It would be a scam, except academics could easily disrupt it and they (mostly) choose not to.
It's more that the taxpayer is fleeced by academia in general (the whole research-funding-publishing complex) for many billions because there's no incentive for academics to save the taxpayer money by handling publishing themselves. (As Doctorow notes, they already review the manuscripts, so all that's left for an existing journal's editorial team to do is vote for a chief editor and switch to any one of many open, free research publication services.)
Public domain publishing should be a condition of government funding for research.
I get it, this is Hacker News and we all disrupt five industries before breakfast, but this so out of touch it's not even funny. Old journals aren't going away just because a few academics decide to start a new unknown journal.
Have you ever outcompeted a cartel that has 100 years and billions of dollars on you? Me neither. Maybe it's possible, but it's certainly neither easy nor as simple as you suggest.
Academics are playing with their own and their students' careers by defying established journals. That's infinitely higher stakes than software devs taking VC money and failing only to use this experience as a piece on their resume for the next job. It shouldn't be that way, but fixing that is hard.
You forget the editorial boards. They can mass resign, start their own journal, and ask that this successor be considered the legitimate heir. But editorial boards don't do that, and on the rare occasions they do, academics keep submitting to the old journal. Because, again, these folks don't care if anyone can read their research outside of colleagues who might cite them.
This has actually succeeded before though. Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR) is one of the premier journals in its field, is open access, and was formed by the mass resignation of editorial board of 'Machine Learning'.
Yes, and ‘Machine Learning’ is still being published, as is virtually every other journal of note that’s seen a mass editorial resignation. Maybe this strategy will work in the long run—if all the high-prestige journals are open access the publishers may wither and die—but so far Springer and Elsevier and the others make their money either way.
JMLR has a far higher impact factor than "Machine Learning".
The for-profit publishers are welcome to print whatever they want, forever. They even publish "hollow" journals that exist purely as spoilers. You're mistaken if you believe they "make their money either way" they need subscribers, and it's increasingly unattractive to subscribe to second rate journals like "Machine Learning".
IIRC, the way they defeat this is by offering discounts on subscriptions to large groups of journals, rather than to individual titles.
If you're going to have to buy the package anyway, any money that is spent on journals not in the package is an extra expense that will have to be individually justified.
There’s a number of these stories, such as the former board of (now-dead) Journal of Algorithms founding the ACM Transactions of Algorithms and the former board of (now-dead) Topology founding the Journal of Topology.
In the two cases adjacent to my field where this happened, the only people who kept submitting to the old journal were people who were clueless about the whole situation.
> Because, again, these folks don't care if anyone can read their research outside of colleagues who might cite them.
Many researchers do care, hence they publish on their own website, arxiv etc., too. But they do care about future funding, their career, recognition and self validation, too.
Serving on an editorial board for a prestigious journal is a career stepping stone just like publishing in that journal is a stepping stone earlier in your career. Asking the editorial board to resign has similar problems as telling PhD students to simply not publish in those journals.
> You forget the editorial boards. They can mass resign, start their own journal, and ask that this successor be considered the legitimate heir.
That would actually be completely irrelevant. Performance evaluation in academia is tied to the ability to post X papers in well respected established publications with a high impact factor. This requirement is generally imposed by legislation and regulation. Thus what matters is a publication's impact factor, it's reputation, and whether they are already in the acceptable list or not.
If a mass protest led an entire editorial board to leave an established high-impact factor journal to start their own journal from scratch, said new journal would fail to meet any of the criteria that makes a journal an acceptable publication.
> Because, again, these folks don't care if anyone can read their research outside of colleagues who might cite them.
Thus assertion is also wrong. There are researchers who put together their own journals and use them to circle-jerk their way into relevance. This has been happening for years, and I even know of a case where said researcher even ties his papers to his own congress. However, these journals do tend to have a piss-poor impact factor, thus they don't count for performance reviews.
>Performance evaluation in academia is tied to the ability to post X papers in well respected established publications with a high impact factor
In the US at least, that evaluation is performed by faculty not by a system. If three schools (say MIT, Harvard, and Stanford) said 'we will no longer consider any work published in non-open source journals in the award of tenure' the system would flip very very quickly. Institutions could do the same with REF in the UK.
It is a system of social norms and conventions that are treated as inherent while also constantly shifting...but no one will admit are shifting or socially constructed.
> Thus what matters is a publication's impact factor, its reputation, and whether they are already in the acceptable list or not.
This makes me wonder if there's room for a kind of legal hack that could carry these things over to a new journal. A journal's reputation is essentially tied to its name; and the name is what goes on people's CVs and on the lists of approved journals and so on. It seems like the name is really the only asset of a journal that could not very quickly be duplicated elsewhere if the editorial board decides to move together.
I assume these names are protected by trademark law and that the publishers will fight to the death to protect them. But in the scenario where the editorial board jumps ship, is there some kind of legal argument they could use to either (a) effectively steal the name from the publisher or (b) piggyback on the name and reputation of the old journal, for example by naming the new journal "The Journal Formerly Known As X", so that it's clear to everyone that this is the journal X in all but name, and thus should be treated like X for the purpose of performance reviews etc.?
Anyone know how far an editorial board could go in this direction, if they made up their minds to do so?
IANAL, but I don’t think the law accounts for “ship of Theseus” situations. If a majority of the company resigns to a brand new one, the trademark is still owned by the old company.
> Performance evaluation in academia is tied to the ability to post X papers in well respected established publications with a high impact factor. This requirement is generally imposed by legislation and regulation.
"Legislation and regulation"? This is an astonishing claim. As far as I know, universities decide their own performance evaluation processes. How on earth did you get the impression that legislators passed laws dictating that academics publish in high impact factor journals?
> "Legislation and regulation"? This is an astonishing claim. As far as I know, universities decide their own performance evaluation processes.
Not necessarily. In some countries, public research institutions are governed by regulations that cover organization aspects, funding, and performance evaluation.
> How on earth did you get the impression that legislators passed laws dictating that academics publish in high impact factor journals?
By the fact that I spent close to a decade working as a research engineer and as a PhD candidate, and I had to learn how my research group was funded and evaluated in order to remain a research engineer.
> Not necessarily. In some countries, public research institutions are governed by regulations that cover organization aspects, funding, and performance evaluation.
This is part of the fleecing. It ends up in law the same way that "Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations" (NRSROs) ended up in law in the US, or anti-third party laws (like against "fusion.")
Those laws and regulations seem like great places to attack, seeing as against the vast majority of academics, the few juggernauts of academic publishing would be very much underdogs. The problem is the weird rationalization that these arbitrary brands serve a useful purpose simply through being labeled as brands that should be respected.
It's no wonder they do as little as possible and charge as much as possible. Their value lies not in the papers they publish, the quality of their peer reviews, or the composition of their boards (which could easily be transferred) but in their titles, as if they were royalty. The only way to transfer this value is to sell the name to a huge company that can realize economies of scale and monopoly power to bring costs down even farther.
Ok, I don't know about most countries, but in speaking with US and UK and EU academics I have never heard of such laws. I would question if the places where most meaningful research occurs have these laws.
I wouldn't be surprised if, say, China did, but China doesn't dictate the way research is done globally.
> Ok, I don't know about most countries, but in speaking with US and UK and EU academics I have never heard of such laws.
I suspect you didn't spoke to a lot of UK and EU academics then, because that's how things are ran in here. The EU has been, for the past two decades or so, reforming their research institutions to introduce performance-based funding, which include and are not limited to tracking relevant and meaninful research output in a competitive environment[1]. These include bibliometrical indicators, which takes into account "publication type and the rank or citation impact of the publication channel". At the member-state and and institutional level this involves whitelists of acceptable reference publications.
Can you name a UK government law or regulation that dictates to universities how an academic's publication record is to be interpreted in their performance evaluation?
Re: the EU materials you've added to the post, thank you, I didn't know about this and I can definitely appreciate that it would make defection from the established set of journals more difficult. That said, editorial board defections usually produce journals with similar impact factors to the originals, so it is far from an insuperable barrier.
At any rate, my original comments seem to apply to countries like the US and UK that dominate in research. Academics there have the power to stop serving paywall-and-overcharge academic publishing corporations. We know this, because they sometimes do, and those that do are often successful. But most choose not to.
Your chain of comments sounds naive and presumptuous to me. What does it exactly mean for the US and UK to "dominate" in research, and in which areas? How are only their research "meaningful" while the others aren't? How exactly do the academics "have the power" and what are the concrete instances where they are successful in doing so especially in non-CS fields? Feels like you're more talking out of vastly simplistic assumptions and imaginations than actual facts.
> At any rate, my original comments seem to apply to countries like the US and UK that dominate in research.
Not really, at least not anymore. Depending on which metrics you choose to look at[1], China currently leads research output, and by a long stretch, over the US.
Meanwhile, within the EU Germany outperforms the UK by a considerable margin, and both India and Japan outperform the UK as well.
The UK fares even worse in papers-per-capita, ranking between the Czech Republic and Portugal.
> Academics there have the power to stop serving paywall-and-overcharge academic publishing corporations. We know this, because they sometimes do, and those that do are often successful. But most choose not to.
Don't get me wrong, it's possible to overthrow the likes of Elsevier. The current push for public-access research is a significant step to eliminate the stranglehold these companies have on research output by abusing copyright laws. However, unlike the initial claim, this is no easy feat nor straight-forward.
China does produce some very interesting computing-related papers FWIW. The few times I've been able to get an english version (or to have one translated) I was not under the impression they were qualitatively significantly worse than from any other place. Arguably that isn't hard because most papers in the field are absolute garbage, but I don't go into a paper expecting that to be the case.
> Nobody who knows anything of the content of the research underlying those metrics takes this seriously.
To be very charitable in my interpretation, your personal assertion is simply presumptuous and outright wrong. China outright dominates research in some key fields[1], and in some fields it's outright impossible to search through topics without getting search hits from china.
Yep...the point is still valid though. Technically, scientific publishing is easy to replace by a sound solution. Yet, politically, it's so hard. Think also to all the students that fully realize that before commiting seriously to academia. They either leave in disgust or start to play along. The death of A. Schwartz moved me a lot during my Phd. But my supervisor forbade me to publish in a public solution based on post review only saying that it would threaten our lab reputation. I am not sure I would have stayed in academia even if the system was less ugly (nb I was in cognitive psychology), but I am fully certain that I would have been much more happy there with a better system.
Kudos to her, she's a hero. But that can only be done by someone working outside of the (western?) legal system. That is not a lifestyle for everyone. We can't blame average scientists for not being like her.
The law needs to change to require public access, so that her effort isn't needed.
> Have you ever outcompeted a cartel that has 100 years and billions of dollars on you? Me neither. Maybe it's possible, but it's certainly neither easy nor as simple as you suggest.
Been there, done that! In the 90s, very few believed that Free Software / Open Source could ever become what it is today. I was (a super tiny) part of it. It was hard and took long, for sure. But possible it was.
I'd love to see a similar movement in the academic world.
While this is cool and sort of topical, in the 90s there for sure was not a software cartel that had existed for hundreds of years. We can know this because it simply wasn't a thing for that long at that time :)
Strictly speaking you’re right. I mostly intended to highlight the idea that making huge social changes was possible with a lot of collective determination; but still : IBM is only 31 years younger than Elsevier...
> I'd love to see a similar movement in the academic world.
but computer science is an academic discipline, and FOSS didn't emerge from the academy. in fact, inasmuch as Stallman started it, though he could be said to have been in the academy, his actions were somewhat anti the academy.
Since the journals rely so heavily on free labor, why is it so hard to dry that up?
If I worked for a competitor or a supplier that is actively squeezing my employer, during work hours, getting fired would be the absolute minimum I could expect.
Why don't universities impose an explicit "you are not supposed to work for any of those parasites during university-paid time"?
From what I hear, the free labour is drying up. Not so much for ideological reasons, but because there is very little reward for reviewing papers (even though that is a thing that needs to happen).
Because universities don't have an alternative. There are two things to realize about this situation:
1. It occurs because academia is a planned, quasi-socialist economy in which there are no market signals anywhere. However even if you get rid of market economics you still need some way to allocate resources. Weird academia-specific hacks like impact factors are the result: they're basically a form of whuffie-like currency, and are used to replace price signals.
2. Academics could change it because they have tremendous freedom and nobody forces them to organize this way, but they never will, because academia is dominated by people who are very sympathetic to Marxist pseudo-economics [1]. Indeed that's how it justifies its own existence: the value of academia to society is framed in terms of negative assumptions about what market-oriented capitalist research can or will do.
It's easy to illustrate the latter point in this case. The author identifies that their system is screwed up and then blames "chokepoint capitalism". Ah yes. A near totally government funded system has an absurd structure because of too much capitalism.
Wrong. Corporate research doesn't have this set of problems at all. The journal system exists exactly because without capitalism academics have to come up with some alternative, and in a centrally planned economy there's no incentive for that alternative to make sense or be any good. So they've drifted into this situation where third parties sell them an alternative ideologically acceptable pseudo-currency called reputation metrics, because they weren't even capable of setting up their own, and flail around mis-diagnosing their situation. Want to get rid of journals? Sure, no problem. Go work for a private sector R&D lab where papers get published on their website and your career ladder is based on the actual market impact of your work, not the impact-factor of where you publish it.
What an abysmal take. Academia is arguably the one place in modern society where the human drive for curiosity does not need to be tied to some notion of utility. It would be terrible to corrupt this with the introduction of a market. Saying that the problem with academia is a matter of assessing “market impact” is missing the point entirely. First and foremost, academia should be about advancing our understanding of the world around us. Figuring out potential applications of this knowledge is a secondary goal, best left to engineers and researchers at companies whose role it is to extract profit from scientific knowledge.
Academia should be about many noble and idealistic things. What it's actually about is producing as many publishable papers as possible, many of which will turn out on close inspection to be nonsensical, non-replicable, waffle, statements of the obvious or outright loopy ideological rants. Having read lots of research papers in recent years, I feel very strongly that the ones that were worth it came overwhelmingly from corporate labs, or sometimes collaborations between universities and corporate labs. Purely academic papers tend to have an extremely low ROI for reading them, and that's ignoring the research that is outright deceptive or fraudulent!
Planned economies very inefficiently produce crap. That was one of the big lessons of the 20th century. We have a planned economy for research and not surprisingly there's lots of dysfunctionality, like the work being published in ways that mean its own authors can lose the ability to read it. It's not a morally defensible system really, which is why so many defenses of it are vague appeals to the idea that academics are somehow purer intellects than everyone else. They aren't.
I share the sentiment of your post but as an academic, I think you are wrong and the OP is right.
The older academic generations have literally built this system and then no point to it as inherent and unable to be changed. They point to socially constructed parts of our faculty experience and claim that it 'is'. It is the truest example of stupid smart people I have ever experienced. it is fundamentally, laziness and self-interest. They complain about the system that they built - they complain about administrators, who are all either faculty or people brought in to do things faculty complained about doing or turned out to be wildly bad at.
I'll give a couple specific examples:
1) Faculty development offices - faculty complain ENDLESSLY about faculty development offices and programs and staff. They feel they are interfering with The reality is they were created for a bunch of reasons - largely because the many faculty had stopped investing time in mentoring their peers, and when that did happen it was often wildly sexist and racist. So it got replaced with people trained to do the job well, overseen by faculty. Much of there work is on teaching faculty to teach - because faculty doing the hiring don't bother to evaluate candidates on that core competency. Now the faculty complain about 'bloat' and about the documentation that is generated.
2) IT - I worked at an institution where the faculty senate basically called a meeting to lambast the head of IT because the laptop specification suggested for students couldn't do [thing]. The head of IT shared the history of his office...it had been a faculty member's job (they had a teaching release to do the work) and no one wanted to do it, so they hired someone and setup a faculty oversight board, then they couldn't get any faculty to participate, so then they stopped the oversight board and just sent a survey of needs to all the faculty, they got almost no responses. So the IT person did their best. Faculty had control, complained about the work, and then complained that they weren't consulted.
In prior generations, tenure and academic freedom were tools that enabled faculty to work collaboratively and collegially to run a good university. Several generations of faculty have transformed tenure into a reward for doing lots of research. Unsurprisingly, once it became a reward rather than a tool it gets abused...and faculty fight so hard for things that serve themselves at the expense of the university that they find themselves standing on the outside, in the cold, with their trophy, and presume someone is out to get them.
I have no wish to invalidate the frustrations and concerns you have with the faculty at your institution, but I hope you realize they are just that: concerns with the faculty at your institution.
The small university I work at has faculty who are quite the opposite. They push for faculty development, and for support for the staff who support them.
I suspect that part of the difference is that this is a small university—basically a liberal arts college with a vestigial graduate program—while I'm guessing the institution you describe is a larger one.
I think you are right, although I'll note that I'm speaking from experience at three institutions now (two large, one small).
I would highlight small liberal arts colleges as absolutely different. From working at a number of 'top ranked' (sorry...vomit) STEM focused institutions, my kid will be significantly coaxed towards a small liberal arts college no matter what they are interested in pursuing professionally.
"there's no incentive for academics to save the taxpayer money by handling publishing themselves."
They could also build the labs themselves, grow their food themselves, where does this end?
The taxpayer's representatives couldn't spend two days thinking through where and how they are going to store and sort data coming out of the research they are funding. Well, someone did it for them (not even particularly well) and is now laughing on the way to the bank. Mind you, it's not like the researchers get a share of the profits, so your critique is very unfair.
None of these journals even bother storing the actual data that came out of the research, so that you could check it statistically.
> They could also build the labs themselves, grow their food themselves, where does this end?
Professors can't build labs but they already run journals. They just don't care to take control from companies like Elsevier because they don't care who can access their research beyond other academics who might cite them or their tenure committee. Even though the barrier is very small, and the benefit to the public large, there is a lack of incentive to go over it.
> Mind you, it's not like the researchers get a share of the profits, so your critique is very unfair.
Of course they don't profit. They just don't care if the public is being overcharged for access to research the public paid for. They don't care that they could change that by putting forth a modest effort. I don't see how that's an unfair assessment.
Which part is modest effort? Creating an open access high impact journal, or choosing to take the funding hits associated with lower impact publishing?
And once they climb that ladder, academics who reach prestigious journal positions very consistently choose not to rock the boat, even though they hold all the cards. I think that says a lot about academia at large.
It's hard to overstate how tired the entire argument is.
Doctorow feels like tweetstorms are an acceptable means of getting communication across (yikes), so maybe some things are just unbridgable.
HN sounds like cranks about this. In my podunk region 2 school I have access to all the journals I want, always have as a student. I rarely need that because it's easier to Google Scholar and then just grab the paper off of someone's site, which pretty mch everyone does these days.
Some of the commenters here could have written a phd in the last decade about this topic but I don't think it's the massive stopper of progress that people think it is.
Billions of dollars! Wish we didn't have to bust my ass to get a portion of that, but keep beating up on the academics.
> HN sounds like cranks about this. In my podunk region 2 school I have access to all the journals I want, always have as a student.
Perhaps you are in computer science. As long as we're trading anecdotes, I went to one of the top universities in my country. I regularly came across articles that were not accessible from large professional societies such as IEEE, ACS, and SPIE. Now I work in a hospital, and they don't have subscriptions to anything non-medical! I have to go through sci-hub for access to my own papers!
It sounds like to me to advance this debate, people could provide examples of journals that are regularly cited and their papers aren't easily accessible in some way.
All of these journals' articles are sometimes available, especially for very highly cited articles, but not consistently.
Medical research is often found on some NIH website though. The NIH has their shit together. I think they make everyone publish open access in addition to whatever journal they submit to.
I know that is a single article and I get your larger point. It's very much a field by field issue, in my field (I've been told it isn't a real science by HN, so no thanks sharing), I can't imagine me or the profs I know taking people seriously if they aren't making their stff available.
I work in the social sciences where we have lots of overlap with other social sciences, stats, and data science, machine learning.
Those are the domains I know and in those domains anyone born after 1970 knows that if they want to distribute their work they put it on their site or a number of free archives.
As I said, you're probably in a more quant-oriented subfield like economics. Ask your colleagues in field biology, or physical chemistry, or anything less quant/CS/stats/data/tech-flavored.
Nah. The editorial board of Nature could start their own open-access journal tomorrow, hosted on the arXiv or ResearchOne, and tell everyone that this is the real Nature they should submit to. And if most academics cared about the public having affordable access to research, they'd treat that new journal as the real Nature, impact factor and all. They just don't care. Not their wallets being squeezed.
It's like, could Google change their domain name? Sure, it'd be a bit of a thing, but if they wanted to, they could and most people would follow them to the new domain.
We know this is possible because some math journals where the board is passionate about open access have already done it.
Prestige journals like Nature don't work in the same way as academic journals. Their editors are full-time employees who did a PhD and often had some postdoc experience before leaving the academia for the publishing industry.
Usually people don't need to get research articles. this is differ to people on HN, usually people will not "do their research", and government will ask university offer science services. so they don't hurt public benefits.
> They just don't care if the public is being overcharged for access to research the public paid for.
I'm sorry, but this is just flat-out false. I personally know a number of academics who hate Elsevier, and one of the standard pieces of advice for students trying to get access to articles locked behind paywalls is to simply email the authors, because they will almost always send you a copy free of charge.
It’s easy: not publishing in recognised journals with a decent editorial board and good referees leads to my papers not being read. You say that I choose to publish there and you are partially right, in the same way that I choose to have a job and to eat.
I do my part and put all the accepted manuscript for my articles that are not in an open access journal on a public repository (and ResearchGate). This is already a condition to get public funding, as it should be. I still cannot not publish in some subscription-based journals.
I agree that individual academics can't change the system. But any given editorial board has it within its power to cut the publisher out of the deal and go open access. When they do, they are often successful. But mostly they choose not to try.
That's not even the only alternative. There are lots, even if universities simply stopped publishing in journals entirely.
1. Academic promotions could be decided internally based on their own evaluation of the research quality, instead of by reference to external decisions.
2. Papers could be sold via the universities own website.
3. University departments could produce their own "journals" that consist only of their own papers and ask people who believe in the universities brand to subscribe to that.
4. Universities could instead patent everything they come up with and allocate promotions based on accrued patent revenue, with the papers being essentially readable adverts for the patent licensing programme,
etc. There are lots of ways to incentivize good research that don't involve journals at all.
The academics could easily solve this by publishing elsewhere. Of course that would require researchers to be judged by something other that impact factor.
At an extreme it’s like saying the Nobel Prize committee is a scam - they offer nothing of value beyond prestige yet scientists are beholden to try and impress them.
To me this is just people trying to have their cake and eat it too - they want prestigious journals to publish in, but they also want them to be free (for author and public) and easier to publish in.
In some areas of math the editorial team has defected for precisely the reasons Doctorow states and founded their own journal. The old journal just recruits a new team and keeps on trucking on the strength of its name. Some academics start submitting to the new journal out of agreement with the mission of freeing publishing, but a lot keep submitting to the old journal because they don't care or even know if the public is being fleeced. The end result is two journals.
True. But realize that's per prize, not per participant. Especially in the sciences, this prize is more often given to two or three people, who share the prize money.
Yes, the problem is one of collective action. A single, pre-tenure faculty member would be taking a significant risk to publish only in open-access venues. Thus, they don't, and the cycle continues.
I don't think the choice is between a commercial publisher and open access venues. In fact, open access options are typically my least favorite, because they charge the authors to publish. Maybe the initial idea was good, but the term seems to be co-opted by publishers to basically mean "pay thousands of dollars to publish."
Since I was a student, I've decided as a matter of principle never to submit to either, and been able to follow that principle all the way through tenure. Though I don't discourage external collaborators from submitting papers to those places, as this principle is more about my or my group's papers.
Luckily, there's a couple other options that are very satisfying (and actually most common) in my subfield and most of CS: non-profit society publishers (e.g. ACM/IEEE), or self-publishing (arXiv or your own homepage). I've done both for each of my papers, and haven't felt like I missed anything. I've also declined reviewing for commercial publishers for a while now, and it makes me very happy to have a great excuse to decline.
I am also in CS. My impression is that the situation in CS is different than that in other fields (better). The only publications in commercial venues I have have been with collaborators from areas outside of CS, in journals in their areas.
This is almost a textbook case of prisoner's dilemma, a psychology/game theory 101 student would know it isn't easy. Pretty shocking such a comically naive argument is upvoted to the top.
It's worse than a prisoner's dilemma. In a prisoner's dilemma, if both parties cooperate, then they get a higher joint reward. But when some academics cooperate to do something like make a new journal, they don't get any reward in terms of tenure/promotions, which depend 99% on publications in high quality venues as assessed by university-level entities and external reviewers.
> It would be a scam, except academics could easily disrupt it and they (mostly) choose not to.
Oh really? Tell me more about how I can publish in journals with low or nonexistanet (conventional) impact factors and still meet my department’s promotion criteria, or convince an NIH review panel that my publication has high impact, visibility, and citation metrics.
Your post presupposes that the solution is so simple when in fact the whole system is perversely incentivized, tragedy of the commons style, and that there isn’t some game theory all locking us in to place.
Downvoted, as others noted, for the naivety of "could easily disrupt it".
Upvoted for "Public domain publishing should be a condition of government funding for research", which I agree (and kinda contradicts the previous point, if the gvmt should intervene it means it's not so "easy")
It is a coordination problem. I have lots of friends in academia, and they all have to publish in specific journals otherwise their research doesn't count toward tenure and promotion. They can scream that it's unfair, but if they don't publish in those journals, they literally lose their jobs, and somebody willing to publish in those journals will be hired.
Who writes the rules dictating which journals count? Can we just use legislation to make public and public-funded universities allow open access journals?
In general, academics will care about the rules imposed by funding agencies i.e. the politicians which want an evaluation that Elsevier et al somehow fulfill. If the funding agencies would say that an open access journal "counts" as much as Nature, that would be a big change, but they don't.
> Can we just use legislation to make public and public-funded universities allow open access journals?
Yes, in many countries legislation requires that some form of open access is used. As with FOIA or GDPR or other legislation which requires people disclose information it is not practical to go around arresting and jailing thousands of admin staff every week day for not complying, so you're dependant upon a cultural shift in society.
However, of course the for-profit journals will lobby to have the rules drafted in a way that permits them to continue to exist, even if they must make some sacrifices.
For example, "Green Open Access" versus "Gold Open Access". The latter requires publication in an Open Access journal, but the former just requires that the for-profit journal not unduly prevent the authors from archiving their own papers, perhaps under an embargo and with copyright permanently devoted to the journal publisher.
In practice, the reality before Open Access but after the Internet was available to academics is that you could get a "pre-publication draft" of more or less any paper by contacting the author. Of course, to know you want the paper is difficult if you can't read the journals everybody is publishing in. So Green Open Access satisfies the obvious technical requirement that if I hear about Professor Smith's breakthrough in Vulcan Unicorn Steel I can go read the paper without paying Elsevier a pile of cash, but doesn't really free Vulcan Unicorn Metal research from funding Elsevier. Smith's peers read about it in the Elsevier journal their institutions pay $$$ to receive copies of and that's how I heard it's a breakthrough.
Definitely no malice. You could start an open-access journal and claim that it will be as selective and prestigious as Nature. But where are your initial papers going to come from? Can you get enough people to submit their Nature-level paper to your journal?
It's not malice. Academics just lack interest in improving a system when that improvement doesn't immediately benefit them.
There are much more difficult coordination problems that people are at least making some progress on, like fighting climate change. This is because a lot of people care about not letting the planet overheat, including the powerful. But academics largely don't care if their research is easily accessible to anyone who isn't citing them or on their tenure committee.
There’s a burgeoning open access movement. Arguably successful, but let’s not act like people aren’t trying. Not to mention preprint servers and various other “nod and wink” mechanisms scientists use to free their own work.
> It's more that the taxpayer is fleeced by academia in general (the whole research-funding-publishing complex) for many billions because there's no incentive for academics to save the taxpayer money by handling publishing themselves.
The scam goes further. Most of published papers are basically of no interest to nobody, or nobody except the few uberspecialists in a given field, which intend to use them as input for producing more papers of the same kind. We're paying billions to produce literally useless knowledge.
In the past, there was always hope that the scientists can stumble upon breakthorughs in their work, but in today's environment, everybody has to derisk their research to stay in the game - so that's not going to happen. It's hard to tell why we do continue with a lot of research exactly. One of the arguments I heard was that the knowledge is mostly in the heads of practitioners (i.e. it's impossible to recreate state of the art based on just papers and textbooks alone), so we always want to have a few experts around in case the knowledge is needed in the future. In this model, the scientists are predominantly custodians of existing knowledge and not creators of new one.
> academics could easily disrupt it and they (mostly) choose not to
They could do it easily if they acted collectively. Individuals attempting to break free simply hurt themselves. Unfortunately, in the history of humanity collective action across a group containing tens of thousands of people, most complete strangers, has never been easy.
I do agree the government should get involved as that's one of the main benefits of government: having a way to enforce collective action.
While I take the point, and support dismantling the power structures within academic publishing, it's not helpful to dismiss the effort required as "easy".
The pressures that are brought to bear within academia are extreme, including financial, reputational, professional, and more. This produces major incentives to work within the system. I'm not defending this, just pointing out the reality of the situation.
The true disruption would be to get rid of the "journal" format. Of maybe even the article format.
Academic reviews seem to be a bad joke most of the time. Either you have "Reviewer 2" picking at straws to try and find issues with the paper, at the same time some reviewers let complete crap through.
There are improvements here and there but mostly punctual.
In fact academics often put their work online freely. But funding sources press them to also publish in journals in order to satisfy their selection criteria
One of the last papers I "published" when I was in academia I just uploaded to Arxiv. I was so disenfranchised with research/academia that I didn't make the effort to polish the manuscript to submit ot to a peer reviewed journal.
This paper had 9 citations the last time I checked. Which I found pleasant.
The fact that publishing on the arXiv works so well, even with minimal institutional support or prestige, just goes to show how very possible it is to do all publishing free and open-access. There's just no incentive for anyone in this system to stop fleecing the taxpayer.
Funding agencies (which are generally controlled by government, not academia) could easily set the standard to be e.g. no subscription and $500 publishing fee (feel free to replace $500 with a reasonable amount, I think $500 is excessive, but it's much lower than current rates), as shown by the slow switch to Open Access, which has been driven by them.
This indeed! In the US the fed government wastes massive amounts of grant money covering excessive publishing and open access fees. This could easily be restricted to a small max per article that must be accepted by any journal grant funded results will be published in. The journals would adapt.
>It would be a scam, except academics could easily disrupt it and they (mostly) choose not to.
This is such bullshit. It's a scam. There is not qualification.
If you think there are academics involved (make your case, provide evidence) they are in on the scam. It is still a scam. It remains a scam if your dog could stop it and chose not to. It remains a scam if Donald Trump. It remains a scam if Joe Biden.
Go apportion blame for it all you like and it's a scam. The publishers perpetrating the scam are going to hell. Hopefully here on earth. Hopefully soon.
> It would be a scam, except academics could easily disrupt it and they (mostly) choose not to.
Not only is your personal assertion wrong, its complete lack of understanding and awareness, coupled with the degree of arrogance and presumption, shows its patently and shockingly wrong.
Without going into details, keep in mind that in academia there's this thing dubbed "publish or perish", and the only publishing that counts is the one being done in established publications with a history of high impact factor. The journals that count are specified by rules and regulations, which are often defined in legislation and comprised of a whitelist of established, often historical, and well-regarded journals.
So unless your journal is already in the list and has a high impact factor, the whole world is pressured to not publish their A-game work in them. This leads to a feedback loop where incumbents are kept at the top of these metrics due to the fact that they are the only one that can receive works that count, and conversely no one who seeks to finish a PhD or secure tenure or get funding will waste their hard work on publications that do not count.
Then there are other factors, like prestige. Everyone wishes to be invited to be a reviewer of, say, Nature, but no one wants wo waste their time reviewing publications to Bob's journal.
It takes far more to put together a journal than a 5$/month instance in the cloud and an afternoon hacking WordPress.
There is no need for this issue to be "solved" per se. Academia can keep up the charade with journals if it needs to, as long as the rest of us can obtain papers via SciHub, this grey status quo serves all parties just fine.
All it takes is some influential university systems to put together an open access system or adopt an existing one and mandate their staff use it. Corporate U unfortunately has more pressing concerns than the academic process.
I reviewed a submission (review paper) to a top journal recently. It took a lot of time, and I responded with seven pages of recommendations, comments, and corrections. My recommendation was to transfer it to a more specialist journal from the same publisher. Afterwards I was wondering "why the hell am I doing this for free when my friends are getting rich?"
I also just reviewed a massive review article. Just thoroughly reading through it once and noting what I thought the main issues were took several hours. Writing up my comments took a few more. It ended up being rejected for publication. By the end I wasn't quite sure why I participated. I don't work for a university; I work for a small company and it certainly isn't part of my paid work! I guess I view it as a certain professional responsibility (almost like jury duty is), but it doesn't really scale well.
Yeah, I take it as a professional or civic duty. I'm a junior professor, and am currently not getting paid while I wait until I can return to my campus. Covid has done a number on my lab, so I don't have a suitable grad student to help me at the moment. The company who publishes the journal makes plenty of money ...
Sounds like the old scam: "Your child could be in this years edition of Who's Who of Bumfuck County, TN" for only $120 ($200 even and you get a copy of the book, too)
“Exposure.” That’s what we tell interns and wannabe artists when we give them unpaid jobs or use their work for free. And that has become kind of frowned upon as of the last 5 years, so perhaps should doing massive amounts of work for free for a non-free-access publication.
> "why the hell am I doing this for free when my friends are getting rich?"
If you're employed as a researcher, then it's (implicitly) a paid part of your job to review papers. We all contribute to the community so that we give and taken equally.
Someone who is taking peer-review but not giving any is being very selfish.
You do realize that modern academic journals with these peer reviews didn't exist until pretty recently? Science doesn't need them, you can review papers publicly and actually contribute to the community, but instead these publishers convinced scientists that the publisher is the science instead of the other way around.
Read Nature's original mission statement, does this sound like the publisher we know today?
> It is intended, FIRST, to place before the general public the grand results of Scientific Work and Scientific Discovery; and to urge the claims of Science to a more general recognition in Education and in Daily Life; and, SECONDLY, to aid Scientific men themselves, by giving early information of all advances made in any branch of Natural knowledge throughout the world, and by affording them an opportunity of discussing the various Scientific questions which arise from time to time.
But isn’t the “value” of a journal in the supposed quality of its publications? And the strength of its review process is a highly influential in maintaining that quality?
If so, I’d say the publisher definitely is exploiting academics for free review.
I am not sure this is the case - My job is to perform and disseminate research to the community. To do this I submit my research to a journal, and my employer pays for them to review and edit it.
Nowhere in my job prescription nor when I submit to the journal it is stated that I am expected to review, and I do not view it as my moral obligation to review. If there is a shortage of reviewers, I am sure journals will start paying them (as they should).
I actually think it’s fine BUT ONLY for open access or free access journals. If you already have enough wage to live, it’s good to do work for free that directly contributes to the public good. But NOT if the output is captured by a toll-extorter that makes a buck primarily just by keeping it from being freely available to the overall public.
I’ve decided right now to never do free review for a journal that isn’t also free.
Contribute back at least as much reviewing as you consume. For example if you submit one paper and get five reviews, contribute back at least five reviews.
Or do you think you should get reviews without contributing anything back?
At the most basic level, a junior author will not be invited to be a peer-reviewer until they have published several papers. A proportion of academics leave academia before they are invited to review other papers. This means there process has "debt" built in. It's the academic version of "original sin".
Regardless, it's still nonsense even if the original sin is repaid. There is no meaningful way in which the pressure to give free labour is bounded. You insinuate that it's balanced: the amount you withdraw should be equal to the amount you deposit. There are absolutely no forces that promote this or enable it; instead, all forces protect the incumbent power structures.
You pose a false dichotomy, using the frankly hackneyed "or did you think...?" followed by some baseless suggestion of my expectations. This final question not only doesn't follow from my previous comment, it's so far off track that it "isn't even wrong".
But this is all splitting hairs. The process is bankrupt. I stand by my previous points.
The taxpayer pays for most of this stuff. They already paid for all of it by providing the salaries of the researchers and the reviewers. Now the rent-seeking publishers want to charge them all an additional toll.
Nah. Reviews tend to cost thousands of $CURRENCY as part of the publishing costs, while reviewers give their personal time, thereby losing cash and/or time.
Which (taking the peer-review but not giving it) is what is done by most established scientists. Thoughtful reviews are much more likely to be delivered by early-career scientists (post-doc, mostly, since Assistant Professors are very time-constrained). Being selfish in academia is an evolutionarily stable strategy.
Why is it not explicitly part of a researcher's job?
You know how we know your claim isn't true? If an employed researcher says "no" to a review request, there are no negative job consequences.
I've not heard of employers keeping track of how many papers each employee has reviewed, much less using that information in promotion or bonus schemes.
While I have heard of employers using the employee's number of published papers that way.
When you apply for a promotion and they ask what your community service has been and you say you haven’t done any you’re not going to be in a good position if you work at the same kind of institutions as most junior researchers.
How would an employer verify that I'm telling the truth that I've peer reviewed 35 papers?
Let's say I take 15 hours to review a paper, making detailed notes, and over multiple revisions. Which I've done.
Let's say my co-worker reviews 10 papers taking one hour total, each with "looks good to me."
How does my employer determined which is appropriate "community service"?
You know how much @$%@*$% crap I get in my email asking to be a reviewer for junk journals from fields completely outside of mine? And that's in addition to requests mostly in my field for topics I am not qualified to peer review.
How does my employer know I'm not inflating my "community service" through worthless volunteering?
> How does my employer determined which is appropriate "community service"?
Research is a small community. Within your field most people know each other and know who's contributing reviews and who isn't. If someone's being a jerk in the community everyone knows about it.
I've been in my field for 20 years. I only know a handful of people who are contributing reviews.
(Some have have told me told me directly, regarding a specific paper they reviewed. Some refuse to be anonymous in their reviews.)
It's not just "being a jerk". There's a whole range of network effects which also confound the issue.
Suppose I am the world experts on $SPECIALIZED_TOPIC, but it isn't a hot topic, and only three people in the world publish in the area. I'm a reviewer on all ten papers published on $TOPIC in a year.
Suppose my co-worker works in $DEEP_AI_TOPIC, with thousands of papers published per month, and reviews 100 papers in a year.
How does my employer weigh information about our respective peer review contributions?
Or, suppose my co-worker and I are equally competent, but my co-worker was in grad school with the editor, so the editor is more likely to send papers to my co-worker.
Also, the industry researchers I know tell me their respective employers have increasingly de-emphasized community service, including in conference organization, where there's no issue of anonymity.
While dbcooper's comment mentions "No one cares", I believe that's specifically that employers don't care.
I believe that because dbcooper's comment was in response to your previous comment 'When you apply for a promotion and they ask ...' and your earlier 'If you're employed as a researcher...'.
No one disagrees with the anodyne statement that "people care". I know people who are not employed (eg, retired) and do peer review even though there is no possible career advancement involved.
This meme of simplifying it down to a problem of individual personal responsibility, though, strikes me as being a lot like the "rational agent" simplification in economics. It's commonsense, easy to understand, elegant, and completely fails to line up with how things actually work in the real world.
It's kind of like climate change, there's only so far that individual responsibility goes.
If you want to make a proper difference there would need to be a huge amount of legislation, and regulation. That doesn't stop people making choices about what fuel powers their car, or whether or not to recycle.
Sure there will always be someone willing to do it. But since you got hired and they didn’t, you are presumably better at it than they would be. So if you quit for ethical reasons, your unethical replacement won’t be as good. Thus the effectiveness of the unethical company is reduced, and eventually the level of employees would fall so low the company couldn’t operate at all.
I guess we all make choices about the kind of work we do. If enough devs feel it's not something they can support, the co wouldn't be able to do whatever the thing is.
I am an accountant, so can and have been put in ethically dubious situations. I couldn't have known beforehand, but once I did, I chose to move on. But where the facts are apparent before, I can just choose not to do that work.
Amazon were recently hiring for finance roles near me. I chose not to apply on ethical grounds. Will they miss me? Probably not. If no one worked in finance because of ethical concerns, then they may have a problem...
It's not assuming that moral values correlate with skill, it's assuming that if skill is evenly distributed (independent of moral values) then intentional selections of the highest skill from a larger pool will tend to be better than the same from a smaller pool.
I think the real bad assumption is that the sum of individual employee skills correlates with corporate success. The larger the company, the more corruption and economies of scale swamp skill. FAANG products consistently get worse for users as time goes on, and any skill becomes focused on exploiting scale, lobbying, and holes in regulation.
Your little company with skillful employees that build up a great reputation will eventually be purchased or regulated out of existence. Skill may be enough to overcome your competitor's monopoly advantages, but the gap between what your ethics are keeping you from doing and aren't keeping your competitor from doing put you at a double disadvantage.
Even worse, giving up makes you a multi-millionaire and allows you to join the monopolist club (or just retire, if you want.) Powering on until bankruptcy makes you an Uber driver.
As much as I hate the copyright model used by the scientific journals, they do have a valid raison-d-etre. It's about prioritization due to limited capacity. If you artificially limit the number of published articles to X per month, you are forced to pick X best ones (according to whichever metric you choose). If you just publish anything that gets a decent peer review score, you'll get voting rings, generated articles, and all sorts of junk.
Has anybody noticed how the quality of journalism plummeted with the transition from physical copies (that had an implied limit on the number of articles) to the online "portals" (that are incentivized to churn out as much clickbait as possible)?
That said, the financial streams should go the other way. Pay a non-refundable fee to get considered for publishing, but otherwise if it's a tax-funded research, it must be public domain.
That’s not how it really works in many fields. Most of CS doesn’t care about journals, just conferences, and physics and other hard sciences rely primarily on the arXiv. Meritocracy survives just fine without journals.
I would love to see journal editors transition into more of a "curatorial" role. Journals as publishing outlets don't need to exist anymore. The arXiv and other preprint services (e.g., Open Science Framework) have solved the online publishing part of the equation. But you're right -- when anyone can publish anything, the bar gets really low, really fast. Journals could still play a valuable role as curators, by (a) providing peer review, and (b) creating curated lists of arXiv/OSF papers that meet their standards and interests. I really feel like what's missing are the second-layer solutions on top of arXiv that help to sift through the massive amounts of information -- that can include recommendation algorithms, but it could also include the experts that currently serve as editors for major journals. We don't need to cut out journals, we need to cut out the for-profit publishers.
Hmm, I used to work for Nature Publishing Group (now Springer Nature) and we absolutely did a bunch of work to print and get everyone their Nature subscriptions. While the actual research and review is done by others, there’s some work left in putting it in the right journals/issues, formatting it and distributing it.
Is that worth assigning the copyright for? Probably not, but the fact that publishers are paid for their role doesn’t seem too bad. It’s just the payment model is messed up. There was some movement towards open access though, where all the cost of distribution is just carried by an up-front lump sum (that can come from the researchers grant, I assume).
On top of that there’s a bunch of initiatives inside Nature at least that were funded by the income from other sources, and those are publicly available (I was working on the natureindex).
> Springer Nature Group is the single largest publisher of scholarly journals, with about 3,000 titles. In terms of revenues, however, Springer is second to Elsevier with estimated journal revenues of €1.150/$1.333 billion (30% of Springer’s reported 2017 revenues of €1.64/$1.9 billion, in fact, derive from the sale of books). Its operating profit margin of 22.8% is also well below Elsevier’s 36.8%.
That is to say, after they pay all the staff, including well-paid executives, and other expenses of putting out a journal, plus pay for other initiatives that are, as you say, funded by charging universities for access to the research created by their own employees, on top of all that there's around $300 million in profit (directly or indirectly benefiting shareholders).
(Btw, average profit margin for popular press publishing is around 12%, vs 22% for Springer or 36% for Elsevier).
To get a more accurate picture, you should be adding executive salaries to the profit figure. They don't contribute anything more than stockholders do, so amount to parasites feeding off profits.
> there’s some work left in putting it in the right journals/issues,
Who cares about issues? I can't remember the issue number for any journal article I've ever read, nor what other articles showed up in the same issue. The issue number is just a meaningless line in my bibtex file.
This was important back when journals were distributed by print. It isn't now.
My experience with academic publishers, including Springer, is that their involvement has made my work strictly worse, in direct proportion to how much they have been involved.
I work in a field ancillary to scholarly publishing, as a super-aggregator of published scholarly articles, and our systems are reliant on the concept of an "issue" as a primary key to group articles. With some of these older industries, it's reasonable to assume their systems were built to fit domain models that predate the conception of online-first publication (and the deprecation of "issues").
> Hmm, I used to work for Nature Publishing Group (now Springer Nature) and we absolutely did a bunch of work to print and get everyone their Nature subscriptions. While the actual research and review is done by others, there’s some work left in putting it in the right journals/issues, formatting it and distributing it.
More, less, or the same amount of work than the publishers of Model Train Enthusiast Monthly have to do?
I always thought a simple solution to this would be to have the knowledge made open source if it was government funded in any way at all. That would be the big game changer.
The same should apply to medications. A lot of medication R&D is funded by the NIH at public universities, but private corporations get to patent the fruit of that research and charge Americans exorbitant amounts of money for them while enjoying government-enforced monopolies.
Good luck turning academic research into a mass manufactured product that is known to be both safe and effective without the billions of dollars of investment pharmaceutical companies put into doing that.
If you want to go into what the money does, you have to look at the drug approval requirements. The public demands, through regulatory agencies, very thorough, elaborate, and expensive clinical trials to prove safety and efficacy of all drugs. Somebody has to pay for that - both for the drugs that do succeed and make it to market, and also for all of the trials for drugs that people thought would work but turned out not to. This is basically high-stakes gambling, and the pharma companies need to make the money back somehow on the drugs that do get approved to make the whole system work. Gambling like this is risky, and any sane investor would want a pretty impressive return when they win in exchange for taking the risk of the loss.
If you don't have a solution for that, it rings rather hollow to complain about how evil the pharma companies supposedly are when they are only responding to the incentives that we created for them.
My statement is consistent with my belief that most drug research and development is a public good, and should be treated as such. Drugs shouldn't live or die based on whether companies think they that bringing them to market will generate windfalls for shareholders or not. I don't mind the state shouldering most of that responsibility, instead, for the benefit of the public.
The fact is, bringing a drug to market safely is a lot of work. All organizations respond to incentives, both corporations and governments. You can say it would be nice for the Government to do that work, but what is the incentive? In practice, most bureaucracies respond to incentives like individual actors minimizing their actual work and attempting to gain promotions. The practical incentives don't align very well with the work and risk associated with drug development. What bureaucrat wants to authorize the effort for a series of huge clinical trials for an experimental medication - they have a downside for failure, but not much upside for success.
This problem aligns far better with capitalism. Companies have incentive to do the work because they stand to make a windfall if they succeed. Governments don't.
I could be wrong of course. How would we test this? Well we have a pretty good free market for this right now - corporations are free to develop new drugs, and so are governments. Corporations develop lots and lots of new drugs at breakneck speeds. Governments by and large don't. Not that they never do, but it's a trickle, relatively speaking. If you want governments to develop more drugs, why not just do that now? Show us all how your solution can work.
The only way to do what you seem to want would be to actively prevent corporations from doing drug development work. So you would be actively preventing new drugs from being developed by organizations that are proven to be able to actually do it in favor of a setup that is demonstrated to work worse. In short, you would be actively making the world a worse place because you have some weird hangup about people making a profit off of something.
In fact much of physics research output is now freely on Arxiv. Doesn’t change the dynamics with journal prestige and securing funding, explained in the tweet thread.
You also want it to be available either for free or "at cost". That is, "open source" is only meaningful after you've received the software. Your solution doesn't prohibit me from requiring you to pay $500,000 to get my research software under the GPL.
Meant that if it was mandated by the government then Wikipedia would maybe accommodate them or other platforms would as well or new ones would be created.
It is not, in fact, required to sign over copyright to even the most "prestigious" journals. All they need is a non-exclusive license to publish. But they will never, ever tell you so.
Universities could help by openly forbidding professors and students from signing over copyright to journals. But they don't.
Leaving aside for-profit publishers, I dont' get what the point of ACM and IEEE is. Those are non-profit bodies and dominate the majority of publishing in CS/EE. Aside from a handful of big venues like NIPS, VLDB, Usenix, almost everything is tied to ACM/IEEE. Why do we need them and what value do they add ? Also, what is a non-profit ? You can keep pumping all the money you make into salaries and other assets that you own. Is that all it takes to be a non-profit?
These societies are run and composed of by academics themselves. In fact, the executive salaries are $0 as far as I know, so it's a volunteer organization.
It's basically how publishing would work if academics take control away from commercial publishers, i.e. the post-disruption publishing arrangement that people in this thread are cheering for. Authors generally have the option to keep the copyright of the papers when publishing for ACM, and at least host the papers on their homepages.
This is a good thing that they dominate CS/EE as they have more reasonable access costs, and many academics no longer have to publish at commercial publishers. It's not completely free because there are real costs to publishing, but it's the best option I can think of for now.
I have no way of verifying this, but clearly the money is going somewhere and it's not publishing.
>It's basically how publishing would work if academics take control away from commercial publishers
arxiv is closer to how publishing would or should work if academics were entirely in charge. Publishing only entails putting a pdf up. All the peer review process is orthogonal which is done for free by everyone involved.
>Authors generally have the option to keep the copyright of the papers when publishing for ACM, and at least host the papers on their homepages.
You do not retain the copyright, and the only permission you get is to share it for classroom use with some other constraints. Authors posting them on their university websites is a grey area that is likely non compliant but it would be really bad PR for ACM to go after such instances. More recently, ACM has started allowing authors to pay some exorbitant fee to make the paper open access.
>This is a good thing that they dominate CS/EE as they have more reasonable access costs
Actually, there isn't really a big difference between the access costs. For most of the world, it's infinite. It doesn't matter if Elsevier is trying to charge $100 for a paper and ACM is trying to charge $30. Or what deals they make with libraries. It's all infinite for anyone not affiliated with a university in a western country.
>It's not completely free because there are real costs to publishing
The amortized cost of putting a pdf on the internet is close to 0. This is already true with arxiv. And even if you do not want to use arxiv, a static website with s3 or the new cloudflare equivalent will cost pennies per pdf.
Sorry for a back-and-forth replies, but I don't want readers to be misled:
> You do not retain the copyright, and the only permission you get is to share it for classroom use with some other constraints. Authors posting them on their university websites is a grey area that is likely non compliant but it would be really bad PR for ACM to go after such instances.
See https://authors.acm.org/author-services/author-rights the options that authors have, including "Authors who prefer to retain copyright of their work can sign an exclusive licensing agreement, which gives ACM the right but not the obligation to defend the work against improper use by third parties."
>> It's not completely free because there are real costs to publishing
> The amortized cost of putting a pdf on the internet is close to 0.
Yes and posting a jpeg on the internet is close to 0, yet AirBnB still charges a fee for their service. The publishing process (including coordinating peer review and development of multiple web apps) has more costs than hosting a pdf. You're welcome to review the non-profit filings for ACM/IEEE if you're genuinely interested in what the money is spent on.
And you're always able to upload your pdf to arXiv regardless of what you do with ACM, "an example of a site ACM authors may post all versions of their work to, with the exception of the final published "Version of Record", is ArXiv" [https://www.acm.org/publications/openaccess]
>Authors who wish to retain all rights to their work can choose ACM's author-pays option, which allows for perpetual open access through the ACM Digital Library
So, this requires the author, and by extension, taxpayers in most cases, to pay a couple of thousand to ACM to put a pdf online. How does this make sense ?
This is the grey area I am talking about. You licensed the rights exclusively to ACM, in perpetuity. In fact, your own publication of the pdf may also be non-compliant, but nobody has sued you as that would be political suicide. Whether you satisfy the personal and classroom requirement is not clear. It is also not clear what agreement you signed with ACM. And you certainly cannot publish this under a different license because
>Please note that the right to assign a CC-BY license to the published Version of Record of the Work requires either the payment of an APC or an affiliation with an institution that participates in the ACM Open program
>Including coordinating peer review and development of multiple web apps) has more costs than hosting a pdf
And this is the crux of the issue. Nobody is compensated for this in the review cycle. So why is the cost of the final product so astronomical ?
>Yes and posting a jpeg on the internet is close to 0, yet AirBnB still charges a fee for their service.
I don't get this argument. AirBnB has a different product. That's why I mentioned the cost of AWS S3 and R2, which is literally what you would pay to host things.
> So, this requires the author, and by extension, taxpayers in most cases, to pay a couple of thousand to ACM to put a pdf online. How does this make sense ?
Tangential, though at a recent SIGPLAN conference, the cost to authors to licence under CC-BY was listed at 400USD. In place was "The article processing charge (APC) is to be paid anyway for all PACMPL articles, and ACM SIGPLAN covers it if you cannot afford it. Your paper will be open access no matter which kind of publishing-rights agreement you choose.".
That said, from what I can tell, most of the main programming languages conferences have far better systems and communities in place than many other fields (a lot of open access, double blind reviews, etc.).
At the very least, I hope that all the top conferences (e.g., the ones in http://csrankings.org/) become open access by default at no additional cost to authors. There are a lot of strange discrepancies even between sister conferences. For example, VLDB is open access, but SIGMOD isn't. It's all the same people in both conferences.
> This is the grey area I am talking about. You licensed the rights exclusively to ACM, in perpetuity. In fact, your own publication of the pdf may also be non-compliant, but nobody has sued you as that would be political suicide
The "Post" section of the page linked by lazyjeff says:
>Otherwise known as "Self-Archiving" or "Posting Rights", all ACM published authors of magazine articles, journal articles, and conference papers retain the right to post the pre-submitted (also known as "pre-prints"), submitted, accepted, and peer-reviewed versions of their work in any and all of the following sites:
> Author's Homepage
> ...
So posting a PDF of the "accepted version" to a personal website is not a "grey area" - it is explicitly permitted by the ACM.
This is the usual situation: authors retain the rights to put the "accepted" version on their homepage. This includes all the changes made in response to reviewer comments, but is formatted by the author rather than the publisher.
Unless they have selected an open-access option (which usually requires paying a fee), they typically do not have the rights to post the "publisher formatted" version. However, in fields like CS the submitted version is usually produced using a LaTeX template for the journal so looks very similar to the publisher-formatted version; the main differences are often things like the journal name and page numbers written in the headers and footers.
For lazyjeff's example, you can compare the version on his homepage [1] with the version on the ACM DL [2], and see that they look quite similar, but one obvious difference is the formatting of the last page: in the author-formatted version, the left column fills the full height of the page, and the right column is shorter; in the published version the left column is shortened so that both columns are the same height.
I maintain that this is a grey area that has not been tested in courts, mainly because ACM would not pursue something like this. In a copyright lawsuit, it is not obvious to me that a judge would agree with your conclusion that slight differences in formatting make it "not the published version". INAL, but to me, the mention of ACM on the paper is itself problematic from a copyright standpoint.
Of course, the larger point I'm making in all this is that this is completely unnecessary and regressive.
I can't say whether or not they are worth it, but they provide some degree of branding, mainly to "adjacent" communities. If I see a paper in IEEE something, I have some degree of assurance that there is a minimum quality level, even if I'm not that familiar with the area.
Also, at least for IEEE, they provide some help with running the conference, publishing the proceedings, etc.
Whether or not they provide value commensurate with their cost is a separate question.
This is a bit like the app store scenario. Sure, if you are a lesser known conference, having ACM/IEEE probably helps you. It really doesn't help any established conference similar to how the Apple store doesn't help Netflix.
It's mind-boggling to me that something as nebulous and tradition-over-proof-oriented as the concept of a "prestigious journal" still gets to be the centerpiece of the functioning of the entire scientific community.
I get that we need some way to measure "scientific success" when awarding grants and tenure, and published articles fit that bill. Which means we need a way to validate "real" journals to avoid abuse.
But the fact that it's something as vague as "prestige" or "respect" that is the defining characteristic of those journals, I don't get that at all, not in this day and age. It's not "has process X, Y and Z in place to make sure their articles are up to snuff" (e.g. "original data is available for independent review"). It's not "has their processes audited by independent agency A". No, it's just "brand value", it's "they've been doing this for a while, and a lot of people believe in them, so we'll just take on faith that whatever they're doing is good enough". How very scientific...
Preach! I really like the idea of post-publication peer review - we need a way to unbundle the different functions that publishers are serving (basic quality checking, filtering based on someone's guess at the ultimate merit/value of the research, archiving, standardized formatting...).
Slightly off topic, but known scammer Robert Maxwell (father of Ghislaine Maxwell) had a major hand in building up the international operations of Springer after WW2 into Pergamon Press (now part of Elsevier).
Lots of posts here from academics saying they need to publish in non open-access journals. I appreciate that. But, a modest proposal: Don't review for non open-access journals. That's really all it would take.
My voluntary time is very scarce. I will not voluntarily give it to someone putting a toll on work done almost entirely without compensation (or to be precise, the toll goes to pay the wage of almost no one but the toll taker… the researchers—who also are reviewers—are paid to do the science and disseminate it to the public, a purpose which is compromised by the toll).
Unfortunately, being a reviewer is also an expected—which is to say, required—part of an academic's career. And depending on the particular field or subfield they're in, there may not be sufficient opportunity to review for open-access journals.
Yes, this is driving the massive proliferation of journals that keep spamming me to publish with them. Never heard of the journal, but there is a USD$2400 fee for 'processing'. It's a good business model, particularly if all your staff are in countries with cheap labour.
The people funding science should cap publication related payments to some nominal sum. Whole swarms of predatory journals would instantly die.
I wonder if there would be a credible way to crowdsource editorial work. Have a journal that anybody can submit to as long as it is reviewed by 5 verifiable peers, or 3 who themselves reach a certain level of credibility (or some other better, similar system). Reviewers would need to accept to basic communications with the journal for verification both of their review and their credentials.
Reviewers who continuously approved poorly received articles would need to be dealt with, but it seems like it could maybe work more generally, and would be relatively easy (although less desirable) for more restricted groups (like limiting participants to a certain group of universities, etc).
It would make for a certain amount of relatively fringe opinions being published, but it might help break the bottleneck, which after the elephant of prestige, is mainly about money to pay for the time of editorial staff.
Peer review really not crowd-sourcable IMO. There is a general argument that an appeal to "free" labour is not sustainable, but it goes beyond that.
At the highest levels of research in your area of specialty there are very few people who can provide useful feedback. These people tend to review each-other's work for the most pertinent facts (yes, somewhat circular but in my experience generally done well with good intention), other reviewers can chime in, but this might only address some of the more general things, like the stats in the method.
Peer review is time-consuming, and you can easily burn-out on it if you accept. A recent journal had the model of "publish for free, just review 2 papers a year". It struggles to make it work.
The only peer review that's relatively easy is when a paper is so terrible you out-right reject it, otherwise it's a lot of work.
Making a stand as a PEER reviewer (I will only review for open-access journals) is not trivial either. At mid-level in your career you have many collaborators, and you're interested in their work, and the work of others in your field, and you want to make contributions. Almost certainly important work will come to you from Elsevier style journals. Almost certainly you'll want to say no, but you'll say yes.
Good journals already have some of these features, private or community driven. E.g. "Quantum Journal" is community driven, and while it lacks polish, it has a fairly functional editorial board. APS journals, which are much more polished (but also require submission and/or subscription fees), have pretty serious internal reviewer database (including editors evaluating the quality of the reviews).
One partial solution: if the paper is academic research primarily funded by the government, it must be posted to the internet and available at no charge to the public. The nih already does something like this.
A variant would be to eliminate copyright on such works. That would take longer to do, but it would allow people to read the results of past work they indirectly paid for. There is no reason that companies like Elsevier, who do not pay for the research, should have exclusive rights to their results.
Just got some peer reviews back on a paper I submitted today --- 2 of the 3 were nonsense and clearly barely read the paper. My faith in peer review falls year over year every time I go through this process. Hard to blame the anti-intellectual crowd after seeing how bullshit the process is 1st hand.
I don't completely disagree (although I feel like there have been a lot of naive and overly simplistic CD "thoughts" posted on HN recently that rubbed me the wrong way). But consider on one hand the "fake news" / misinformation problem or whatever people want to call it, and the legacy academic publishing industry on the other. I'm looking at this from the perspective of an academic, the target audience of the publications, not a layperson for whom they are not designed. Like it or not, big concentrated power in academic publishing largely addresses trust in the quality of the publications. Good faculty want to review or serve as editor for good publications, and researchers will follow and rely on the quality of reputable, high impact factor publications. I know it's not always as simple as that, but I liked opening a new issue of my go-to journal and knowing that what I was reading had gone through a good review and was curated to be stuff that was relevant to me. I'm glad my university paid for it.
Not saying there are not other ways, but that these "scams" are providing a valuable service.
(And I'm aware of examples of bad research, retracted papers, etc, these are mostly issues for laypeople and the media, they have almost no impact on researchers and occur with insignificant frequency)
(And there are lots of real scams and rent seeking in the industry, but not what is covered in the twitter posts)
> (And I'm aware of examples of bad research, retracted papers, etc, these are mostly issues for laypeople and the media, they have almost no impact on researchers and occur with insignificant frequency)
I think these issues occur far more frequently than is appreciated. To me, peer review is more of a facade than a filter. The vast majority of the time, the review is superficial. I think most researchers have false confidence in the quality of the reviews, and should be more skeptical of published papers.
During my PhD I spent a fair amount of time working through various papers in my field and I was surprised by how many of them had serious flaws that were unnoticed. Even highly cited papers could have major issues. For example, see this comment I put on PubPeer on a paper that is very well cited in my field: https://pubpeer.com/publications/95455FA4147A9CBD5EAA5185D21...
These errors I noticed in this paper are quite basic and I'm disappointed to apparently be the first one to notice. You don't need to do a deep analysis to notice the errors.
Now, I'm not arguing that we should eliminate peer review or anything like that. This is mostly a response to the view that bad research is uncommon and does not have a major impact on science. I personally think that peer review should be reformed, though I don't have clear ideas about how yet.
Does the journal pay for the academics’ time in reviewing articles? No. Does it pay for the articles themselves? Also no. What service, exactly, is the university paying all that money for?
It seems to me that the core service journals offer is as a central place for people to submit articles. And some organisation around requesting and collecting reviews.
And that sounds like the sort of thing you could replace with a website. The workflows we use for modern software development (eg on GitHub) are far more complex, maximally automated and free. And the result is source code anyone can browse, without needing any of the code to have its copyright handed over to a rent seeking middleman.
It’s crazy that academics of all people live in such a primitive ecosystem.
I think you're missing the point. Researchers literally could upload their work to github if they wanted to right now. They choose to publish in journals because the reputation means their work will get seen and will have credibility with other researchers. It's a bit like Big-4 auditing in a sense. They don't do anything particularly special, but their size and reputation give credibility to their audits that wouldn't otherwise be possible. And like journals, they have had some spectacular failures that are dwelt upon, but in general they make vetting much easier.
They're paying for credibility, but assigning the credibility to an organization instead of an open and understood process of vetting. This confuses me.
The editors of good journals (APS Physical Review Letters for instance) provide significant service and it is reasonable to pay for it: from simple things like significantly improving the quality of the prose and typesetting to more crucial stuff like properly moderating the review process (picking appropriate reviewers, controlling for conflict of interest, filtering out superfluous submissions).
There's an important distinction to be made between fake news which is deliberately misleading and the concept of fiat news which is when information is passed along with no checks and balances in environments where people explicitly assume that there are checks and balances. We see this in the media but now also increasingly in academia as journals seem to be performing the review function less effectively than before. There's an article that I think explains the difference between these two problems that is worth reading: https://www.epsilontheory.com/fiat-money-fiat-news/
Yes, some of the most important moments in my life were getting a paper accepted in a prestigious publication. Standing has such importance. Still some (medical) journals have nevertheless lost reputation by publishing work by shill authors
Because it is irrelevant. The concentration of power is one thing, but the complaints here are against the shameless rent-seeking. Open access publishing would not take away from anything the OP is extolling the values of.
Couldn't you just post your own thoughts instead of downvoting my comment then? Or if you find it irrelevant just ignore it? What does downvoting add? Personally I don't care if you want to downvote, but your justification doesn't make any sense.
I think people should draw parallels between sci.publishing and social media. They also ask unpaid individuals to publish their writings, then ask other unpaid individuals to review and rank them, then use their algorithms to editorialize and pick the ones they like and then make exorbitant profits. Some of then like youtube will subsidize that with increasingly dwindling payouts , but overall it is a scam based on monetizing content created for free by clueless individuals. Participating in unpaid social media should be considered an equally extortionate thing to do.
In my opinion, scientific publishing sells prestige. Every "you could simply..." distruption that assumes it is only about getting people to have access to the paper won't work.
I am surprised no one has the most important factor at work here: prestige. Yes, editors can resign en masse but they can’t recreate a 100-year old institution. Think Harvard or New York Times. Big name scientific journals have the same level of prestige. Not saying this is right or how it should be, but we must recognize that this is the most important factor.
-someone who has published a paper in one of these journals
I know it has been said before, but I think reading that (and I had to stop) as a series of tweets was akin to "Welcome to Hell. Please keep your arms and legs in the Hell vehicle at all times... unless you know, you want more Hell".
Honestly, I thought Doctorow would do a blog or something. It is just too broken up.
True, but one nitpick. In my field you can post the paper on your website and send copies to anyone who asks. Publication provides vetting. And posting on Arxiv is generally acceptable.
Simply a system with broken incentives (publish in these longstanding journals or perish), a system designed to exploit those incentives (pay us to publish in the aforementioned journals), and a group of humans who have little personal incentive to stick their necks out (e.g. grad students and professors).
The cognitive dissonance your comment created reaped undeserved downvotes. It's a legitimate concern: massive amounts of money fund these ventures and massive amounts of money in turn get guaranteed to the concerns which funded the ventures. The efficacy of the procedure is irrelevant: this is clearly corruption at a massive scale with perverse incentives which guarantee it repeats itself.
It's full of distractions. Did you know that chocolate is a crystal? So when I see a thread on twitter, I can't decide if the next tweet is directly related or is it a reply. It would take less than 6 months to get to the moon by car at 60mph. Then there are stats like retweets and likes for every tweet that's totally meaningless, why can't people just push the top tweet? #furries are trending in Hungary btw. Then there's the conceptual problem about how authors interact with the platform. They must fit a paragraph into 280 characters, they can't edit a previous tweet so it's less coherent and they certainly can't give it a proper read through. Pierre-François Bouchard discovered the Rosetta stone in Egypt in case you wondered. Unfortunately this makes Twitter threads more like a rant rather than a regular blog post.
Now I know that chocolate is a crystal. And when looked into it further, I found out chocolate can be tempered. [1] While I am glad to know a little more about the chemistry of chocolate, I must say I am also glad I was not the one to wade through Twitter. I can say I learned it on Hacker News, instead.
To play devil's advocate, the value these prestigious journals provide is providing an objective function to optimize allocation of resources in academia. To advance one's career in academia, one needs to publish in prestigious journals, there isn't really a way around it (and if the entire system were to change, resources would need to be invested to create a different hierarchy of publication quality). To whatever extent publishing in prestigious journals captures scientific quality (and/or political astuteness), it serves the purpose of funneling more resources to those that optimize that objective. So it's not really a scam when everyone has run their individual game theory and chosen to continue with this particular system, and these journals can extract their cut because there is still value in publishing in Nature/Science/Annals or whatever. There is a push to change some of this but typically only the most successful academics can afford to boycott these journals, after already having dozens of publications vetted by the existing system.
It's more that the taxpayer is fleeced by academia in general (the whole research-funding-publishing complex) for many billions because there's no incentive for academics to save the taxpayer money by handling publishing themselves. (As Doctorow notes, they already review the manuscripts, so all that's left for an existing journal's editorial team to do is vote for a chief editor and switch to any one of many open, free research publication services.)
Public domain publishing should be a condition of government funding for research.