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Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

newscientist.com

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Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#101

Post by Aelius »

This comment is more directed at hn commenters than the article itself. I'm led to believe that free journals aren't successful precisely because they don't have standards. They don't have standards because they can't fund people to do basic vetting (this is not the same as peer review), or otherwise are eager to accept whatever comes their way- which are usually papers that have been rejected by the reputable journals.

Assuming there is no money driven agenda, even the reputable journals have the issue where much of the content doesn't get peer reviewed. The findings are far from concrete.

But money driven agendas definitely exist too, and without basic vetting a journal finds itself hosting bs lobbyist material with sloppy "science" finding favorable results for anti-GMO, alternative medicines, organic farming, anti-vaccine, etc. The problem also exists that these entities are effectively funding their own journals to buy "legitimacy"- and they certainly would pose a threat to any journal that doesn't have high vetting standards.

As of yet, free access journals aren't reputable or actually desirable because they don't have adequate quality control. Free access to information is a worthy and noble goal, but we can't render the information useless in the process.

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#102

Post by Ericson2314 »

geoalchimista wrote: post #79
sitkack wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like machine checked proofs or other mechanical formalisms need to be employed to ensure scientific validity.

Machine checked proofs only work for deductive, non-experimental disciplines. You can't use machine checked proofs to tell if a drug is effective or not. Human referees have to be involved no matter how advanced the AI is.

You can precisely "quarantine" the "human referree part within the framework of a formal proof. That's still a huge step forward from the status quo of reasoning and opinion being smeared together and nothing formal.

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#103

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

elvinyung wrote: post #72

Here's a Twitter thread with a director at Elsevier (@mrgunn) making extremely snarky comments about why they think academia shouldn't be free and widely available: https://twitter.com/dgmacarthur/status/1028489457803161600

Holy shit! I guess in the age of trumpism nothing is a surprise anymore. Well, we have the brightest here on HN, how about someone make a go at a competitive solution?

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#104

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

blazespin wrote: post #93
elvinyung wrote: post #72

Here's a Twitter thread with a director at Elsevier (@mrgunn) making extremely snarky comments about why they think academia shouldn't be free and widely available: https://twitter.com/dgmacarthur/status/1028489457803161600

The real problem is that these publishers actually provide real value that gives them leverage over the industry. If they didn't, it'd be pretty easy to destroy their grip over academia. The idea that after 23 years of internet they've maintained their position via smart deals is ludicrous. They've maintained it because of useful curation. If there was a way to open source curation and not lose quality, I can't imagi…

Are we still talking about publicly funded research that’s being pay walled?

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#105

Post by mcbits »

avs733 wrote: post #35
lumost wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It strikes me that the challenge of peer review is that it is non-transparent, and gate-keeping. It is impossible for one to read the peer review feedback related to a published paper, and it's similarly difficult to publish controversial pieces that break established norms. Contrast this to the peer review culture of popular open source projects - major pull requests have extensive and transparent dialogue, and disa…

gatekeeping in science is a theoretical good...the difficulty in practice is highlighted by the general 'three paths' for citations...articles that never get cited, articles that get cited a lot at first and then are forgotten, and articles that aren't cited until much later and then cited en masse. That last category is really the 'good science' because it does what we want foundational research to do - disrupt curr…

I'd favor something like clustering and client-side filtering over gatekeeping. Mainstream academic research can coexist just fine with fringe theories and industry research in the same database as long as one can efficiently distinguish between them.

And keeping everything together in one (de)central database would make it possible for people, so inclined, to annotate other people's work with new references to support or debunk the work long after it was published, or to clarify ambiguous language, etc. Those annotations, too, could be subject to filtering as needed.

People could build reputations and whole careers around tying up loose ends instead of the "publish or perish" grind.

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#106

Post by ben_jones »

secabeen wrote: post #87
elvinyung wrote: post #72

Here's a Twitter thread with a director at Elsevier (@mrgunn) making extremely snarky comments about why they think academia shouldn't be free and widely available: https://twitter.com/dgmacarthur/status/1028489457803161600

He claims that digital distribution isn't cheaper than analog. I don't doubt that, given the amounts of money it probably costs to build effective DRM and paywall systems. Were all journals open-access, their costs would be a lot lower too. Sci-Hub hosts 85% of the articles published in paywalled scholarly journals on a shoe-string.

I think it should be acknowledged that there are likely a number of accessibility and similar requirements that at scale bear non-trivial costs. I.e. building a website with top of the line accessibility, providing resources for auditory and visually impared, etc.

I'm not saying current publishers are great at these things, just that they should not be forgotten and should be improved on if a new order was to take shape.

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#107

Post by api »

blazespin wrote: post #93
elvinyung wrote: post #72

Here's a Twitter thread with a director at Elsevier (@mrgunn) making extremely snarky comments about why they think academia shouldn't be free and widely available: https://twitter.com/dgmacarthur/status/1028489457803161600

The real problem is that these publishers actually provide real value that gives them leverage over the industry. If they didn't, it'd be pretty easy to destroy their grip over academia. The idea that after 23 years of internet they've maintained their position via smart deals is ludicrous. They've maintained it because of useful curation. If there was a way to open source curation and not lose quality, I can't imagi…

I have to reluctantly agree. If there is one thing I've learned after 20 years on the open commercialized Internet its that any uncurated medium falls to spam, trolling, con artists, cranks, propaganda, and hoaxes. The bad stuff is easy to make and generally has better "viral" characteristics, so it drives out the good. The money is also very much on the side of quacks since absent regulation quackery is more profitable than real medicine. Hoaxes and tabloids are also more profitable than real news.

Science without curation will fall to corporate shills and propagandists with political axes to grind. It's already bad enough but with no gatekeepers at all it would be a total free for all. Tobacco would become good for you again, homeopathy would work, etc.

Curation can be democratic, but if so there must be a well thought out procedure for electing curators and a constitution or set of bylaws that is hard to amend. Science has a lot of power, so any scientific curation system is going to come under constant attack. We are living in the age of information warfare.

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#108

Post by ylmm »

apathy wrote: post #34
williamstein wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a professor (in mathematics), and there are some reasons why I personally might say "yes" to review a paper. (1) If the paper is so interesting that when I see it I think "I really, really want to read this paper!", then I am likely to peer review it because as a reviewer when I read it, I get to ask any question and the author will take my questions and concerns very seriously. (2) I owe the editor who is asking…

Well, yeah, but without students & postdocs it is very difficult to make a material impact on your field of endeavor. There’s also an ulterior motive for some lines of work, where sending a paper to be critically reviewed by rivals is a mechanism to torture test the work & conclusions. This can be taken too far (especially in biology, the glam fluffing and $million additional irrelevant experiments are legendary), bu…

Well, yeah, but if you submit a paper to "torture test" and it gets rejected, that cuts off a journal to be able to submit to.

Well, yeah, but I think what he's saying is it's probably the case that a large number if not majority of academic make the decision to go through the grueling PhD process and give up years of earnings in their prime for things other than monetary gain. But of course people can become disillusioned later down the road.

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#109

Post by ylmm »

apathy wrote: post #38
ylmm wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least in the social sciences, journal editors delegate papers to reviewers. Your first sentence also suggests that you don't know what peer review is. Peer review is not the same thing as replication, which is replicating the results of a paper after it's been published (e.g., confirming some groundbreaking finding). Peer review happens at the stage before publication of the original paper. Researcher(s) submit th…

Well, yeah, but learning to review is less difficult than learning how to communicate clearly, crisply, and forcefully. So in a well administered review, most benefits accrue to the authors even if the reviews are poorly done, so long as they are ethical. (Editors can step in when reviewers are being unreasonable or ignoring explicit instructions; unfortunately professional editors at glam journals can also step in t…

Well, yeah, there are other irrelevant things about reviewing that I also have the ability to bring up but my point is that to say that the "benefit" of reviewing is for the purpose of networking is misinformed.

Re: Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

#110

Post by mrhappyunhappy »

Aelius wrote: post #101

This comment is more directed at hn commenters than the article itself. I'm led to believe that free journals aren't successful precisely because they don't have standards. They don't have standards because they can't fund people to do basic vetting (this is not the same as peer review), or otherwise are eager to accept whatever comes their way- which are usually papers that have been rejected by the reputable journa…

What’s wrong with organic farming? It’s the only kind of produce I want to eat.
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