviewing, typesetting, checking proofs, organizing their dissemination conferences, administrative tasks, filling up IP forms, returning them, getting them checked by attorneys paid on our side, etc., etc., etc., do not get absolutely anything remotely in value to the price it costs to our institutions or peers to access our work.

We force ourselves though to do something so illogical and nonsensical because we are evaluated according to inefficient and silly performance bars that emerge from a herd of seemingly intelligent people each acting in their best interest (both those that seek showing their merit, and those that seek evaluating the merit of others), most of which do not have enough power and/or leadership to be the first ones to disrupt the current status quo. ['Tradegy of the Commons' theme]

Of course, I would not suggest any student to try to subvert it, as doing it "heroically" will only constitute an obstacle for themselves without doing anything to convince your rightly-so competitive peers to join your efforts rather than to overtake you. [edited: sentence corrected]

However, things are slowly changing, as people & institutions with the right amount of power and leadership are starting to take action.

> things are slowly changing, as people & institutions with the right amount of power and leadership are starting to take action.

Where exactly, what people and institutions?

The American Astronomical Society has taken a pretty powerful stance against the predatory journal publishing practice.

They are pushing their own field-recognized journals that are partially open-access (12mo blackout window, then fully open access) with the option to go full open access from the beginning for a surcharge, and are even working to provide publishing cost assistance for those in need of it (such as early-career scientists who may not have a lot of funding to lean on).

It's not ideal, given that there's still a somewhat high cost for a fully open-access publication (the "gold open access"), but at least it's there. Also, the fact that a paper "ages" into open access after 12 months means that the knowledge does eventually make it into public hands.

See eg the various initiatives against Elsevier's pricing practices with all/most German universities and a number of American universities refusing to pay Elsevier's fee/ransom.

Similarly the whole 'open access'publishing movement which sadly has been somewhat coopted by the big publishers.

Well, sci-hub's one.

You can check for yourself - on providing and dissemination, check Arxiv & Siblings. On institutions, check e.g., University of California, or search, e.g., "Elsevier's Paywall" using some internet search service to find names.

I was gladly surprised that a "low quality" (data/experiments were fine, but terrible copywriting) paper I wrote while in academia which I uploaded to Arxiv actually got some good amounts of citations ( and is even indexed by google scholar).

Having papers published in journals (especially prestigious ones like Nature) is how you attain status in the research community. Also most research institutions have some expectation that you will publish N papers a year on average (because it also enhances their status).

I'm a PhD student. To graduate, I need publications. The quality of my publications, and hence my possibility of graduation, is evaluated based on the reputation of the conferences I publish in. The same applies to a PhD graduate trying to get into a post-doc position, or a post-doc trying to get assistant professorship. For historical reasons, many of the reputable conferences are closed and ran by publishing houses that charge unfair money for them. We are trying to change that.

And if you approach Springer to try to publish something (e.g. a Book), and you have some draft of it online on your homepage or something - you'll be rejected outright. They won't publish unless they can monopolize it.

As I said, I understand the hatred for academic publishers. They aren't compensating authors like you, your university does that.

My comment was in response to the parent who said 'knowledge should be free'

Information freedom radicalism is not in any way mutually exclusive with compensating creators.

Grants, shareware, donationware, donation subscriptions (like patreon), crowdfunding, and the list goes on and on- of all the ways information creation is compensated prior to the information being given away for free.

Copying information takes virtually no work. It's not unreasonable to hold that the concept of "intillectual property" is morally bankrupt.

Nobody here suggested creators shouldn't be compensated.

I don't follow your argument: "information creation is compensated prior to the information being given away for free." You can't give something away for free by requiring compensation beforehand.

You can make your information public and free to anyone interested under the condition that you are compensated beforehand by anyone.

> Nobody here suggested creators shouldn't be compensated.

Sure they did, they said knowledge should be free.

If it is funded, someone's got to pay for it, and that is by definition not free.

If it is the government who funds it, you're paying for it through tax dollars. And, you're not paying a competitive rate, which means low quality information is coming out.

edit: I'm done with this comment chain of people claiming free doesn't mean $0. It clearly did in the original comment to which I replied, where they said "I am of the opinion knowledge should be free and easily accessible."

You're mixing up free of cost with free as in liberty. Information freedom is about liberating access to information not demonitizing creators.

In the context of freedom of information the opposite of free information is not funded information- it's censored, withheld, horded, etc.

The market withholds food when they tell you to pay first before taking it home. The same is fair for an author.

You don't need to fear paywalls. You're capable of learning and creating the same knowledge as any other person.

> The market withholds food when they tell you to pay first before taking it home. The same is fair for an author.

Food is finite. When you buy material goods, you subtract from the seller's supply of goods and add to your own. It's impossible to create new goods out of nothing. Since there isn't enough for everyone, an economy naturally arises.

Information is infinite. Copying and transmitting data is not only trivial, it is natural. That's why people came up with ways to create artificial scarcity. The only cost associated with human knowledge and art is that of creating it. After it's created, information costs $0.

All data, all files on a computer, they're essentially just really big numbers that humanity happened to discover. Once the number is known, modern computers make it possible to copy and transmit it for almost $0. Paywalls? Only one person needs to pay in order to get copy and distribute it to everyone else.

Nobody is saying creators shouldn't be compensated. We're saying they need a new business model. It's the 21st century. You no longer need huge printing presses in order to make copies of something at scale. It's as easy as copy paste.

> Information is infinite

Published material is not infinite, nor is an author's time.

Information is infinite if you definite it to mean all information, but that is not the context here. The context here is published work.

Man, you are obnoxious. Do you understand that we authors of these damn papers get fuckall from their publication? The publication industry is an extortion racket.

I said above I understand the hatred for academic journals. This thread is about whether all knowledge by otherwise uncompensated creators should be available for free.

> Published material is not infinite

Sci-Hub proves otherwise.

> nor is an author's time.

True.

I don't fear paywalls. I create, fund, and advocate for circumvention tools because withholding something of value that is instantly copyable and virtually free to share is morally abhorrent.

It's your right to withhold information just as it would be your right to withhold water if you had the only well in town. Likewise it's my right to use information to liberate withheld information just as it would be my right to provide well digging tools to your parched neighbors.

The only difference is that I'm thinking of what is best for everyone and you're thinking only of yourself. That's your right; take the low road if it makes you happy.

> It's your right to withhold information just as it would be your right to withhold water if you had the only well in town

Information is like the food in my example, not the "only water supply" in yours. Leibniz and Newton independently developed calculus, for example.

> you're thinking only of yourself. That's your right; take the low road if it makes you happy.

It's not selfish to be compensated for your work. Authors can choose themselves whether they want to make some of their work freely available, just as a market can give away some food or not.

> It's not selfish to be compensated for your work.

As far as I'm aware, authors get very little of the compensation for the work they're doing.

> Authors can choose themselves whether they want to make some of their work freely available, just as a market can give away some food or not.

Not if the established procedure for publishing is a journal.

Author compensation depends on the author and their ability to strike a good deal for themselves, just like the rest of us when we apply for jobs, they do it per piece of work.

As for journals, I understand the distaste academics have for these. This thread was about whether all published information should be free, not just journals.

The research is already funded differently, usually through (public) grants, salaries of the researchers and everybody on their teams (taxes, tuition), or even patent revenues.

Nobody makes money off of publications except for the publishers. Some publishers even demand money from the authors for their publishing "services".

The publishers themselves add very little value, as e.g. peer reviews are done for "free" (aka on the universities or peer-reviewers dime), or rather for the prestige that comes from being a reviewer.

What's more, a lot of the authors of what's published actually want to publish their work for everybody else to see. But they are currently caught between a rock and a hard place: they need the "reputation" that comes from publishing in "prestigious" journals but those journals or rather the parent publishing companies require signing a contract saying that the article may not be published elsewhere, not even on the authors personal website.

In short, the actual research work has been paid for already, academics (authors and peer reviewers) are fucked, the public (who often paid for the research already) is fucked, and the publishers are money-printing-machines.

You could easily replace the publishers with a few non-profit orgs that are funded by universities for a couple of hundred bucks per university per month, and make all the content available for "free" to everybody on the planet in perpetuity. There are over 25,000 universities worldwide, so if every university paid e.g. 200 bucks a month, it would come out as $5M per month, which is enough to fund the publishing end of every last scientific journal in existence and then some (assuming we keep not paying authors and peer reviewers through such publishing, like it is now)

If I was the regulator in charge, the first thing I would do is require all work that is - in part - paid for by public taxpayer funds or public university funds to be published under a free license, since the public already paid for the work. Similar to e.g. works created by US government - and some other governments - is automatically in the public domain already; that's why e.g. all those nice NASA pictures are "freely" available to everybody already, because the US federal tax payers already paid about $35 bucks on average per year to fund ALL of NASA.

> The research is already funded differently

Yes, I understand the hatred for academic publishers b/c they don't fund the research.

The comment above said 'knowledge should be free' and that is what I was responding to.

If my tax payer money helped fund the research, I better get access to it. Similarly, if my tuition money helped fund it, then I better get access to it as well. Or even, if my actual time helped fund the research (e.g. I am a student involved in the research) then I better get access to it, too.

Sounds fair?

The vast majority of academic research is funded at least in part by tax payers either directly (grants, public universities or universities receiving public funds, etc) or indirectly (subsidies).

Even if research was "made possible by a grant from (private entity)", if it happened in a university, it most likely used university funds (from using rent-free space and equipment researchers can use, to staff and administration researchers rely on, etc)

> If my tax payer money helped fund the research, I better get access to it.

I agree, I don't know why you think I don't. I said I understand why people don't like academic journals.

Usually the work of the creators has already been paid for by public finding. Research grants etc..

And how exactly do publishers contribute to said work? Research is done by researchers; papers are written by researchers; and papers are reviewed by other researchers for free...

Of course there's development costs to publications. It doesn't follow that we thus must lock publications behind paywalls or clutter them with ads.

It's perfectly consistent to both want the work funded and want it free and easily accessible. When someone says knowledge should be free, it's unreasonable and illogical to assume they are saying that knowledge work shouldn't be funded.

The discussion of how to fund work without paywalls or ads is worth having. The straw-man argument about whether we should fund work is not.

> It's perfectly consistent to both want the work funded and want it free

No, it really isn't. It sounds like you're saying you want someone else to pay for it. That's not free.

> When someone says knowledge should be free, it's unreasonable and illogical to assume they are saying that knowledge work shouldn't be funded.

Funded work is not free.

You're conflating free as in beer with free as in liberty. "Information should be free" means that it shouldn't be caged away- it means free as in liberty.

Funded information can be liberated.

Shareware is free. Donationware is free. Crowdfunded creative works are often free.

Creation of valuable information is effectively infinitely more expensive than copying valuable information. It's not unreasonable to consider that this distinction alone may be enough to consider restrictions on copying abhorrently immoral.

> You're conflating free as in beer with free as in liberty. "Information should be free" means that it shouldn't be caged away- it means free as in liberty.

Sorry, no. What you're describing is "easily accessible".

The comment above wrote "knowledge should be free and easily accessible".

> Creation of valuable information is effectively infinitely more expensive than copying valuable information. It's not unreasonable to consider that this distinction alone may be enough to consider restrictions on copying abhorrently immoral.

That is an entirely unreasonable and absurd conclusion. Of course it takes more effort to produce valuable information than to copy it. That is the whole point of copyright; it protects creators and encourages people to create their own works. In doing so, creators contribute to higher quality of life for everyone by earning an income in exchange for putting the fruits of their labor down on paper.

> That is the whole point of copyright

Copyright was created centuries ago when people needed a literal printing press in order to create copies at scale. They had to be a major industry player in order to infringe copyright. We're living in the 21st century: people infringe copyright without even realizing it and all but the worst offenders go unpunished.

Whatever the point of copyright was when it was conceived, it no longer applies. It's obviously incompatible with free computing as we know it today. In order for copyright to be enforceable, computers that run unauthorized software must be made illegal. Otherwise, people will always be able to copy whatever data they want and there's little anyone can do about it.

Part of the social contract behind copyright is giving the public free access to the works of humanity after the protection expires. It's clear now that the copyright industry has no intention of ever letting these protections ever expire. There's no reason for the public to recognize copyright as legitimate when the copyright holders refuse to keep up their end of the deal.

> Sounds a lot like communism, where everything is free and you don't need to worry about working.

Communism implies an economy. When it comes to data, there is nothing to economize. It's abundant, there's more than enough for everyone.

The only reason the internet isn't a post-scarcity society is we still have laws like copyright holding us back.

> Oops, now nobody is working and there is no stuff!

Pretty weird seeing this argument on Hacker News of all places. Lots of developers work for no financial reward, myself included. Scratching one's own itch is a hacker tradition and it disproves the notion that nobody would create anything if it wasn't for copyright.

>Sounds a lot like communism, where everything is free and you don't need to worry

I think you are unaware of how stupid that sounds, maybe go and read what communism is/was or stop commenting when you have no idea and you learn things from Star Trek.

FYI people were/are working in communism and things are not free (so 100% comment you had there)

I don't know what to tell you. You're just plain wrong.

Having the freedom to access information and information be8mg easily accessible are two different things. Those are the two things the above commenter was advocating for.

Should accessing information be free of cost? Of course, yes, as much as possible it should. That's why we have libraries.

Should creating information be free of cost? Of course not, that's just nonsense and the fact that you thought anyone would suggest that is rather telling.