Researcher here. That argument is bullshit. Papers are the main method for researchers to communicate their findings. They're written by the researchers themselves, who are often funded by taxpayer dollars, and reviewed by other researchers for free. I hear that sometimes a publisher will do some copy editing at the end, but in my field there's nothing beyond some simple formatting checks.
Which is why you can find all of my "preprints" online.
It is incredibly silly that it's legal for taxpayer-funded research papers to be hidden behind a paywall, which sends money to a corporation that did not fund the authors of the paper.
Former Systems Librarian at a University. My budget was over $80,000 per year just to gain access to the journals. Before this happened we had journals out on racks and boxes with previous journals behind them for as many as I could cram there. Then I had these journals in a backroom which I would have someone go get something for a student maybe two times a month.
Usually the new Journals are not even available in digital for anywhere from 12 to 48 months. So we still had to buy the journals at full price (Looking at you Nature (It's over $100 a month) then pay thousands to get access to journals that would not have ever made a profit before.
Main reason I left the field is Librarian would defend these parasites and bad mouth Open Source projects. I would pay $150,000 for my content management system and portal for version releases and about $40,000 a year maintenance fee. It averaged about $0.50 a year per book to have them in a maintained database and public portal. These systems were absolutely garbage technically (I had to reboot my servers daily according to contract) and the interface was backwards. So glad I left what should have been a position to champion for fair use and equal access but found out that librarian for the most part were the police of copy right and closed source projects. Rant Over
> I hear that sometimes a publisher will do some copy editing at the end, but in my field there's nothing beyond some simple formatting checks.
By "some copy editing", what you surely mean is "a blind search and replace that introduces last-minute errors", which is the main effect of this copy-editing that I've seen.
I've actually had extremely good experiences with both copy editors and layout, including a journal - an Elsevier journal by checking - redoing a figure.
It is also highly debatable whether it is a good use of taxpayer funds to cover thousands of dollars in page charges (which is not uncommon for many journals these days). Think how much money could go towards funding more postdocs, graduate students or researchers, but is instead spent paying page charges to journals...
> It is incredibly silly that it's legal for taxpayer-funded research papers to be hidden behind a paywall
I know at least for research funded by the Department of Energy, after 1 year any published articles become freely available regardless of the publisher's access policy (excepting classified material, of course).
Which is why you can find all of my "preprints" online.
It is incredibly silly that it's legal for taxpayer-funded research papers to be hidden behind a paywall, which sends money to a corporation that did not fund the authors of the paper.