We are not compensated for reviewing on behalf of journals. We even pay to publish, and then pay to read our own paper.
edit: Nothing wrong with volunteering to review research, but if the whole process is for-profit, I don't understand why the reviewers cannot be compensated for their effort.
This sounds like a valid viewpoint, but it could lead to significant downsides. Like pay per review scams on Amazon. I don't know how this policy will play out in reality.
Nothing would change (except that Elsevier etc would have to reach their pockets for the first time).
The editor invites domain experts to review manuscripts. By compensating the reviewers it does not mean that you suddenly get more domain experts. Same people will be invited. But they will be compensated by taking a cut of the publisher's profits.
Or we can cut the middle men and publish in community maintained non-profit open-access journals.
Open access are not always free. I think one of the biggest materials science journal is asking from the authors to pay something in the order of $4,000 to make it open access [1].
The trick is to kick out out the for-profit middlemen who are taking advantage of the prestige and impact that various journals built over time, and now they just receive paychecks and free labor.
That's inaccurate. When you publish to a journal, the journal will give you a pdf of your paper which you can put up on a personal site. You always have access to distribute your research.
Another point - journals never charge to publish (conferences do).
Your link states you retain the right to do this, but that it may be subject to an embargo period. If it's referring to the allowed embargo period according to US law (which requires all federally funded papers be shared publicly) then it would be 12 months. They further allow you to share preprints which are not their professionally-formatted versions (i.e. you can put your pre-review version on arxiv), as does generally everyone else.
Also Taylor & Francis may have decent journals in some niches but generally aren't a great publisher.
This is false, it is merely a CSE viewpoint. In science, several prestigious journals are difficult to get into, and afterwards, charge you for the paper, per column or per page, being published. Figures and color may cost extra (significantly).
I would pay $10 if the author got at least payed $8 out of that. But since authors get payed nothing, I rather download the work from some other site and send the author a thank you mail if I really liked their work.
A whole lot of us post our papers on our websites. Those that don't are typically afraid of getting their employers in legal trouble, or don't know how to set up a website beyond the faculty bio page that their department makes for them.
My understanding is that the universities have contracts with the journals that mandate the professors and researchers publish in the journal with almost no exceptions. You’re putting the blame in the wrong place.
Universities have contracts with journals through their libraries to provide their staff full access to publications.
Universities rarely tell scientists where to publish. That is determined by the scientists, the quality of the paper and the editor of the journal.
Scientists and PhD students need to publish in high impact factor journals for their work to be recognized, for promotions, graduation, etc. There is a lot of work that goes into a scientific publication. It's not a blog (which most people equate it to when they say why isn't it free).
Scientists can make their publications available on their personal website. Generally google scholar will give you a pdf if its available. Some labs maintain papers on their site, other scientists don't. Generally, finding older publications is a challenge.
I've commented on this earlier. Asking the researcher to not publish in these journals is pointless. You need to legislate access. But in general, most scientists will have access to these journals from their university libraries (at least in US/Canada/Europe).
This is inaccurate. Universities have contracts with publishers to get their faculty access to the journals.
I've never encountered a mandate to publish in certain journals because the university has contracts with them. On occasion there are incentives like breaks on open access fees essentially because the university pre-paid, and there are field specific norms on where to publish.
then they are stealing money from universities... essentially the scientist is agreeing to work pay free for the university by attending it. What do you think the money for the university is used for?
Who, exactly, do you think gets the money from journal access fees? I'll give you a hint, it's not the people who write the articles, nor the people who peer-review them, nor the universities who employ either group.
Universities around the world collectively pay billions of dollars to gain access to journals, many of which their own researchers contribute to. The University of California cut ties with Elsevier because of the extremely high cost of accessing their work.[1] And that is a huge deal for a major US university like that to end things with the world's largest academic publisher. The universities are not making money from journals -- they're paying exorbitant amounts to for-profit companies with some of the largest profit margins in any industry.
If someone were to snap their fingers tomorrow and make it so that scientists could publish their work without having to deal with these for-profit publishers, universities would save millions of dollars (per school), taxpayers would save money, and the general public would also have greater access to the work that they themselves funded through public grants.
It's confusing but "the University of California" as used here actually refers to the entire system of ten schools, from Berkeley to, uh, Merced. The system collectively negotiates for journals.
There was also a big fight over prices with Nature about 10 years ago.
> the scientist is agreeing to work pay free for the university by attending it
This statement makes me think you significantly misunderstand how scientists / universities function. The scientists (graduate students, postdocs, professors, staff) are all salaried employees of the university. The university does take some of the grant money given to lead professors (e.g. to pay the aforementioned salaries).
