Diamond Open Access (or Platinum OA) is a scholarly publishing model where journals and platforms are free for both readers and authors, with no Article Processing Charges (APCs).
The problem is: publication is based on reputation. Reputation takes time and effort from the entire community.
I feel like modern infrastructure (Google Scholar, AI research, LinkedIn, etc) helped to decrease the importance of high-impact journals such as Nature, etc. Researchers don't rely on highly curated printed journals in their physical mailbox to get informed what's happening. You can just use tools to scrape content much faster.
But still: It can be career decisive if a reseachers lands a publication in a for-profit journal such as Nature.
The CS community has a much nicer publishing pipeline where most top journals/proceedings are attached to non-profit conferences and the fee is 0 (beside a conference fee).
I wish more fields would work like this: you publish with a conference proceeding and talk on the conference about your paper.
Researchers are themselves responsible for typesetting, advertising, etc. This and removing for-profit stakeholders can reduce the costs a lot.
It'd be great if this could one day be a real alternative to Elsevier.
Today, professors and postdocs are doing the peer-review for Elsevier, for free. They can do that because they get a paycheck from the government (through university and grants). Then, the governments pay for Elsevier access through university libraries, ontop of that. It'd be much more efficient, if everybody could just publish and subscribe for free on a publicly funded platform.
You absolutely need to solve the gatekeeping and reputation part, otherwise your newly-minted open access journal would be filled to the brim with cranks and charlatans.
Arxiv and the internet do more for science than Elsevier. They're rent-seeking middlemen, having lost any of whatever their purpose might once have been.
I think the worst part is, Elsevier could still serve a purpose and make money by curating and leveraging reputation even if all academic research was openly published and freely accessible - they could select what they consider to be the best research, have editorial content, produce visualizations and accompany content with a high quality of journalism, like Quanta. Papers being locked, researchers and institutions paying out the nose, and the other artificial scarcity / artificial stupidity features are entirely unnecessary.
The problem - for them - is that they wouldn't be able to make as much money as a curator than as a grifter, a middleman. As a curator or a creator, they would be actually forced to work, as compared to the current rentier model that they enjoy.
Those executive bonuses don't pay for themselves you know.
Open access typically means authors pay a publication fee, which leads to the same result of the government paying twice and the journal profiting twice.
And most of those require ridiculous "article processing charges". Even non-profits. Elsevier is bad, but it's not much worse than other publishers.
Author (in practice author institution, in practice with public funds) pays open access is less bad than locking articles behind paywalls, but it's still a racket.
This CERN system is about diamond open access, meaning that neither authors nor readers pay.
> In the five years since its launch, the platform has seen steady growth and uptake across the research community, with more than 1,200 articles published.
That actually doesn't seem like a lot (240 articles per year), but I suppose they're still in the process of gaining traction.
Diamond Open Access (or Platinum OA) is a scholarly publishing model where journals and platforms are free for both readers and authors, with no Article Processing Charges (APCs).
The problem is: publication is based on reputation. Reputation takes time and effort from the entire community.
I feel like modern infrastructure (Google Scholar, AI research, LinkedIn, etc) helped to decrease the importance of high-impact journals such as Nature, etc. Researchers don't rely on highly curated printed journals in their physical mailbox to get informed what's happening. You can just use tools to scrape content much faster.
But still: It can be career decisive if a reseachers lands a publication in a for-profit journal such as Nature.
The CS community has a much nicer publishing pipeline where most top journals/proceedings are attached to non-profit conferences and the fee is 0 (beside a conference fee).
I wish more fields would work like this: you publish with a conference proceeding and talk on the conference about your paper.
Researchers are themselves responsible for typesetting, advertising, etc. This and removing for-profit stakeholders can reduce the costs a lot.
I think the worst part is, Elsevier could still serve a purpose and make money by curating and leveraging reputation even if all academic research was openly published and freely accessible - they could select what they consider to be the best research, have editorial content, produce visualizations and accompany content with a high quality of journalism, like Quanta. Papers being locked, researchers and institutions paying out the nose, and the other artificial scarcity / artificial stupidity features are entirely unnecessary.
Those executive bonuses don't pay for themselves you know.
Author (in practice author institution, in practice with public funds) pays open access is less bad than locking articles behind paywalls, but it's still a racket.
This CERN system is about diamond open access, meaning that neither authors nor readers pay.
That actually doesn't seem like a lot (240 articles per year), but I suppose they're still in the process of gaining traction.