There's no official position. It's a messy issue, with what I'm sure are lots of conflicting opinions among various people at Sage. I don't see perfectly eye to eye on this with other board members (one of whom is my father) or upper management. That's not a bad thing. The issue of paywalls and piracy is a really complicated thing, even though most HN commenters would make it seem like a black and white good vs bad issue.
Sage is in a particularly interesting position because we serve so much of the humanities and social sciences (HSS). In STM you can make the legit argument that all published research should be open access and the cost of that should come out of the same funding that funded the research (ie NIH or private funding agencies). But in the social sciences there isn't the same funding picture.
So even if we decided we were going to be super ambitious and flip all of our journals tomorrow to author-pays OA, it's hard to imagine that working in HSS. What would end up happening? Hard to say, but my guess is that a lot of our journals would collapse for lack of submissions and the vast majority of the content would go to our competitors' paywall journals. And remember that a lot of our journals are academic society journals and the societies rely on the journal revenue to operate. So it would also meant the implosion of significant societies that currently serve their members (well, in reality it would just mean they'd migrate their journals to another paywall publisher).
The whole thing is super messy and complicated. The competing interests of societies, academics, universities, funding bodies, tenure committees, etc all make it a big complicated mess (particularly when focusing on HSS). I wish we could have some of these debates in forums like HN in an intelligent way, but that's pretty hard to do given how quickly the pitchforks come out.
> In STM you can make the legit argument that all published research should be open access and the cost of that should come out of the same funding that funded the research.
There is no cost of publishing your/my papers as open access. Just follow these easy steps:
1. Write paper, send to journal
2. Do the peer review hokey pokey until paper is accepted
3. Upload preprint version to preprint server (arXiv etc.), with link to journal version
If you're brave, you can do step 3 before step 2.
This whole concept of paying for open access is ridiculous and should go die in a fire.
That hokey pokey you refer to does cost money. So yes, you can use a system that has costs associated with it, then attempt to ensure those costs can't be recouped. But if that's successful the system will collapse. I assume you'd think that would be good in this case. But I find it funny reasoning to say you should opt-in to publisher-facilitated peer review while trying to tear it down. Wouldn't avoiding publishers altogether be the more ideologically consistent method?
SciHub is costing around $50k a year to host 50 million papers for free. Elselvier makes a 37% profit margin on 2.07 billion pounds a year. Funny enough, SciHub shows Elselvier could host all scientific knowledge for under 1% of 1% of its revenue while making an operating profit. I'm sure we can find a better trade between widespread access and profitable management of that access than Elselvier. ;)
But no publisher is arguing that the hosting of PDFs is the expensive part of their business. If it was then you're right and researchers should just send their finished PDFs straight to sci-hub for hosting. But hosting a PDF is only a tiny, and as you've identified, an inconsequential part of the equation.
The other critical parts still don't result in a 37% net margin as it's basically labor. Most of it is low-skilled labor that should have plenty competition. The peer reviews of specific fields is high-skilled labor with decent to uncommon competition depending on size of field.
My claim still applies even if those costs are factored in. A yearly fee should be enough to cover everything. Charging $10-30 per article and such is just profiteering.
Yes, it costs money, but it's not being paid for by Elsevier. Referees receive zero money, editors receive zero (or perhaps a nominal fee). The copyediting costs a bit, but it is low-skill labor and can mostly be optimised away (many journals already accept camera-ready copies directly from the authors).
What I see publishers mainly providing is ranking and filtering (and branding to some extent). ACS has their top level journal (JACS) and several subfield-specific journals, and usually there are ACS journals with different prestige in each subfield. ACS, APS and other non-profit science organisations do a fairly good job at it IMO.
Forbidding for-profit publishers would be my preferred option.
If the collapsing part of the system is the one containing middlemen who earn millions taking advantage of free labor from academicians, it will be a success. The only current effect of sci-hub is that research is really open.
Sage is in a particularly interesting position because we serve so much of the humanities and social sciences (HSS). In STM you can make the legit argument that all published research should be open access and the cost of that should come out of the same funding that funded the research (ie NIH or private funding agencies). But in the social sciences there isn't the same funding picture.
So even if we decided we were going to be super ambitious and flip all of our journals tomorrow to author-pays OA, it's hard to imagine that working in HSS. What would end up happening? Hard to say, but my guess is that a lot of our journals would collapse for lack of submissions and the vast majority of the content would go to our competitors' paywall journals. And remember that a lot of our journals are academic society journals and the societies rely on the journal revenue to operate. So it would also meant the implosion of significant societies that currently serve their members (well, in reality it would just mean they'd migrate their journals to another paywall publisher).
The whole thing is super messy and complicated. The competing interests of societies, academics, universities, funding bodies, tenure committees, etc all make it a big complicated mess (particularly when focusing on HSS). I wish we could have some of these debates in forums like HN in an intelligent way, but that's pretty hard to do given how quickly the pitchforks come out.