How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers? • Hacker News Board

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#61

Post by rflrob » Tue, Aug 30, 2011, 5:12 PM UTC

Given that PLoS is only 8 years old, I think it's too soon to draw any meaningful conclusions from the fact that the open access movement "has failed to displace the monopolists". I think more important is that the trends are moving in the right direction: some high profile journals (like PNAS) have an open access publishing option, and it's unusual for new journals (at least in biology) not to be open access [1][2]. We aren't where we could be 20 years into the World Wide Web, but we're getting there.

[1] http://www.hhmi.org/news/20110627.html [2] http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-06/gsoa-gln06211...

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#62

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Aug 30, 2011, 5:24 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#63

Post by DMalloy » Tue, Aug 30, 2011, 5:25 PM UTC

So, who would be interested in brainstorming about an open scientific portal with peer-reviewed OpenAccess papers? One could integrate all the well-known crowd sourcing mechanisms, e.g. accumulating papers around a specific topic or even certain question, and make things more lucid than they are now.

I have been very interested in discussing this possibility for a while. If others are interested (leave a comment), I will set up a mailing list. Or leave a comment with a link to the portal I have missed in case one exists.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#64

Post by roadnottaken » Tue, Aug 30, 2011, 5:36 PM UTC

decode wrote: post #33

roadnottaken wrote: post #27

This is not quite right. The NIH does, in fact, maintain a Public Access Policy: http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm which states that all NIH-funded research must be placed in this database ("PubMed Central") within 12 months of publication. I do not know how widely it is obeyed, but I know that the several labs I've been in regularly deposited their papers there.

Since the article mentions this, in what way is it not quite right? "The National Institutes of Health in the US oblige anyone taking their grants to put their papers in an open-access archive(17)."

You're right, I mis-read this line. Still, it deserves more than a sentence. The NIH does require all NIH-funded research to be made publicly available. What more should/could they do?

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#65

Post by mathattack » Tue, Aug 30, 2011, 6:04 PM UTC

I agree with All the points about hiw government sponsored research (including all public school research) Should be free or near free.

The unanswered question is "Why is the market failing?"

A couple unmentioned ideas:

- Until recently, tuition hikes went unchallenged.

- Faculty have a vested interest in maintaining the system. (If my publishing in Journal X marks my competence, what happens if it goes away?)

- An alternate system for rating a very hard to measure topic would be needed. Counting scarce publishing, and references in scarce journals is imperfect but nothing else has beaten it.

I don't have an answer but perhaps a couple bright entrepreneurs could figure out a better equilibrium, and find a way to cross the chasm to get there. Geoffrey Moore would say pick one vertical or academic discipline.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#66

Post by blahedo » Tue, Aug 30, 2011, 6:24 PM UTC

mathattack wrote: post #65

I agree with All the points about hiw government sponsored research (including all public school research) Should be free or near free. The unanswered question is "Why is the market failing?" A couple unmentioned ideas: - Until recently, tuition hikes went unchallenged. - Faculty have a vested interest in maintaining the system. (If my publishing in Journal X marks my competence, what happens if it goes away?) - An a…

> "Why is the market failing?"

There's an easier answer to this question: because it's not a "market". There is no part of this whose pieces are fungible. Not the researchers, not the ideas, not the papers, not the journals. For "the market" to do its thing (to the extent that we can even say that), it requires the goods for sale or the people providing the services to be substitutable and commodified. That isn't (and pretty much can't) be true of academic publishing.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#67

Post by blahedo » Tue, Aug 30, 2011, 6:36 PM UTC

It doesn't have to be this way, and individual fields can break away (to a greater or lesser extent). For instance:

In Natural Language Processing / Computational Linguistics, the professional society (Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL) was its own publisher, with no profit motive, and so authors for its conferences and journal never signed over copyright (merely granted permission to ACL to publish the work). For years, it was quite standard for nearly all of the authors to post PS or PDF versions of their papers on their own websites. Then ACL started accepting PDF instead of camera-ready, and just posted the PDFs themselves; and then they started scanning the back-catalogue.

The result of this is that the vast majority of all NLP/CL papers ever written (excluding only those published elsewhere, e.g. in AAAI, and a very few missing proceedings from fifty years ago) are available online, for free, in PDF, at http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/ .

This is how science should be.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#68

Post by jtwb » Tue, Aug 30, 2011, 6:43 PM UTC

We forget the value of curation.

Why can a boutique shop sell a $50 dress for $200? Taste. One could simply walk into that boutique, confident that 20 minutes later a cute, fashionable and well-fitting dress would be acquired.

Why can top universities charge so much for tuition? Every year, %s University generates a curated list of individuals, and many hiring processes (not to mention ad-hoc interpersonal filtering processes) emphasize individuals in that list. Like boutique shopping, this is an expensive strategy that often excludes superior talent, but is fast.

Is it worth $200,000 to have one's name on that list? Apparently.

Is it worth application fees and an iron publishing agreement to have one's paper published in Nature. Apparently.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#69

Post by mateo42 » Tue, Aug 30, 2011, 8:00 PM UTC

electrichead wrote: post #24

impendia wrote: post #20

I heard an interesting argument from my advisor (a very famous mathematician). I strongly disagree with it, but it is the only argument I have heard for keeping this system in place. His argument was the following: In many fields such as laboratory science, research is expensive; one has to apply for grants and then spend the money, and these departments have large budgets, and this all looks good to deans. If a depa…

I'm not sure about that. If you pump out a tonne of great research, but use relatively less money, wouldn't that make you look better? Or is the academic world that far removed from the rest of the economy?

It's really sad that this is the case, but in the lab I worked for at a UC many of our costs were complete BS made up so that we could use up the full amount of our grant. The system encourages this behavior. The logic is completely flawed: If you don't use the money, then you obviously don't need it. Next time you won't receive the full amount from your grant. When your grant is millions of dollars over a few years, you end up having a lot of very nice dinners paid for with money that was meant to be used for research and education.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#70

Post by rmc » Tue, Aug 30, 2011, 8:05 PM UTC

starwed wrote: post #54

rmc wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking as an academic, these companies do nothing for us Start the revolution at home. Put PDFs on your university website. Ask your collegues to do likewise, ask the rest of university to do likewise. Start the ball rolling.

That doesn't really fulfill the "quality signal" aspect of journals, though -- the replacement would be some sort of open journal that still had peer review. There was an Elsevier math journal where the entire editorial staff got fed up, quit, and then simply founded a new journal on the same subject. That's the sort of thing most likely to bring the big journals down, not self publication by individuals. (Well, that…

You're probably right that there's a good value add to come from journals. However the internet works well, and that's a pile of individual pages/web sites, so I think it'll all work out.