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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

#161

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

dougmccune wrote: post #120
colordrops wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jus…

I think HN has chewed all of the above to death. If you read previous comment threads it's obvious that the community actually does understand all of these things, and also understands why they're a problem.

Personally I've lost count of the number of threads and posts where at least one person says "Publishers are in the reputation business."

The fact that you seem unaware of this is curious. If you genuinely think that plans to disrupt the industry are going to be based on distributing PDFs, it's possible you may not be as familiar with the discussions here as perhaps you could be.

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

#162

Post by laichzeit0 »

impendia wrote: post #20
rsa4046 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> No reviewers are ever paid either That's almost true. Elsevier once surprised me with a $100 Amazon gift card, which they said was in recognition for a particularly good job of peer review that year. I'd laugh at the prospect of Elsevier rewarding me with "recognition" -- certainly something I would not put on my CV -- although I did take their money. Another time, the American Mathematical Society (which is non-pr…

What's your hourly rate? How many hours did you spend reviewing? Divide that $100 by the hours and see if it was worth it.

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

#164

Post by Teodolfo »

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…

There are plenty of free, open access journals that are reputable.

JMLR http://www.jmlr.org/ is quite successful. There are some fields, such as machine learning, that are not dominated by for-profit journals. Why is this possible in some fields and not others? My answer would be that it is possible in all fields, but incumbency advantages can be very strong and coordination across academic volunteers can be more difficult when they are individually less secure.

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

#165

Post by aj7 »

If you think about the insurance business, it’s only economic value added is fraud detection and minimization. Someone needs to have an incentive to prevent fraudulent claims. The economic value of publishing is orderly and dispassionate administration of intellectual property ownership. Successfully publishing a paper entitles the author to permanent ownership of the work. The author name never changes. A paper that leads to tenure at a major research university has a discounted value of more than 7 figures (USD or Euros.) This is why the academic beneficiaries of this system, who further control research, are not eager for alternative methods, or they could bring it down rapidly.

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

#166

Post by a3_nm »

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…

There are plenty of conferences and journals with curation (peer review) which are free for readers and free or almost free for authors. For computer science, see, e.g., http://pierre.senellart.com/travaux/open-access/

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

#167

Post by chrisseaton »

randomsearch wrote: post #159
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…

Allow me to turn the tables a little: - why don’t publishers pay reviewers for the extensive time they spend reviewing the paper? - why don’t publishers pay academics who edit journals, another time consuming task? - why don’t publishers pay academics or institutions for a product they sell? I can’t comment on your company, but the above is the status quo for most of academia. Do you think this business model is ethi…

Because those people are already being paid anyway - their full time jobs, whether that’s PhD student, lecturer, professor, or industrial researcher, includes the job of reviewing and editing for publications.

It’s a society. You publish papers which get reviews, and you also work to review other people’s papers. Everyone contributes to make it work.

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

#168

Post by Topolomancer »

pjc50 wrote: post #146
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…

I'm not sure people are trying to fix academic publishing so much as burn Elsevier to the ground. Whether or how they are replaced is a separate question. https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2016/12/12/why-i-still-wont-...

Well, Elsevier is maybe for some people the worst of the bunch (cannot speak from experience, though).

Springer, for example, has very relaxed and open copyright transfers. You basically retain the right to have copies on your website, on archives, etc., provided that they contain a link to the 'definitive version' of your paper. Elsevier does that to some extent as well, but Springer _also_ invests money to 'cross-fund' (if that is a word) books in fields that do not attract so many readers and that otherwise could not be published. So in that sense, Springer is giving back to the community and people are appreciating that more.

I agree, however, that there seems to be generic and unspecified hatred against Elsevier; having not reviewed for them or published with them, I do not have a properly-formed opinion here.

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

#169

Post by [deleted] »

dougmccune wrote: post #120
colordrops wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 jus…

[deleted]

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

#170

Post by reacweb »

dougmccune wrote: post #132
panic wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 slow…

When I was young, I have bought the standard C++ in pdf because it was less than $10. I think it was the maximum I was agreeing to pay for it. Sometimes I find a reference to research articles I would like to read. I have no access to university to get them freely. If article were accessible at a decent price (less than $2), I think I would buy a lot more of them. IMHO, academic publishing would still be profitable if prices were low.
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