Comment by jimberlage
1 year ago
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.