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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

#261

Post by dougmccune »

reacweb wrote: post #170
dougmccune wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I assume the price is probably too high, but for $50/month you can essentially get access to a Netflix for articles, called DeepDyve[1]. It's certainly not complete in that they don't have agreements with every publisher on the planet, but there's a lot of content on there.

[1] https://www.deepdyve.com/

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

#262

Post by Vinnl »

michaelt wrote: post #226
Vinnl wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone realizes this. They absolutely don't. Every time this subject comes up, there are plenty of people wondering how expensive it can be to host a PDF. It's not; the price they're asking is not for the service of hosting a PDF, but for granting you the privilege of using their brand. A publisher has a monopoly on its brands, which means that there's almost no downwards price pressure.

Every time this subject comes up, there are plenty of people wondering how expensive it can be to host a PDF. I always assumed that was a rhetorical technique, a sort of jargon-free shorthand for "Given that variable costs are so low but the prices so high, surely this company's managers are either sinfully greedy with their profit margin, or sinfully inept in their inability to control back office costs"

Right, but "inept in their ability control costs" is irrelevant: the price they ask is for the brand, not for the costs of producing anything.

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

#263

Post by Vinnl »

jamesrcole wrote: post #236
Vinnl wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone realizes this. They absolutely don't. Every time this subject comes up, there are plenty of people wondering how expensive it can be to host a PDF. It's not; the price they're asking is not for the service of hosting a PDF, but for granting you the privilege of using their brand. A publisher has a monopoly on its brands, which means that there's almost no downwards price pressure.

There are two issues 1. why the system is as it is (and why it's hard to change) 2. what work are the publishers doing that is actually contributing value The hosting cost is a point regarding 2, and making that point is consistent with understanding 1.

I agree, but I will still argue that people making the PDF download point are often conflating points 1 and 2.

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

#264

Post by scottlocklin »

Angostura wrote: post #21
avs733 wrote: post #19

Add in that the quality of the system is massively massively broken...peer review is about as accurate as the flip of a coin. It does not promote gorund breaking or novel research, it barely (arguably doesn't) even contribute to quality research. I had a colleague recently be told by a journal editor 'we don't publish critiques from junior scholars.' So much for the nature of peer review being entirely driven by the…

What would be a good alternative to peer-review though? Genuinely interested.

This answer will not please the 'publish or perish' economy which has built up around this: editorial discretion (which is a sort of peer review) and about 10x fewer papers published per capita involved.

Its how science worked for most of its history. Really, Elsiever is responsible for the profusion of people publishing fluff to weak journals, subsidized by the government.

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

#265

Post by em-bee »

notyourday wrote: post #255
em-bee wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business. And when you start peeling back the onion of how academics are assessed, given jobs, given tenure, etc you start seeing how hard changing behavior can be. there is no doubt about that. but maybe it's time to question how science is done in general. in the end the goal is to advance our knowledge and bring humanity forward. but instead of everyone cooperat…

> in the end the goal is to advance our knowledge and bring humanity forward. That's not true. The end goal of scientists is to get get grants to they can get paid. As they climb higher, they get more money for less work. Soon they get to attach their name ( sometimes in the first position ) to academic papers when they did no work on it what so ever. To do that they means they need to generate papers and publish pap…

i wasn't talking about the goals of individual scientists, but the goal or the purpose of science as a whole. why do scientific research? if it's for fame then you'll have more chances as an actor.

no, there can only be one reason for publicly funded scientific research. to advance our society.

as for academics having no interest in technology. yes, that is a problem. but that is changing. the younger generations are more comfortable with technology, and i am guessing that if they don't use modern tools, it's because their supervisors can't deal with them, and they are not bold enough to change the status quo. but they will once they are in charge.

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

#266

Post by secabeen »

ben_jones wrote: post #106
secabeen wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He claims that digital distribution isn't cheaper than analog. I don't doubt that, given the amounts of money it probably costs to build effective DRM and paywall systems. Were all journals open-access, their costs would be a lot lower too. Sci-Hub hosts 85% of the articles published in paywalled scholarly journals on a shoe-string.

I think it should be acknowledged that there are likely a number of accessibility and similar requirements that at scale bear non-trivial costs. I.e. building a website with top of the line accessibility, providing resources for auditory and visually impared, etc. I'm not saying current publishers are great at these things, just that they should not be forgotten and should be improved on if a new order was to take sh…

That's a good point, and accessibility of science is a big issue across the academy, as the Berkeley captioning case shows. The DRM/subscription piece of digital publishing is still probably the biggest cost of their model.

I remember but can't find a citation for an apocryphal story that the administrative overhead of metering, tracking and billing phone calls in the Ma Bell days was more than 50% of the cost.

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

#267

Post by randomsearch »

dougmccune wrote: post #254
randomsearch wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As the parent didn't reply, I will fill in: People trying to change or improve the publishing process _do_ understand academia - most of them work or have worked in academia. The reason they're not engaging with you is likely that that your model is so obviously broken, and arguably unethical, that they don't want to help you or work with you - they want to put you out of business. Personally, I think that is an enti…

I didn't mean engage with the publishers to work together with them. I meant engage in the conversation to really understand why changing the behavior of academics is so hard, so that you can be more effective at doing whatever you are trying to do to put publishers out of business. There are a lot of things that publishers don't like about academic publishing (journal impact factor is highly contentious within the i…

I think there is plenty of engagement in that conversation, via new alternative publishing models, but putting that aside for a second, I think there are two separate issues here:

1. Academia has a broken incentive model. I agree with you, I think this is a valid point.

2. Academic publishing is an exploitative monopolistic business.

I don't think the big publishers will be able to do much about (1), because they haven't done anything about (2) - which seems to me to be a much easier problem to solve, as the power is in your hands to immediately start paying reviewers for their time, as a simple example.

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

#268

Post by randomsearch »

dsjoerg wrote: post #249
randomsearch wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. This is inaccurate. This is not a part of a postdoc's job description, for example, in the UK. The university does not pay you to do this - you have to review on top of your day job.

What do you mean "have to"? What happens if you don't?

Turn of phrase here, fair point. I meant "if you want to review, then it will be additional time outside of doing your paid work."

Second question is an interesting point: what happens if you don't review? I can tell you that it is certainly the case that a lot of academics don't do reviewing. Given the amount of reviewing I and my colleagues do, there must be others who are not doing their fair share (say 3 x your submission rate) of reviews. What are the consequences of not reviewing? Perhaps you can be seen as a freeloader, some social cost, but mostly people just won't know unless you're replying to them directly.

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

#269

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

simonh wrote: post #213
YeGoblynQueenne wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you think the current legacy model of journals and the peer review of articles isn't contributing to knowledge?

I'm sorry, I don't know what the legacy model is. If you mean the way academic publishing works right now, I don't think anyone disputes the fact that publishing to a journal, free or not, constitutes a contribution to knowledge. I mean, I sure do not.

The way I understand the debate about reforming academic publishing, it's about the morality of profiting from resources set aside for public benefit, rather than private (or corporate) profit.

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

#270

Post by dmitriid »

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…

The price of $40 has nothing to do with copyright.
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