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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

#111

Post by ylmm »

Y7ZCQtNo39 wrote: post #61
ylmm wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've only worked with professors in economics and political science but I'm under the impression that this is true more generally of academia. Some people do it to help advance the state of the field. Career incentives and standing in the field also come into play. As the poster above mentioned, a professor would be able to say more. To respond succinctly to your comments: money isn't the only incentive in life, so i…

In my experience, academia is largely driven by money. Professors at my university were recognized for the money they brought to the university first and foremost it seemed, rather than for any discoveries/innovations in a particular field.

Ah, I know a former engineering professor who left a large flagship university in the Midwest for exactly that reason. Based on what he told me that's more a phenomenon specific to institutions without a lot of money than a general truth about academia.

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

#112

Post by x220 »

avs733 wrote: post #89
Nasrudith wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is a question what is the sort of theoretical good for the gatekeeping? What is the functional purpose of it? I think that answer would prove insightful for determining the future. I can see two noncynical reasons for it one. One is educational purposes. Two would be quality control - if it is already debunkable or widely known there is no point in publishing in Nature "thinking done in the brain". The cynical a…

>Here is a question what is the sort of theoretical good for the gatekeeping? What is the functional purpose of it? I think that answer would prove insightful for determining the future. Because I am not at all prepared to assess the quality or accuracy of a quantum physics paper and I doubt a molecular biologist is prepared to assess the quality or accuracy of a sociology paper. In what I have seen there are a lot o…

That guy has some pretty interesting articles.

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

#113

Post by [deleted] »

moultano wrote: post #62
avip wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have (almost) open publishing and open commenting. Did that improve anything?

I think so. I've followed the back and forth on a few papers on openreview.net and I found the comments nearly as interesting and informative as the paper they were commenting on. There are a lot of things that only exist as suspicions and intuitions inside of a researcher's head, and that sort of information is much more likely to come out in a back and forth reviewing a paper than in actual published literature.

[deleted]

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

#114

Post by NateEag »

mrhappyunhappy wrote: post #110
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.

Organic farming does not mean farming without weedkillers or pesticides. It means farming with weedkillers and pesticides that are largely unstudied, compared with known quantities like Monsanto's products (whose positive and negative effects are well documented and widely understood).

The 'organic' products may be better on balance, but we don't actually know that, because the body of knowledge isn't nearly as developed yet.

That's my layperson's understanding, anyway. I could be wrong.

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

#115

Post by dougmccune »

Academic publishing is a favorite recurring topic on HN, and it's one I've occasionally dipped into discussing, although these discussions are typically 99% one-sided and void of nuance or reasoned arguments. It's like discussing politics online.

I'm a shareholder and board member of a large privately-held, family-owned academic publishing company. If anyone is interested in trying to understand what makes the industry work, why it's so hard to disrupt it, etc. I'd love to engage or put you in touch with people within the industry smarter than me - my email is in my profile.

I know the industry is particularly frustrating to the HN crowd. We want to think it's a technology problem - that distributing PDFs is a solved problem (which it obviously is). But the root of the problems (of which there are many) are all cultural and much harder to change. If you're going to jump in and try to "fix" the industry or put publishers out of business, I highly encourage you to engage with folks in the industry with an open mind and really try to understand why things work the way they work. You're not going to have any success unless you truly understand the incentive structure of academia and the social and cultural aspects of inertia that are at play. If you go in thinking you can build a better "publishing" mousetrap you will fail. You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business. And when you start peeling back the onion of how academics are assessed, given jobs, given tenure, etc you start seeing how hard changing behavior can be.

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

#116

Post by Aelius »

mrhappyunhappy wrote: post #110
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.

It's entirely marketing, there is no actual data supporting the claim that it's healthier for you. It succeeds by the "appeal to nature" fallacy, which causes a bunch of problems and gets decidedly anti-science in a few ways.

Using only "natural" pesticides because they are "healthier". This is unsubstantiated, again it's just an appeal to nature. It can become problematic because natural pesticides often aren't as effective, thus certain farms/crops require using an excessive amount- way more than they would if they used the more effective synthetic pesticides. The synthetic pesticides are of course accused of being unhealthy (because unnatural)- though this is generally untrue. Furthermore, even the natural pesticides cause pollution problems, and overusing them isn't good.

Because the organic lobby succeeds by the appeal to nature, they are also anti-gmo. Which is a big problem.

While there are entirely organic farms, a lot of organic products are really not even what they advertise themselves to be, as many organic farmers don't actually run organic farms: they run normal farms with a section of it that adheres to organic standards. These standards are pretty arbitrary, except for the fact that organic farming is a significantly less efficient use of farmland, which is going to become a problem within the next century. We need to be making efficient use of our arable land, as we don't actually have much left on the planet unless we start turning national parks + protected areas into farmland.

Largely, organic farming is a faux luxury built on anti-scientific ideas that does nothing except waste valuable land resources, sold to relatively privileged people who are willing to pay a premium to feel better about what they eat.

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

#117

Post by WhitneyLand »

rsa4046 wrote: post #11
justinpombrio wrote: post #5

For anyone who still doesn't know this: publishers do not pay paper authors, in any field. I am also not aware of a publisher paying peer reviewers. (Lowly soon-to-be-postdoc here; a professor would be able to say more.)

In academia (at least the hard sciences), no faculty are ever paid for publishing in mainstream, peer-reviewed journals. No reviewers are ever paid either, although recently Elsevier has started to publish the names of its "star reviewers", presumably as a token for the large investment in time and expertise required to evaluate papers for publication and improve the field. Even book deals (or editorships) yield no r…

>the lay public is hilariously misinformed about this

Ironic for a scientist to rail on anecdotally and off topic about a problem they play the much larger role in deciding the fate of.

Knowledge of science among the general public let alone of how this sausage factory works is however unfortunate, not the key to fixing the problem.

There are a handful of different key roles and interests competing to influence the outcome. Researchers, universities, publishers, for profit businesses, etc.

It’s not that complicated. There’s the logistics, economics, and best guess modeling of any proposed changes.

Then separate from these technicalities people everyday are making value judgements and prioritizing principles against personal interests.

I’m not trying to advocate my opinion here in a comment of what these stakeholders should do. Only that these individual decisions, judgements, and will to act on them play a far greater role than public knowledge of who gets paid to review a paper.

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

#118

Post by sytelus »

HERE is a trivia question for you: what is the most profitable business in the world? You might think oil, or maybe banking. You would be wrong. The answer is academic publishing. Its profit margins are vast, reportedly in the region of 40 per cent.

40% are very normal and consider healthy margins for many businesses. The business with largest possible profit margins I know of is political donations. For mere $100K, one can own vast public land for mining and selling resources worth billions for many generations. That's 1000000% margin for you.

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

#119

Post by colordrops »

dougmccune wrote: post #115

Academic publishing is a favorite recurring topic on HN, and it's one I've occasionally dipped into discussing, although these discussions are typically 99% one-sided and void of nuance or reasoned arguments. It's like discussing politics online. I'm a shareholder and board member of a large privately-held, family-owned academic publishing company. If anyone is interested in trying to understand what makes the indust…

Sorry if my reply seems trite, but the same sorts of things could be said about the cab, bookstore, and music industries. They were entrenched and difficult to take down, but most are better for it.

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

#120

Post by dougmccune »

colordrops wrote: post #119
dougmccune wrote: post #115

Academic publishing is a favorite recurring topic on HN, and it's one I've occasionally dipped into discussing, although these discussions are typically 99% one-sided and void of nuance or reasoned arguments. It's like discussing politics online. I'm a shareholder and board member of a large privately-held, family-owned academic publishing company. If anyone is interested in trying to understand what makes the indust…

Sorry if my reply seems trite, but the same sorts of things could be said about the cab, bookstore, and music industries. They were entrenched and difficult to take down, but most are better for it.

Sure, I wasn't saying it's not possible to disrupt publishers, and I'm not discouraging anyone from trying. I'm simply saying that to do so you're absolutely going to have to understand what makes the industry work the way it does. If you don't understand your users (in this case academics, tenure committees, universities, grant funding bodies, etc) then you're not going to make a dent in the status quo. I'm more just trying to counter the argument that there's no reason for publishers to exist, therefore it should be easy to make them obsolete. There are tons of reasons publishers and the entire system as it is exists, and if you want to change it you need to understand it.
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