Ask HN: Why aren't scientific journals free on the web?

The internet allows for a much more powerful system than the current journal system, much more powerful than even an open journal system.

Some things I'd like to see in a unified online open system:

* Hyperlinking between papers

* Discussion threads for papers

* Collaborative mark ups of papers, so that difficult papers can be communally dissected and fleshed out, or so that students can work through a paper and provide a mark up to ease the reading for other students

* An ongoing wiki for every subfield, detailing current outstanding problems, papers to read to get up to speed, most recent progress, etc, as well as curating accepted knowledge. Wikis should also be able to be marked up by students, so that difficult material can be broken down and fleshed out for the sake of other students.

In physics and math, a lot of the the intellectual/ academic "action" (a combination of the sharing of results + acclamation by peers (for tenure and promotion)) has moved to preprint servers, specifically http://arxiv.org. Instead of the closed peer review process, what happens is that your scientific peers either start citing you publically or they rip you to shreds publically -- just as good for judging a result as three anonymous (and usually old and set in their ways) reviewers.

This move really pisses off the big publishing houses/ copyright owners like Wiley, but whenever they blather about anonymous peer review what they are really saying is "we make a lot of money off this process -- don't take it away".

The problem with systems like arxiv -- and the reason why all academics don't go there in droves -- is that acedemia promotes people and the govt gives grants based on a formula: sum(journal_prestige .* number_articles). Take away the current system and there is no way to evaluate anybody.

What about via their intellectual merit, you ask? You can prove things in the experimental sciences and math, but in the humanities and the social "sciences" (ack!), there is no objective criteria for evaluating whether a potential hire is either "good" or "not so good" except the above formula. What makes it worse, is that in the social sciences, nobody ever reads papers unless their advisor or one of their advisor's friends wrote it, so if you are on a hiring committee outside your field, you don't know shit about most potential hires (except sum(prestige .* count))

As for the cost -- the internet makes it basically free -- all you have to do is host a bunch of pdf's and have a search function. Fairly trivial for a linux enabled programmer in a university. It is the sociology of it all that prevents the move to open articles.

One of the contradictions, though, to the evaluation argument above is that academics increase in value with each citation, so it hurts an academic to put barriers in front of her papers. Academics almost NEVER make royalties, btw.

(The linked article makes many of the same points.)

A lot of hot academics just put pdf's of their articles on their personal website anyway.

Let's look at these costs a little bit, and whether they still apply with the internet --

Printing: No need to have printed journals at all ever again. If a library wants an archive they can do it on their local hp and bind it. Free.

Reviewing: Done by volunteers. Free.

Editing: Done in the reviewing process, plus journals don't "work with" authors helping them to craft their paragraphs. There is an editor who might say "this is unreadable, resubmit", but that's all. Free or darn close.

Creating PDF's or publishable documents: This now happens on the researchers desk, and is basically free once you buy office software. There are plenty of people in a university to prep an article to be really, really pretty if you bother to print it out. Free.

Hosting PDF's and data: Universities have enough leftover computers and FTE's that they can do this without charging an account. Free.

So what is the cost to an open journal? The fact that it is going to inevitably do to the academic journal business what craigslist did to the newspaper classified business....

Sorry, time marches on.

Removing barriers to increase citation count, h-index, etc is the primary argument for open access from an author's perspective. I went to a talk at Georgia Tech on open access recently, put on by the library, and they harped really hard on this. Removing barriers can even increase the reputation of a research institution with more highly cited faculty.

Yes, but the question is about the ones that are asking for money. They are always behind for-profit organisations.