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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

#131

Post by Fomite »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #75
Angostura wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be a good alternative to peer-review though? Genuinely interested.

Why not just build a kind of a social network where people would post research papers, "like" interesting and high-quality papers and reference papers relevant to their research, post their comments and for every participant you would be able to see what papers they have published and reviewed? Sounds fairly simple. Why not?

People have tried this, or spins on it, and they don't particularly gain traction. Part of the problem is these have to exist alongside the traditional structure, and "Hey academics, do you want to be busier for intangible rewards?" is a hard sell.

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

#132

Post by dougmccune »

panic wrote: post #129
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…

> You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business. Everyone realizes this. The problem is that you're abusing your position in this reputation system for profit. Do you think $40 is a fair price to read a paper from 1987? https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/109434208700100...

Nope. I'd be in favor of shorter copyright terms in general. The truth about $40 prices are that they aren't intended really to be the fair price of a good. They're there simply to allow the subscription business model to work. So no, I don't like the fact that we charge $40 for a 31 year-old paper. And I'm a huge proponent of shifting to a non-subscription business model. And the publishers are shifting, albeit slowly and only because they're being forced to. But they are shifting, at least in STM fields, and I'd guess that this $40 byproduct of the subscription model will indeed die out when the subscription model shifts to the open access author pays model (which, of course, we can also debate for a long time).

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

#133

Post by Fomite »

sgillen wrote: post #26
Angostura wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would be a good alternative to peer-review though? Genuinely interested.

I think the op is not saying that peer review as a concept is broken, more that the current peer review system is broken. I think we could start fixing things by incentivizing good peer review. There’s a lot of ways to do this and I’d be interested in a discussion of different schemes. It will by no means be easy but I think that’s what needs to happen.

For reference, good peer review is incentivized in some places. A journal I read gives awards every year for the best reviewers, and good reviewers end up as Associate Editors.

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

#134

Post by Fomite »

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…

I've been paid (in credit for more books) for two reviews of book proposals.

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

#135

Post by apathy »

ylmm wrote: post #108
apathy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 disillu…

I claim that it’s better to request major revisions than recommend rejection, but that’s mostly due to my lack of faith in authors.

Too many examples of “oh well, let’s try the next journal” and not enough of “gee maybe we should fix these glaring flaws”. It’s not because I’m a nice person; it’s because I would prefer the literature not to be a toxic waste dump. Nobody is entitled to be published anywhere. In an ideal world, doubly blinded review would become a part of the published record. At some journals it already does.

The reviews offer valuable context, which is often sorely lacking in high profile venues. (The canonical examples of STAP and arseniclife come to mind, but also much more subtle details where an overall sound paper somehow only gets cited for the one shaky assertion in the results)

JMHO

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

#136

Post by Fomite »

ylmm wrote: post #14
Y7ZCQtNo39 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do peer reviews happen, then, if nobody gets paid to do them? Does research money (that goes to the production of the paper) not also cover peer-reviews? I wouldn't see any incentive for any work to be peer-reviewed, ever, then.

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…

> To respond succinctly to your comments: money isn't the only incentive in life, so it seems weird to not see "any incentive" as soon as money is taken out of the picture.

Especially for a group of people where many of them have taken a pass on more monetarily lucrative careers.

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

#137

Post by Fomite »

TheSmiddy wrote: post #46
Y7ZCQtNo39 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do peer reviews happen, then, if nobody gets paid to do them? Does research money (that goes to the production of the paper) not also cover peer-reviews? I wouldn't see any incentive for any work to be peer-reviewed, ever, then.

They are paid, just not by the journal, they're paid a salary by their university and one of their responsibilities is peer reviewing papers.

This. "Service to the university and field" is literally part of my contract.

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

#138

Post by dougmccune »

garmaine wrote: post #123
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…

Could you summarize, in 50 words or less, what tangible benefit your family’s business provides to justify the intermediation? I’ll wait.

Not sure if you're asking about the role that academic journals play in general, or about what specific actions publishers do.

Journals in general serve to curate an ever-increasing body of research and provide a crude method of gauging scientific quality, relevance to your field, and importance. They provide a crude method of judging the impact of scholars without having to read every single paper ever published.

Publishers specifically put in grunt work to make the curation process function. That means hiring people to coordinate the peer review process, identifying new fields that are in need of new journals to help disciplines form and mature, ensuring standards of the scientific method are being followed, and of course there's the commodity service of hosting digital content.

I think a more interesting question is how much the role of a publisher is worth (as opposed to whether it should not exist), and whether there are ways to fill the same role with a cheaper alternative.

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

#139

Post by apathy »

ylmm wrote: post #109
apathy wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I sometimes agree to review out of a sense of obligation, where I know damned well that the authors recommended me, but you’re right, that’s not networking per se. There’s no reasonable expectation of benefit and it would be unethical as hell to request any.

The authors most likely won’t (can’t) ever know that I agreed to review their paper; it’s more of a good citizen affair. Sometimes, afterwards, it will become apparent that a particular referee was someone familiar. I would like to think that the original poster was imagining something along those lines, but your take is probably closer to the truth. Oh well.

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

#140

Post by Fomite »

peter303 wrote: post #58
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.)

'I scratch back, you scratch mine' Generous reciprocity of free service keeps the system going.

Also this - I review for journals because in turn my submissions to those journals are reviewed.
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