Ask HN: Why aren't scientific journals free on the web?

MI: Was it clear to you when you started out at as Editor-in-Chief of Science how important the move to electronic publishing was going to be?

FB: When I got to Science, it was quickly explained to me that the price for paper was going up. The price for postage was going up, and I was asked where in the budget did I want to make the cuts in order that we wouldn't be in a deficit. And so it occurred to me, if I was constantly going to be confronted by changes in paper costs and postal rates, which I couldn't control, I would have to find another way to distribute the magazine. And we decided we had to be online quickly.

MI: So the age of electronic publishing really came to fruition while you were at Science. Were there issues that you faced for which you really had to define limits as to how far electronic publishing could go?

FB: Well, PubMed Central [the initiative put forth by the National Library of Medicine to archive and disseminate biomedical research findings] was one of the last issues that I faced, and I think, faced down. It was wrong-headed in its origins. But the concept that people should have access to the scientific literature is of course a good one. Scientists want to have access to research findings so that they can pursue experiments. And when scientists are confronted by a publisher's wall that says you must be a subscriber to get in here, you'd like to find a way to get around it.

But to me, nothing is free. I am aware of the cost of making a prestigious publication. The cost of rejecting 95 percent of all the papers that are submitted makes the accepted ones so valuable. And there's only twenty-four hours in a day, no matter how intense your efforts to keep up with research reports. If I have time to read, I'm going to read in a place where I know that the information has been thoroughly vetted, and so I limit my reading to places where I can trust the judgment of the editors. If everything were free, and everybody could publish everything they want to, anyplace, I'd have no way to know how to sort things out. I certainly don't have time to read through a lot of very provocative assertions that turn out not to be true.

[1] excerpt from http://molinterv.aspetjournals.org/content/1/4/192.full [2] Appel 1996 Ann NY Acad Sci "Classical and Contemporary Histochemical Approaches for Evaluating Central Nervous System Microanatomy"

During the late 90's, the academic societies realized that making their archives internet accessible would be very high value. But 90's era internet economics meant that this would cost several hundred million dollars. But during the late 90's stock market bubble, it was also possible to raise several hundred million dollars.

As a condition for digitizing journal archives, the publishers acquired the copyrights from the academic societies.

This investment has turned out to be extremely profitable. Publishers have been able to charge immense institutional access fees for electronic access to the journals. When I was studying at Upenn, 20% of undergraduate tuition went to paying for institutional access.

The notion of preprint archives have been a somewhat successful work around. This basically creates a free distributable version of the work before the copyright is transfered from the authors to the publisher. Unfortunately, physics and math are the only disciplines that have established the use of preprint archives as a norm.

As sibling poster notahacker says reviewing other work in the field is part of your own research effort or I'd warrant you're not doing it right.

(I'm not an academic and have only done undergraduate level study).

I have read enough papers that I don't trust any editors. I read based on what I have read of the authors and on what has been recommended by reviewers I trust. If neither is available, I generally read abstracts more or less at random until one catches my attention (usually by being more specific to my needs than most). There have been too many times that groupthink or political correctness has captured journals to trust them too far.

Quality always costs. I think that open access journals are net cheaper than their print counterparts, but it will always cost money to produce a good journal. Look at the PLoS group. They are the closest we have to a top-tier online-only journal and they produce a high quality journal with an excellent impact score. However, it still costs $2900 to get an article published (if it's accepted) in PLoS Biology. Why? Because that's their costs.

You are also severely over estimating the ability of most academics to produce a good, publication ready, PDF. If you're publishing in a journal, there is a set look and feel that must be applied. No matter how good the work is, someone still has to apply the right layouts. I've published in a conference before where what you submit is a camera-ready document, but somehow no one seems to set things up the same way. And good luck getting a biologist to figure out LaTex... that isn't going to happen.

What you're describing seems to be closer to a distributed combination of arXiv and PLoS One, which is where I think we'll end up moving in the future. However, for now, the hosting costs of the organization is not trivial. Even arXiv has started seeking external funding for support.

I'm scared to think of the state of science if open journals are going to do to existing journals what craigslist did to newspapers. Now newspapers are struggling to figure out a way to pay for high-quality reporting in a world without a sustainable revenue model. The result is poorer quality news or news dominated by a few big players.

In science, the journal system has long served as a filter for information. Sure, a purely open access environment would let more people publish quicker, but it would also fill up the scientific record with a lot more noise. And there will always be costs to filtering signal from noise.