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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mcmillan" data-source="post: 9687355" data-attributes="member: 6681949">When Staffan admitted he wasn’t too familiar with academic publishing it seemed clear this wasn’t a conversation of two experts but an expert and someone more familiar than you but still a layperson. You might not have intended this impression but your response to this to ask them  be more persuasive and “try again” when they admitted reaching their limit of knowledge is what came off as demanding. To be clear when we say scientists pay publication fees this almost never is their personal funds (I say almost since I think I remember hearing about some who did cover costs as a political point early on when concepts were first being put forward but currently it would be very unusual). Generally this would come out of grant funds but that would mean a trade off for money that otherwise would go into research. And mandates for OA publishing haven’t kept up with corresponding increase in grant funding. In our department we have had people request publishing support from department budget that would also go to things like conferences or training workshops or there’s smaller funding opportunities the university offers that could offset publication fees (this isn’t what they were created for but is the main use in chemistry where the total grant might cover a few weeks worth of chemicals) Ideally I’d like to see grants cover publishing better too, but in practice there’s a few issues. There’s a range of fees in different journals even in related fields so setting the amount may be tricky. Doing something like saying funding supplement would be given to match publication fees can run into problems with incentivizing more predatory journals to raise fees since they know they’ll be paid. There’s also tricky situations where a grant might be awarded for doing research but not be renewed at the time publication happens. There might be ways to get around some of these hurdles and I think making an effort to address them would be worthwhile in the long term but there aren’t easy answers. I think there are some cultural shifts happening to acknowledge review is more than just formal peer review prior to publication. There are meaningful discussions happening with preprint servers that were mentioned before - though there’s also a dumping of papers that are fundamentally flawed and never changed. Also with my experience with computational chemistry I have seen there are influences from open source software where people are making data in addition to code available in public repositories. Yeah it has been a tangent - such that I almost forgot which thread this was in. I’ll probably try to avoid derailing more moving forward</blockquote>

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