To start with something as valuable as knowledge cannot be free; someone at some level pays the price. The question is who ought to pay for dissemination of scientific literature?

Traditionally, the creators of scientific knowledge have been given a free pass and the costs of reviews, printing and other overheads have been passed on to the reader. Then came along the open-access model. Currently, there are 140,000 open access journals, THAT IS A PLACE TO READ FREE RESEARCH. Currently, the directory of open access journal (doaj.org) has 12,129 Journals, 9,057 searchable at Article level; 3,345,600 Articles.

Publishing fees for open access journals became almost prohibitive. The fees ranged from a couple of hundred US dollars to seven thousand dollars. The compounding issue is that there are predatory journals that charge money without having legitimate peer-reviews conducted. FUTURE IS BRIGHT: In Europe and other regions, there are efforts underway for requiring funding agencies to budget open-access publication fees as a part of research funding. That is a beacon of hope.

This Discussion is the Most Important of ever appeared on the RG site. The positive solution of the problem raised - will give Enormous Potential for the Scientific Community. Everyone understands this, but no steps to change/improve the situation were ever done.

Best Regards,

Leonid Vladimirov

I think some of them are free

Interested

To start with something as valuable as knowledge cannot be free; someone at some level pays the price. The question is who ought to pay for dissemination of scientific literature?

Traditionally, the creators of scientific knowledge have been given a free pass and the costs of reviews, printing and other overheads have been passed on to the reader. Then came along the open-access model. Currently, there are 140,000 open access journals, THAT IS A PLACE TO READ FREE RESEARCH. Currently, the directory of open access journal (doaj.org) has 12,129 Journals, 9,057 searchable at Article level; 3,345,600 Articles.

Publishing fees for open access journals became almost prohibitive. The fees ranged from a couple of hundred US dollars to seven thousand dollars. The compounding issue is that there are predatory journals that charge money without having legitimate peer-reviews conducted. FUTURE IS BRIGHT: In Europe and other regions, there are efforts underway for requiring funding agencies to budget open-access publication fees as a part of research funding. That is a beacon of hope.

previously i face difficulty in access articles apart from abstract which is not enough to give full information to complete any research ,but recently i use sci HUB web site that provide me full access for about of 95% of articles i need , its really beneficial . for us in Iraq where the government didn't support researchers by financial and scientific resources which is really major problem to pay for each article i need to complete my article . for example in my last article i need to use 45 reference articles most of them not open access , so i used sci hub .

The matter like the sports, start as a hobbies for enjoyment, and ended as a business of billions of dollars...

Getting the article as many other things should be payed, because it cost alot to be done, but the question is who should pay, and how?

Some universities and institutes payed for the journals and give an access to their employees.. as free or a very simple charge..

regards.

We pay for textbook, why not for article. Though am not in support of paying to assess online articles, not from researchers.

In my opinion, every review/research article must be free of cost so that it can be available to a larger domain of boffins.

Hi Hulya,

Not all research published in journals is funded by government entities. Therefore, someone has to pay publishing costs.

Although the concept of free may seem nice at first, nothing is truly free -- someone pays somewhere along the line. If the journal has print copies, paper has a cost, ink has a cost, mailing has a cost, binding has a cost, copying has a cost, handling/processing has a cost, storage has a cost, logistics and transportation to destinations involve costs, business insurance involves a cost, and so on ... so, a number of costs add up quickly -- which also all involve some aspect of human resources necessitating additional cost.

Even in the case of a virtual journal, there are still costs -- servers, server space, software systems, back-ups, redundant systems as a means of bolstering fault tolderance within the system, business insurance, employees maintaining computing environments, employees for typesetting, editing, etc., and so forth... so a number of technical and human resource costs, too.

So, somewhere down the line, numerous direct and indirect costs are involved in publishing necessitating payment for services and labor through time.

Well, my thoughts, at least...

Have a great day!

--Adrian

Dear Kay Smarsly

Thank you for the links - very helpful they are to better understand the significance of the issue.

Well, in my opinion, knowledge shoudn't be free. It takes time and effort to conduct a research, collect the data, analyze it, until the paper is goog enough to be well published. That's why as academics we can access them by the university account for free, but paid by the institution.

Despite that, I think that more than having free access to a paper, what is our challenge is to share this knowledge beyond the academic walls. How can we connect and explain to our community the subjects of our research? How can it improve their lives or even promote a reflection about a topic?

I hope to have contributed to the topic. That's a very interesting discussion. Thanks for posting it.

Amanda Zambelli Ferretti has raised an interesting point. I agree that in a quest to have scientific research evidence readily accessible to the research community, it should be made useful and accessible to community partners as they are important stakeholders (after all their tax dollar might be at work in funding our research). The phenomenon called community-based participatory research (CBPR) is the type of research that fits this profile. CBPR involves respecting community beliefs, needs, and insights when identifying the research problem and designing research/interventions,. Consequently the community and its representatives are likely to be receptive to such research. The attached publication may help detail some of these ideas.

@Kay Smarsly, I think I get your point as well as that of the @Amanda Zambelli Ferretti. Ms. Ferreti’s perspective is that it costs so much to produce research, and doctoral students like her and many others spend their hard earned money to produce research. If on top of that they have to pay prohibiting fees to publish in open access journals, then they are in a sort of double jeopardy. If those people publish in traditional journals that do not charge the author, then their research is only available for paid subscription. And those are the journals that will not allow authors to self-archive their research on ResearchGate. The dilemma, the catch 22 starts to shape, making Amanda’s point valid. I definitely see truth in Dr. Smarsley’s point. My conclusion, it is not so cut and dry, black or white. There is a lot of grey. Complex, so to speak; like life itself.

I think the papers should be available for free

Best Regards @ Hulya Avci

I guess it is back to questioning why do researchers do research for? Is it for the advancement of human knowledge or is it for living earning knowledge? I think it is important to support the free flow of information rather than reserve it for the profit-making institution. It is not cheap to pay for a research paper. It cost more than a book. How long it would take to put a research paper into a book for public access? I agree with Kay Smartly, we should let those taxpayers pay for nothing.

If the paper is not an open access one, you have to pay. But using DOI there are ways to have the paper. I guess you know the ways