Comment by baubino
1 year ago
I agree but I also know (as a university employee) that the reason they don’t do this is because then they would have to pay for and manage the hosting of hundreds of thousands of articles. From the university’s perspective, managing and hosting articles is exactly what publishers do, so universities cede that work to publishers. What is needed is a public database of all publicly-funded research.
How hard or expensive is it to embed a PDF link in the Univ news article. It maybe less harder and expensive than the stock image that they have used.
Stanford maintains an extensive catalog of research papers: https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/in00000064276
At first I was like, “oh, that’s a reasonable perspective,” and then I thought about it more and it kinda isn’t?
When I buy a keyboard, the manufacturer doesn’t run a shipping company, so they use $x from the purchase price to subcontract shipping. (They tell me it’s separate at billing, but they don’t make me ring up DSL myself either.)
When I hire an electrician, they buy materials from Home Depot, so they use $x from the purchase price for materials. (They sometimes break down the bill into materials and labor, but they don’t make me drive to Home Depot myself and buy every part.)
When the public hires academics to do research, they have administrative overhead and have to hire a publisher, so they use $x from the grant for administrative overhead and…
Abdicate responsibility for the $y needed for publishing and pretend the public didn’t intend for part of the grant money to go to that??
Publishers are not supported by government. and government only require publish.
You may have missed the point here.
OP was saying that publicly funded research needs to have, built in to its budget for the research, enough money to make the findings publicly available. The publishing mechanism is largely arbitrary here, only that it must be budgeted for.
Hosting is a long-solved problem. High-quality repositories have provided free, universally accessible document hosting to the academic world for decades.
The arXiv is a nonprofit organization run by Cornell that hosts preprints, and I wouldn't be surprised if it holds more stuff than all the for-profit publishers combined at this point. The barriers to uploading on the arXiv are very low - all you need is to be at a recognized academic institution or endorsed by someone who works for one.
Resources like arXiv have made official publishing largely superfluous for spreading knowledge in the parts of academia that understand and care about the value of spreading knowledge for free. Analogous archives exist for (at least) biology, medicine, psychology, and economics.
https://info.arxiv.org/about/index.html
some sort of scientific hub, one might say
Sounds like a good cost for the government to subsidize.