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Comment Re:Boicott these publishers (Score 2) 26

In the past ten years, I've had zero problem paying for my publications in open access journals. If all journals become open access I will hardly notice.

You may be an established scientist with sufficient funding, or working in an institute which provides this funding. There are other experiences; in the past, I have struggled to find a way to pay open access fees and it has prevented me from publishing. Most publishers claim to have policies that allow waivers of open access publications if authors are unable to pay, I found this to be mostly empty promises. After 3 months going around offices at my university to get certified that I really have no funds to pay for the article processing charge, I got a 50% discount -- asking me to still pay over 1000 GBP which I would have had to cover from postdoc salary, because the university had no means (or will) to pay. This did not happen with "predatory" OA publishers but more established OA publishers like PLoS. And it is not only my own experience but shared by colleagues in my field.

I am all in favor of free access to scientific publications, but not a fan of Open Access publishing; instead of a barrier to reading scientific articles, OA puts a barrier on publishing and I find that even worse (no, just putting your article on the arXiv or BioRxiv is not an alternative -- it is important but lacks the added values journals still provide, such as editing, reviewing, and essentially curating collections of papers so I can find them).

There is a move towards paid open access publishing globally, and I think this is mainly a bailout of the publishers and means to protect them against SciHub. The cost of this move is a barrier to publishing, especially for poorer countries, but also for people in countries where there may be sufficient funding but not everybody has access to it. You may be privileged by working in a field or at an institute where you have sufficient funding, or are able to acquire sufficient funds to cover your OA charges; this is great, but not everybody is in your position (I feel myself fortunate to being able to pay OA charges for most of my papers now). (Mandatory) OA will allow publishers to continue to exist and make profits from publicly funded research; with SciHub, everybody could read science without paying ridiculous subscription fees, so business was lost for publishers; but scientists cannot stop publishing, and charging for publication instead of reading will perpetuate the publishers' business model (making money off public research funds). So no, I don't think OA is the solution; it is part of the problem. SciHub was the solution (and yes, it is illegal; there are many ways possible to make this a public service, make it legal, make it a requirement; that should be what scientists lobby for, not OA publishing).

Government

Submission + - German government malware analyzed (ccc.de)

lennier1 writes: The German hacker group CCC (Chaos Computer Club) has analyzed a piece of malware the German government uses in criminal investigations to spy on a suspect's computer.
I'm sure we're all surprises that it's opening security holes for third parties, violates a related court verdict and several laws in general.

Censorship

Submission + - Belgium May Not be Blocking The Pirate Bay (activepolitic.com)

bs0d3 writes: Recently many people from Belgium have been joining thepiratebay's and telecomix's irc channels and asking for help with the telecomix dns saying that it doesn't work to access www.thepiratebay.org. This is true. The court was very specific in their order, and it was to block the domains: www.thepiratebay.org, www.thepiratebay.net, www.thepiratebay.com, www.thepiratebay.nu, www.thepiratebay.se, www.piratebay.no, and www.ripthepiratebay.com, or else face a daily penalty of 1.000 EUR for every day when defendants do not implement such "DNS-blocking" in their DNS-servers'. So obviously in defiance of that, people testing their dns servers go to the domain www.thepiratebay.org, except, thepiratebay doesn't have the www domain turned on. At one point it redirected to the main page at the url thepiratebay.org, now it doesn't probably because of negligence from the admins. What's interesting is that the court only ordered the block of the www subdomains so if an isp wants to make a fuss they should be able to avoid the penalties until a later ruling.

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