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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

#201

Post by chrisseaton »

FabHK wrote: post #191
chrisseaton wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asking a totally separate question - you're asking 'since tax payers funded the research shouldn't they be able to see the output?' That's a great question. But the question I was replying to was 'who is paying the reviewers'. The answer is that their employers are.

The question wasn't "who is paying them?", the question was "why aren't the publishers paying them?". And that is a crucial question, and not answered by the observation that they are already paid by others.

The answer to 'why' is that no money changes hands for any review - not to pay to get a review for your paper, and not to review a paper for someone else. It's a social system.

You 'pay' for reviews of your papers, by reviewing other people's papers.

All the publisher does is connect people up and produce the final product. You can argue that the cost to subscribe is therefore too high for that service. Fine, it may be so! But saying 'why don't they pay their reviewers' is to misunderstand what the entire setup is here.

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

#202

Post by fifnir »

neilwilson wrote: post #187

Surely the system should be like ... Hacker News. We publish here, and the stuff that is good rises to the top with upvotes from our peers, and it is all subject to review in the comments where many an interesting discussion is had. We all gain by sharing ideas as widely as possible. We just need a way for that to happen.

Upvote/downvote lists a horrible way to publish science. Simple silly example: big group publishes, everyone gets online and upvotes the post in the early stages so it floats to the top.

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

#203

Post by nl »

mcbits wrote: post #105
avs733 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 suppo…

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

How do you propose that is done?

For my job I build neural networks for text processing. I spend a lot of time reading papers in the field.

And yet if I look at something in an adjacent field (even something as close as something like open information extraction) I have trouble telling which papers are important.

How on earth am I supposed to tell if something in a further removed field which attracts more crackpots (say probability theory or something) is a fringe theory or a breakthrough from a new author?

I'd note the example of the Gaussian correlation inequality[1] where even people in the field weren't aware it had been proven for 3 years after publication[2].

[1] https://www.quantamagazine.org/statistician-proves-gaussian-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaussian_correlation_inequalit...

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

#204

Post by yqx »

ms013 wrote: post #180
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.)

Nope. Nobody in the review or author role gets paid. And personally, that doesn’t bother me. I put in time to review papers with the understanding that someone else will put in time to review mine. My employer (I’m in industry) understands that this is a reasonable use of my time given that they see value in me being engaged in the academic world. Prior to industry when I was an academic, it was also part of my paid…

I don't understand why academics seem so complacent in this. Sure I'm perfectly happy to do "service" for a community of researchers who run an open access journal or are organizing a conference. That's a beautiful system. When it's for a for-profit publisher that will charge those not working at a well funded academic institution extortionate fees to access my work , or the work I'm reviewing, it's a whole different story.

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

#205

Post by im3w1l »

em-bee wrote: post #198
im3w1l wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which is technology, and reviewers, which are academics. There is another factor to consider - the outsiders. They need to know which research is good and which isn't and independent journals giving a stamp of approval to create "branded" science helps.

the same can be done by independent reviewers. i would not trust a commercial entity whose goal is profit, to be able to decide for me what research is good, the same way that i don't trust movie distributors. i'll look for outside reviewers who earned my trust because they understand the subject matter.

There are two types of outsiders, individuals and institutions. For an individual, choosing a reviewer to trust can potentially work but it does get harder if you have to pick multiple different reviewers to get good coverage.

For institutions, especially those in charge of grants, something more stringent and organized is needed than "I like that science guy". And those organizations will need to be payed somehow, preferably in such a way that it doesn't create too perverse incentives.

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

#206

Post by mschuetz »

neilwilson wrote: post #187

Surely the system should be like ... Hacker News. We publish here, and the stuff that is good rises to the top with upvotes from our peers, and it is all subject to review in the comments where many an interesting discussion is had. We all gain by sharing ideas as widely as possible. We just need a way for that to happen.

Considering the popularity of homeopathy and other junk science, that's probably not a good idea.

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

#207

Post by vanderZwan »

chaosite wrote: post #190
neilwilson wrote: post #187

Surely the system should be like ... Hacker News. We publish here, and the stuff that is good rises to the top with upvotes from our peers, and it is all subject to review in the comments where many an interesting discussion is had. We all gain by sharing ideas as widely as possible. We just need a way for that to happen.

Or, maybe not. An academic article is not a blog post. Also, only the most popular posts get discussed here -- tons of stuff is lost if it's not initially popular. Timing your submission allows for gaming the system. All scholarly articles need to go through peer review and receive honest, constructive feedback -- especially the bad ones, and Hacker News (and Reddit and Slashdot and any system like that which doesn't…

> All scholarly articles need to go through peer review and receive honest, constructive feedback

Which is also a system that can be gamed, by the way. For example, by the reviewers:

- "Oh dammit, we got scooped... better use the insights from here to help us past our hurdles, while stating this work is not original enough to be published so we can quickly submit our own and get published earlier after all!"

- "I see that this paper belongs to Camp A with regards to these two competing hypotheses explaining unexplained phenomenon X, I am in Camp B. Therefore, I will consider this paper rubbish by definition."

- "I am an old researcher who does not believe in some of the newer findings that contradict longstanding assumptions that I "grew up with", and therefore will never allow this paper to pass."

- "I am a very insulated researcher who cannot make sense of this multidisciplinary work, therefore reject the parts that lie outside of my field as rubbish."

- "This paper is a by a researcher competing for the same position/grant/etc. as me. Better make sure they don't get too much credit."

- "I'm not sexist/racist/etc but... totally clearly biased in my judgement of this paper because..."

Now, I'm obviously describing worst-case scenarios here. But my point is: it's human politics all the way down.

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

#208

Post by arethuza »

chrisseaton wrote: post #201
FabHK wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question wasn't "who is paying them?", the question was "why aren't the publishers paying them?". And that is a crucial question, and not answered by the observation that they are already paid by others.

The answer to 'why' is that no money changes hands for any review - not to pay to get a review for your paper, and not to review a paper for someone else. It's a social system. You 'pay' for reviews of your papers, by reviewing other people's papers. All the publisher does is connect people up and produce the final product. You can argue that the cost to subscribe is therefore too high for that service. Fine, it may…

Creating a "market" for reviews would be a terrible idea - I agree that the reviewing part of the process seems to work pretty well (or at least did when I was last involved, which is a while now).

Edit: The bureaucracy of charging for reviews would be bad enough - but I suspect perverse incentives would soon arise as reviewing would soon be seen as a revenue generator to be maximised and a cost to be minimised.

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

#209

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

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…

One upvote is not from agreement, but from interest to see replies to your comment (which upvoting it makes more likely).

Personally, I do think the matter is complex. However, if you're trying to protect the current model by arguing that building a reputation costs money, you will not convince those who, quite reasonably, believe it should be earned by contributions to knowledge, instead.

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

#210

Post by dmurray »

impendia wrote: post #39
justinclift wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If I get asked to peer-review a paper that looks uninteresting to me, or something outside my interests and expertise, ... or write a quick report recommending that the paper not be accepted . That seems kind of harsh?

Often (but definitely not always), requests to peer-review are accompanied by statements like "We consider our Journal X to be on par with Journals Y and Z, and aim to be extremely selective. Please only recommend publication if blah-blah-blah...." I'll then read the introduction. If I don't have sufficient expertise to referee the paper, I'll decline the request. If I do, then I'll see what the authors have accompli…

I think the "harsh" comment was because you suggested you might recommend the journal reject a paper because it was outside your interests and expertise, not because of any lack of merit. But that implication only arose from some selective editing.
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