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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

#271

Post by dougmccune »

dmitriid wrote: post #270
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…

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

Right, sorry for the confusion. I was responding to two separate items in the question. One was the price, the other was the age of the article. I thought the question was clearly asking about both. Question 1: is $40 fair? Question 2: is that price (or potentially any price) fair for an article over 30 years old? My opinion is that $40 is not a fair price for a single article, and yet it's required to make the subscription business model work. And my second opinion is that the duration of copyright should be shorter. Obviously these opinions are in conflict with the business with which I'm involved, and are certainly not shared by most others within the industry.

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

#272

Post by dougmccune »

randomsearch wrote: post #267
dougmccune wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 hav…

I hear you and it's a totally valid point. We could start paying reviewers tomorrow. I'm not convinced that adding a monetary incentive to the peer review process doesn't have its own serious negative consequences, but I'm certainly open to the idea that that's a potentially better version of the system than what we have now. It's certainly a difficult business decision to push through, given the universal lack of anyone doing so industry-wide, but that doesn't make it the wrong thing to do, and it certainly could be a differentiating factor if done well (ie by speeding up the review process a publisher might be able to increase author satisfaction and also increase article output, which in an OA world has a direct revenue impact).

I do have an issue calling it a monopoly, however. At best you can call it an oligopoly. The top 5 publishers publish about half the total articles each year [1]. So half the research is published by a combination of hundreds of smaller publishers (both for-profit and not) or independent scholarly societies. And then within the top publishers, they are absolutely in competition with each other, which becomes readily apparent when you dig into the royalty deals that publishers offer scholarly societies for the rights to publish their journals, which continue to get richer for the societies (which poses a whole different interesting problem in terms of the collateral damage to modern-day scholarly societies if or when the business model blows up).

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

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

#273

Post by dougmccune »

jamesrcole wrote: post #216
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…

> I know the industry is particularly frustrating to the HN crowd. We want to think it's a technology problem - that distributing PDFs is a solved problem (which it obviously is). That's not at all my impression of these discussions. If people thought it was just a technical problem, then they'd think it would be easy to change the current setup. If people thought it was just a technical problem they wouldn't have su…

I certainly made a broad generalization, but in this HN discussion you can find people asking why we can't just have a simple HN or Stack Overflow-like site for upvotes and downvotes instead of the existing peer review system (implying that it would be trivial to apply the tech used for social discourse online to academic publishing) and another comment about spinning up a peer-to-peer BitTorrent approach to distributing digitally signed data. And in every discussion of the topic on HN that I've read someone always asks the same type of question about why this is still a problem when it should be trivial to apply software tech toward a solution. My intent wasn't to discourage folks brainstorming technical improvements for the system, it was only to point out for anyone who isn't entrenched in the intricacies that there's a lot of reasons for the dysfunctional system to both exist and persist.

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

#274

Post by dougmccune »

idiot900 wrote: post #211
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…

I agree, the solution is not a technical one, it's about money. If funding agencies require, as they should, day one free and open access, the problem will solve itself. Not without a good deal of temporary pain, but it will be solved. (I am an early career professor who has to worry about promotion - and am happy to bear the pain of such a transition.)

One thing to think about is what happens to academic fields that are not well funded? Plan S makes sense for funded research in STM disciplines. If we accept that publishing does cost some amount of money then it seems reasonable to have the funding of the research also cover that cost. Obviously we can argue about what a reasonable cost is ($100? $500? $5,000?), but it's certainly non-zero (even though yes, you can find specific examples of zero-cost publishing, but not on a scale that works for the system as a whole).

But what about the humanities and social sciences, which are typically not funded by government or foundation grants? We currently have a system in which the expectation of the academics is that they can publish for free because the universities pay for that cost via subscriptions. Changing to an author-pays model, which Plan S seems to push the industry toward, doesn't work for a lot of academic fields. There are certainly alternatives, like university libraries converting some of the funding they currently use for subscriptions to cover publication costs, or entire governments covering all publication costs for every academic within their borders. But it's not as easy to see exactly how the non-zero cost of publishing is covered outside well-funded disciplines.

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

#275

Post by dougmccune »

em-bee wrote: post #156
dougmccune wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you're asking about the role that academic journals play in general, or about what specific actions publishers do. Journals in general serve to curate an ever-increasing body of research and provide a crude method of gauging scientific quality, relevance to your field, and importance. They provide a crude method of judging the impact of scholars without having to read every single paper ever published. Pu…

out of those identifying new fields that are in need of new journals to help disciplines form and mature, ensuring standards of the scientific method are being followed are things that really should be done by academics and not by hired professionals. if commercial publishers are doing that now, it means that academics have dropped their responsibility on this.

Yes?

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

#276

Post by dougmccune »

garmaine wrote: post #225
dougmccune wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you're asking about the role that academic journals play in general, or about what specific actions publishers do. Journals in general serve to curate an ever-increasing body of research and provide a crude method of gauging scientific quality, relevance to your field, and importance. They provide a crude method of judging the impact of scholars without having to read every single paper ever published. Pu…

The only tangible benefit I can read into that is peer review, which isn’t paid for by the journals at all. Open access journals have demonstrated the ability to have effective peer review journals without the middlemen. Otherwise you haven’t mentioned anything of actual value.

OA journals are a middleman too. They typically charge, just in a different way. In fact, popular OA journals can have much higher profit margins than your average subscription journal. If you're advocating for free publishing (whether OA or not) I'd challenge the belief that a system can scale to the current needs of the academic community without charging someone (institutions, governments, authors) and fees of some kind. You can certainly make the argument that the world would be a better place with all actors in the endeavor being non-profits, but that still doesn't at all mean free publishing.

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

#277

Post by amanaplanacanal »

ekianjo wrote: post #59
Angostura wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> What would be a good alternative to peer-review though? Genuinely interested. Replicating researches? That's how we prove findings are not wrong or biased, usually.

Yes. The fact that we have so much published research that can't be replicated indicates to me that peer-review is doing less work than we think it is.

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

#278

Post by notyourday »

em-bee wrote: post #265
notyourday wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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.

And that is not going to happen for next fifteen to twenty years.

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

#279

Post by guscost »

kilburn wrote: post #175
guscost wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anonymous doesn’t have to mean secret, although it isn’t always trivial to achieve.

Examine the facts: - Many research fields have anywhere between 3 and 10 groups working in them. - A review always transpires the background of the reviewer. You just cannot "mask" the shape of your knowledge around a highly-specialized subject. This includes your approach to the problem, the issues you are most interested in (and hence know more about), the references you give, etc. With a closed system, you only ge…

In the current system, when you get to see the reviews of your paper, there are still the same challenges for anonymity and ugly consequences that you’re pointing out. Perhaps even to a greater degree, because the information is “leaked” through gossip rather than in a formal process.

If all reviewer comments were collected and then published at the same time to prevent them influencing each other, how could that make the situation with respect to “frank and honest” reviews any worse than it is already?

Are there entirely secret journals where nothing is accessible to non-contributors, for the same reasons? I suspect the answer is no, which is why these feuds often play out in attack-counterattack sequences of published papers.

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

#280

Post by specialist »

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…

"I'm a shareholder and board member of a large privately-held, family-owned academic publishing company. ... You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business."

Prove it. Get out ahead of these issues. Add value. Progress marches on. Lead the way.

Let's assume (for scope of this comment) the replication crisis is the biggest threat to everyone's reputation.

What would a solution look like?

More access & transparency & accountability.

Imagine a scholarly clearing house that facilitated the existing processes and workflows.

Something like github.com for warehousing all the data. Something like a collaborative editor. Something like scholar.google.com to better find & forage for stuff. Something like linkedin.com for researchers to connect and share their thoughts.

Maybe even a brokerage for grants, connecting funders with applicants, help administrate the administrivia.

Publishers would still publish journals. The cream rises to the top. aka curation. As Scott Galloway likes to say "Information wants to be expensive."

TL;DR: Innovate to add value in a changing world, instead using the status quo to continue rent seeking.

--

"It's like discussing politics online."

For policy work (vs electoral politics), I very much agree. Policy work has it's own replication crisis.

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