The way forward is for government research-funding bodies (ideally all of them) to insist that funded works only be published under open access. This appears to already be well underway in the UK. [0][1]

The article isn't about open access though, so this isn't strictly on topic.

[0] https://www.ukri.org/manage-your-award/publishing-your-resea...

[1] https://www.nihr.ac.uk/about-us/who-we-are/our-policies-and-...

Then the publishers get thousands of dollars from taxpayer money for each article published under the open access route, while still billing universities for many thousands to give access to the non open access ones.

Right, and that is why the same government bodies need to cap the amount that can be paid towards open access fees or page charges via a grant. If grants only provided $200 per publication that would end the ridiculous open access fees / APCs that currently get charged. There is no reason it should cost thousands of dollars to publish an article given the limited proofing most journals now do, the ability to easily submit works in a template provided by a journal, and that peer-review is uncompensated.

This already happens. You can find all US NIH funded research for free on pubmed.

Well, that just shows it happens in the US, but it's the same for most tech journals and Google scholar/arxiv

Just a data point: Google scholar regularly reminds me of any publications of mine that list US gov funding that do not have a publicly accessible PDF.

You are already allowed to (at least in tech) provide a preprint and public PDF on personal (non commercial) or educational web sites.

And Google scholar does associate those with the publishers links, as an alternative source.

So, it's not like we couldn't provide all R&D for free already. At least in tech.

That doesn't solve the problem of funneling public money to elsevier/springer nature. The model in which volunteers perform 95% of editorial work yet private publishing companies charge abhorrent prices for OA is absolutely disgusting.

I’m all for government agencies requiring research to be available to everyone, full disclosure I work for one, but I’m pretty against paying the open access ransom to do it. GP seems to have a beef with the DoE, but policy requires all published works that have even one DoE employee on them be licensed perpetually royalty free and transferable to the government, and that works funded by the office of science (and many other sources) be available through free open platforms like OSTI.gov. Why should we waste grant money on the thousand+ dollar fees to the publishing houses rather than making it free through the already existing, already required, and already working channels? Of course, this is for Computer Science and mathematics. I can’t speak for other fields.

Let's remember Aaron Swartz died fighting for this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz

He helped Assange who is now facing the same fate. And "the west" loves to point fingers that countries for their flawed justices systems. Hypocrisy to the max.

You can fight for a good cause and still break the law. A system of law that selectively enforces laws is inherently flawed. The laws need changing. It was lopsided power against him. The law was still broken.

I wish Aaron Swartz had not committed suicide ahead of his many charges. I wish he had had his day in court to argue the illegitimacy of those laws in these cases in the first place. It wouldn't be the first time that produces a change in laws. We will never know, and must change the laws asap.

> You can fight for a good cause and still break the law.

I have learned it is unproductive to confuse laws with ethics; laws are not inherently ethical.

In larger governments, laws are commonly created thru unethical means and for purposes misaligned with the common good.

> A system of law that selectively enforces laws is inherently flawed.

A system that seeks to inflict all the penalty it can is a system that is doing harm; it has fully lost site of it's original purpose to promote a specific good. Having lost it's way, it is fixating on fairness and outputting damage.

I easily assume that many laws were broken in what lead to his suicide. And equally for Assange. Law is a stretchable concept nowadays: Hunter's laptop turned out to be not "Russian disinfo" as some three letter agencies illegally made us believe. And the laptop is full of evidence of breaking the law, but he got a sweetheart deal.

Laws created+pushed by Joe that put many in jail for drugs, were violated by Hunter, and he walks.

Law is a fluid concept in this day and age. Same like this "rules based international order".

Please remember that hiding "undersireables" in WW2 Germany was against the law, or freeing slaves was against the law.

> academic publishers are vultures that serve no purpose

This is a naively optimistic view of how knowledge production actually operates. Sure, the scientific endeavor is constrained by what is actually the case (i.e.reality), but without some kind of editorial oversight imposed from above nothing coherent nor useful will be produced. A thousand well-trained, well-intentioned researchers toiling away at a problem will not magically self-organize such that their collective efforts make tangible progress on large, intractable problems. This will be true regardless of how many fancy web2.0/3.0 niceties one throws at the problem, since experience has shown that such solutions only make the problems of social dominance worse, not better. In the end, this sentiment is nearly identical to people complaining about "capitalists".

Do capitalists and academic publishers have purposes to fulfill? Yes. Do they fulfill that purpose well these days? Absolutely not. Like many of our social institutions these days, the people who run them seem to fundamentally misunderstand what their roles are, deferring to some vague, financialized liberalism that believes all problems can be addressed by maximizing human-freedom, with no regard to bootstrapping problems. Because the institution ceases to perform it's role, people begin to believe it has no role. Worse yet, now that people have no idea what the institution's role even is, they have even less of a clue as to how to fix it.

> without some kind of editorial oversight imposed from above nothing coherent nor useful will be produced.

True, but academic publishers charge an absurd amount of money in return for very little value. The publisher provides a platform for "editorial oversight" by peer reviewers, but they do not pay the peer reviewers. I would argue that "editorial oversight" in the form of peer review may be worth thousands of dollars per publication, simply providing a platform for that review and profiting from volunteer work should not be compensated as highly as it is right now.

As someone who knows Alexandra personally and follows her work for a very long time, I must warn you that, despite creating an awesome tool, in my opinion (and the opinion of a lot of scientists who were in communication with her) she is not a sensible person at all. She is a lot into pseudoscience (e.g. astrology) and very radical political views (she's a Stalinist), and she's got a strange mix of mysogyny and radical feminism going on. She is very open about it on public Scihub channels. At least this was the situation a year or so ago.