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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

#281

Post by czzr »

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.

“Open access journals have demonstrated the ability to have effective peer review journals without the middlemen.”

Open access journals are basically the same as traditional journals, they just charge authors up front, rather than readers later. I don’t understand what you mean by your sentence above - they haven’t demonstrated anything close to what you claim.

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

#282

Post by bargl »

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…

This is similar to what I've seen from numerous Non-Govt orgs that try to help in other countries.

A very specific example. In the US, there was a research team building a (post earthquake) hut that could be built with only plywood and also was built to be "tightened down" to resist earthquakes and hurricane force winds. It had anchors and was a really cool technology. I went to Haiti and the people there would rather live in tents temporarily and move into a concrete house because that's how you build a house. Compare this to Paul Farmer, who was on the ground and built a network of medical facilities by including the people he wanted to help. He's been (by my standards) wildly successful.

It's easy to see a change that seems obvious from the outside, but if you don't get in and work on the ground floor to disrupt with people and change culture you're making your job way harder. Get in and talk to people, figure out why, and remember that people are just that people. Politics / Culture are unavoidable. Sometimes the easy part is the technology and that a'int easy.

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

#283

Post by kilburn »

guscost wrote: post #279
kilburn wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mak…

> So when you see the reviews of your own paper, there are the exact same challenges for anonymity and ugly consequences as you’re pointing out.

Yes, and this already happens (hence the grudges I was commenting about).

> How does maintaining secrecy for the per-paper improve the situation with respect to “frank and honest” reviews?

By increasing the uncertainty. If I am 95% confident it is you who screwed me last year and 50% certain this paper I got now is yours, I will look at it with a harsher attitude than if I'm only 20% and 20% certain.

If you were to publish all reviews then researchers would have much more information to convince themselves that it indeed is "that guy".

It is sad, and I personally despise it, but that's what it is from my personal experience.

PS: I quit academia after getting the PhD, and this was among the reasons for me to quit. The other major reasons being that I don't want to keep relocating somewhere else in the world every 2 years until I'm in my 40s-50s, I don't like the overselling and result dishonesty in general, and I actually enjoy working in industry too).

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

#284

Post by guscost »

kilburn wrote: post #283
guscost wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mak…

> So when you see the reviews of your own paper, there are the exact same challenges for anonymity and ugly consequences as you’re pointing out. Yes, and this already happens (hence the grudges I was commenting about). > How does maintaining secrecy for the per-paper improve the situation with respect to “frank and honest” reviews? By increasing the uncertainty. If I am 95% confident it is you who screwed me last yea…

> By increasing the uncertainty. If I am 95% confident it is you who screwed me last year and 50% certain this paper I got now is yours, I will look at it with a harsher attitude than if I'm only 20% and 20% certain.

Ouch, that’s a good (and depressing) point.

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

#285

Post by dang »

garmaine wrote: post #123
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…

Could you summarize, in 50 words or less, what tangible benefit your family’s business provides to justify the intermediation? I’ll wait.

Please don't haul internet hostility tropes in here. That's just what the site guidelines are asking you to avoid.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#286

Post by dang »

BurnGpuBurn wrote: post #223
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…

> 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. Well I think we should all be grateful then that your Highness has come down to us 99% one-sided thinkers void of nuance or reason. Way to start a discussion, asshole. > I…

If you attack anyone like this on Hacker News again, we will ban you.

Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

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

#287

Post by jasode »

em-bee wrote: post #150
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…

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…

>how about a model like stackoverflow? papers are published like questions, and reviews are the answers. readers upvote good papers and good reviews, so that the most upvoted and most reviewed papers float to the top.

The problem is that long-form works that require substantial analysis by experts (such as scientific papers read by competent scientists) don't work for a voting system like Stackoverflow. Internet voting works on things like comments of HN but not for 20000 word papers.

(I made previous comments about the limitations of voting systems to vet academic papers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269673)

Basically, scientists are humans and human nature says they won't log into a system to upvote/downvote papers. Instead, they want a stronger signal than karma points before they spend (or potentially waste) their precious time on analyzing the merits of a long paper. That stronger signal is another respectable scientists that asks them to look at it.

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

#288

Post by kaitai »

laichzeit0 wrote: post #162
impendia wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No reviewers are ever paid either That's almost true. Elsevier once surprised me with a $100 Amazon gift card, which they said was in recognition for a particularly good job of peer review that year. I'd laugh at the prospect of Elsevier rewarding me with "recognition" -- certainly something I would not put on my CV -- although I did take their money. Another time, the American Mathematical Society (which is non-pr…

What's your hourly rate? How many hours did you spend reviewing? Divide that $100 by the hours and see if it was worth it.

The sibling commenters here have it right -- and I'll add that reviewing and similarly reading grant submissions are tasks that benefit the researcher as well. Sure, it's work, but you stay on top of the new stuff in your field, develop some sense of what's important and what's minutia, are able to identify new people coming into the field and how they or their work might interact with your own. If you don't review at all, you are actually missing a fair bit of professional development and power. It works fine for some not to review but for others it's an important part of the intellectual process.

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

#289

Post by shrimpx »

Fomite wrote: post #141
shrimpx wrote: post #124

The trouble here is that the entire academic structure is extremely difficult to question and change. Disrupting academia is kind of like disrupting the Catholic Church. It's so entrenched in its assumptions and rituals that trying to bring revolutionary change to it is pretty hopeless. Professors gained their status in this archaic structure and will resist challenging it. I mean, your PhD advisor will make sure you…

> I mean, your PhD advisor will make sure you never challenge the research status quo with your thesis topic This will come as a surprise to both my PhD advisor and my current advisee

You should elaborate. In my experience academia is largely a status structure where people are groomed to be hirable at schools X, Y, Z and publish regularly in conferences/journals A, B, C. You're saying this is fertile ground for hardcore innovation? No way. The extreme majority of the work is incremental and predictable; small low-impact results. (Disclaimer: My experience is in CS.)

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

#290

Post by kaitai »

davrosthedalek wrote: post #48
impendia wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by "not accepted" I mean "not published in the particular journal I was asked to review for".

The problem is the preceding if clause. You say that you do this if you find it uninteresting, or if you have no expertise in the field of the paper. Both of these are qualifiers of you, not of the paper, so indeed it seems harsh to punish the authors for the bad referee selection of the editor.

He'll decline the request or say it should not be accepted. Declining the request is just fine, and a reasonable thing to do. There are many mathematical results that are in fact uninteresting (to just about anyone) and it's fine to suggest those be rejected from a good journal.

I've had many paper rejections, none because of false or uninteresting claims but almost all because "it's not good enough for this prestige journal" or "it's too specialized for this journal". I expect a certain number of those, because I submit to reach journals now and then and hope I get a reviewer and editor that like the work :) If I wanted certain publication immediately I'd submit to lower-tier journals first, which I have also done when I just needed something out.

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