•  qyron   ( @qyron@sopuli.xyz ) 
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    10110 months ago

    Nestlé has been patenting human milk proteins for decades. To my understanding, this prevents other companies to add such molecules to baby formula, even if somehow methods to synthesize said molecules were developed.

    That is a scary notion, a malevolous intent and a gross outcome.

  •  moog   ( @moog@lemm.ee ) 
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    6210 months ago

    “…he sought funding from the private sector to start Celera Genomics. The company planned to profit from their work by creating genomic data to which users could subscribe for a fee.”

    Fuck this guy

  • I’m not even sure what he’s talking about. Open access journals are the ones who charge authors to publish.

    If you publish in a journal that has closed access, there is generally no fee to publish. If you want your paper to be open access, you can tack on an additional open access fee so that your paper doesn’t end up behind a paywall. The last time I looked - and this was several years ago - the going rate for making your paper open access in a closed access journal was about $2-3k. We always budgeted for publication fees when we were putting together our funding proposals.

    The fee structure is similar for open access journals, except that there’s not a choice about paying them. For researchers whose work isn’t grant funded, it generally means they’re paying out of pocket, unless their institution steps in.

    I had a paper published in a small but (in its field) prestigious journal, and the editor explained to me that he only charges people who can afford it, and uses those funds to cover the costs of the journal. He explained that he had a paper from a researcher who couldn’t cover the publishing fee, and he let me know that I was helping out the other person, too.

    What I don’t understand is how anyone how has gone through academia doesn’t know this.

      • Of course you can put it anywhere you’d like. Services like arXiv specialize in hosting pre-prints of published papers as well as white papers that only have an institutional association.

        The problem is that the job of an academic is to publish. That’s how you build credibility and seniority. For it to count as a “published paper” it needs to have undergone peer review so that the people who want to read/cite the paper at least have the confidence that it’s at least been reviewed by other experts in the field.

        There are some “journals” that will publish anything as long as they get their fees. Most academics are wise to that by now, but it can still impress people in business for whom a pub is a pub.

  •  bl_r   ( @bl_r@beehaw.org ) 
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    1910 months ago

    Paywalled articles are still openly available if you politely email the researcher. While we should strive to have no barrier, if you can’t afford to publish openly those who need the research can still acquire it under the table. Having research unpublished because the researchers could not afford to pay the fee is worse than having the research published in a closed journal.

    I’ve gotten a few dozen papers from closed journals that way, and I’ve never been told no.

  •  Sloogs   ( @Sloogs@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 
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    10 months ago

    Surely there has to be a cost to the infrastructure of publishing and curation though. And possibly all the work of setting up and organizing the peer review process. So they probably charge the institutions or authors submitting the paper instead of their readers. But perhaps we should treat scientific journals as a public good, like libraries, or at least have a publicly funded option. Or have universities and institutions fund it for the public good.

    •  jol   ( @jol@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
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      2710 months ago

      But it’s mostly a scam. The costs don’t remotely compare to the revenue. Reviewers time is not paid, and there’s a price to both publish and access. It’s all about the prestige to publish. If you contact the author directly they’ll typically gladly send you the article for free.

      •  Sloogs   ( @Sloogs@lemmy.dbzer0.com ) 
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        10 months ago

        Oh absolutely. I agree. I don’t think anyone’s disputing that something about it needs to change. Even given that things cost money to run, for profit journals that can basically act as gatekeepers means there’s also going to be excessive price gouging and profiteering and that needs to change.

  •  jadelord   ( @jadelord@discuss.tchncs.de ) 
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    10 months ago

    Well, he does have a point though. #OpenAccess

    Footnote: Yeah, I saw that he had done some bad faith research, but remember open access is for everyone in the world, not just free rider corporate shills.

    Footnote 2: If it is not feasible to go for gold OA journals, please go for green route: publish in closed but allows authors to put it up on preprint like arXiv.