Boffins snap first pics of hot white dwarf nova bursting out of its shell Astronomers have caught the first pictures of a star in the early stages of going nova after a Japanese amateur skywatcher alerted the community to a new star showing up in the heavens. On August 14 of last year, Koichi Itagaki reported discovering a new star in the sky called Nova Delphinus 2013 around 14,800 light years from …
Well, it is "Nature" magazine that is charging the money for the research paper. This is a for-profit outfit (Macmillan Publishers Limited, to be precise). You can probably download the raw picture from the researchers' website - sometimes even a preprint of the paper or the paper itself if the authors were good at "clarifying" intellectual property rights.
Here is how it works:
1) Scientist gets funding to do Science from NSF or other sources
2) Writes up paper
3) Decides to publish in Journal "X" (today many papers are put onto the arxiv for free though)
4) Journal X goes into Kyubee mode, puts out a contract saying "we pay you Z" (I have no idea what the going rate is; if it is negative, beware, it is probably a 'pay to publish' scam), "BUT you have to transfer the exclusive copyright to us, then we will peer-review it and if accepted it will appear in our renowned journal etc."
5) Journal with the research paper is published and sold generally to libraries (these subscriptions are expensive). Nature can be found at the street vendor's stall too though; I once found one in a shop in Madeira, of all places.
6) You may have a subscription to access all areas of the journal's web-enabled archive (often at rates that are very good in case you need more than 20 papers per year) or else pay lots of dosh for the reprint of a single article (in this case GBP 22). Inflation is nasty. IEEE articles that you now have to pay USD 30 for a single PDF may still have written "reprints can be obtained for 0.2 USD" underneath.
Here's how it should work:
1) Scientist gets funding to do Science from NSF or other sources
2) Writes up paper
3) Since the taxpayers have paid for this, it is provided free to the public!
Enough of this publication scam, where ultimately the taxpayer pays again, and then a third time to actually read the work. Surely the NSF can publish results of results themselves or just put it online...
> Here is how it works:
In an ideal world, perhaps. More likely:
...
3) Scientist needs to publish in a "high impact factor" journal like Nature to get the NSF or whoever to hand out the next slice of funding for the "Science", or to get his/her next paid position.
4) Journal (possibly prompted by jealous peer reviewers) says "this stuff isn't important enough for a quality publication like ours, go away".
5) Rewrite for next lower impact factor journal
6) rinse and repeat...
In pre-web days there was a sort of deal, whereby institutions and libraries paid the expensive subscriptions and the publishers did the work of co-ordinating peer review, editing, printing on shiny paper and sending out to aforementioned libraries and institutions. The web made all that look expensive, and the expansion of research brought into existence a lot of new journals of varying quality, which libraries didn't have the money for. So the model rather broke down. I'm not sure any journals pay for papers any more; in fact many have page charges which the scientist (read: taxpayer) has to pay.
So now we have a mixed ecosystem of traditional journals like Nature, newer pay-for-publication journals, and not-for-profit systems like PLoS which attempt to spread the cost "fairly" over the beneficiaries. Science funders are gradually becoming more permissive about publication costs in grant applications. At the end of the day all that work has to be paid for by someone.
Amongst all the tedious academic name checking that appears in the part of Nature article not behind the paywall I see no mention of Koichi Itagaki, the amateur discoverer of this nova. Surely he (well I assume it's a he) deserves more recognition - at least his voice might be heard more clearly when asking the local authority to be more careful with siting the street lights.
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