Am I the only one that thinks comparing profit margins of a publisher and a software/hardware company is a bit far fetched?
Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees
211–220 of 254 posts
Re: Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees
#212In the age of Github/Gitlab, federated database systems & search, plus social media, and many other advances... we need to move off the old model of publishing research. I offer to the HN community that modern research 'publishing' should include: - providing all raw data - provided a timestamped electronic lab notebook that documented what you and when you did it... if applicable. - working code for your data analys…
GitHub, the company with the closed-source platform, training CoPilot on their users' hosted code against license terms. That's to be our guiding star?
Re: Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees
#213In the age of Github/Gitlab, federated database systems & search, plus social media, and many other advances... we need to move off the old model of publishing research. I offer to the HN community that modern research 'publishing' should include: - providing all raw data - provided a timestamped electronic lab notebook that documented what you and when you did it... if applicable. - working code for your data analys…
Exploitative publishing is not a technical problem. Publishing a journal isn't very hard and in particular in the academic world where writing stuff and organizing committees is something that people do all the time. Tons of artifacts are already available on various software and data repositories, either public or institutional.
The problem is that through some hoops of history a couple companies hold quite firmly the political control of important (and less important) journals and publications. To attack this there is no other way than to organize and move the journals to either an alternative administrative "host" entity (university, association, ...) or setup a new one. Which takes time, lots of emails, solid reputation and some luck in convincing people that have a say. And it's not like the academic world is particularly well currently, with everybody having tons of time to bootstrap such things.
Just calling for change and starting your "github for research" won't do anything (semantic scholar exists, tons of startup exist in this space). Anyone a bit serious studying what's happening for 1h can come up with tons of deficiencies. The question to ask is why it stays in this obviously deficient state: corporate political control, time, support from employers, ..
Re: Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees
#214Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? First off, if the only publisher you have a problem with is Elsevier, you have already shown your hand. A half dozen other publishers are more expensive, but you can only name Elsevier. That means you're just repeating a meme that started on forums like this one. So take a moment and ask yourself why any of these publisher…
> Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? I find this with almost any topic I am familiar with. The absolute confidence with which certain things were stated on HN was completely different from my lived experience. This made me start placing less value on HN comments, and going and reading up more when I found a topic interesting. I also find comments related to…
Same issue here, could be a topic that I have 10 years of experience in both academically and professionally. The instant contrarianism without any experiene is quite astounding.
Re: Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees
#215In the age of Github/Gitlab, federated database systems & search, plus social media, and many other advances... we need to move off the old model of publishing research. I offer to the HN community that modern research 'publishing' should include: - providing all raw data - provided a timestamped electronic lab notebook that documented what you and when you did it... if applicable. - working code for your data analys…
Exploitative publishing is not a technical problem. Publishing a journal isn't very hard and in particular in the academic world where writing stuff and organizing committees is something that people do all the time. Tons of artifacts are already available on various software and data repositories, either public or institutional. The problem is that through some hoops of history a couple companies hold quite firmly t…
In fields where there aren't too many adversarial players (i'm talking about big industrial companies) like math or compsci things are kind of ok already. Its in biology and medicine where it's the worst. It's obviously because their fields are much more penetrated by the industry and more generally by economical goals. At some point you gotta be blind not to see that the ones dragging us behind (or more generally holding levers) are the guys with the big bucks.
Re: Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees
#216Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of the same vibe: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."
This doesn't even make sense looking at national politics, which are far more vicious and the stakes are much higher.
The claim was that national politics is less vicious, e.g. personal attacks are less common. I don't know if that's still people's experience, but it was felt to be true at the time.
Re: Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees
#217Honestly if even $1 of public money goes toward research, the work, data, journal, etc should all be public domain. End of story. That should be a basic requirement of taking public funds.
The NIH indeed requires all work published under their grants to be made available open-access. Problem is publishers figured out that meant they could charge EVEN MORE for submissions to be made open access than they charged for standard closed publishing. Wiley charged me $2,975 last year for an accepted submission to Human Brain Mapping.
And why did you pay if i may ask? I would guess it's because if you don't your career will be in trouble because that's what employers value.
The current state of affair isn't a random thing. It's because the global policy of employment in public research and the definition of success is completely stupid and based on metrics (i don't care which metrics, the sole fact that we try to quantify everything just makes this kind of situations possible).
Re: Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees
#218Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? First off, if the only publisher you have a problem with is Elsevier, you have already shown your hand. A half dozen other publishers are more expensive, but you can only name Elsevier. That means you're just repeating a meme that started on forums like this one. So take a moment and ask yourself why any of these publisher…
> Of course, the customers complain about the price, so the question is, why not just buy something cheaper? Because that would defeat the whole point, which is to buy prestige.
You're basing your whole argumentation on the fact that only money can provide prestige which is upside down. The community provides prestige. History provides prestige. They just happen to have captured it and monetized it.
In fields like compsci -- at least in the subfield of programming languages which i know about -- the most prestigious journals and conferences are being run by independent (non-profit) institutions, charge pennies and publish open access. They are still prestigious.
Re: Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees
#219Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I read in this is that sci-hub is only a third of the solution of cutting out the middle man. The another third is a credible place for researchers to publish to. The current publishers are trying to retain a dead model. We don't really need a publisher anymore. What they do provide that I haven't seed a good solution for is visibility among peers. Sci-hub is great to grab a paper when you already know the DOI.…
Google Scholar, Arxiv and Researchgate make a pretty robust solution for paper discovery
They don't provide a good solution for filtered/ranked paper discovery, one where someone else sorts the papers so you have to skim through less garbage. For paper discovery the main problem is the overabundance of noise, not the ability to find everything (which is indeed solved already). There are excellent papers both on Arxiv as well as in (for example) NeurIPS proceedings, and there is is trash both on Arxiv as well as in NeurIPS proceedings; but the signal-to-noise ratio is vastly different. And the effect of the 25%-ish acceptance rate in many publication venues is not just cutting out 75% of the papers, because for each rejected paper there's probably two (or a dozen?) more which don't even get submitted there because the authors know it'll get rejected, so such a filter removes 90% or more of papers in a manner that's correlated (definitely imperfectly, but still meaningfully) to whether you'd want to read or skim them.
Re: Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees
#220Earlier quoted context omitted.
The NIH indeed requires all work published under their grants to be made available open-access. Problem is publishers figured out that meant they could charge EVEN MORE for submissions to be made open access than they charged for standard closed publishing. Wiley charged me $2,975 last year for an accepted submission to Human Brain Mapping.
And why did you pay if i may ask? I would guess it's because if you don't your career will be in trouble because that's what employers value. The current state of affair isn't a random thing. It's because the global policy of employment in public research and the definition of success is completely stupid and based on metrics (i don't care which metrics, the sole fact that we try to quantify everything just makes thi…
They probably paid because, as the grandparent post suggested, taking public funds from NIH imposes a requirement to publish the research results in this manner, so for the research team it's an unavoidable part of the expenses related to the grant - and so it's not the researchers' money nor their decision; NIH defined what they want and so they're paying publishers a significant portion of their funding for that.