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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

#291

Post by shrimpx »

ms013 wrote: post #154
Fomite wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Same for my PhD advisor and current/past students. Unfortunately, this HN post seems to be full of the usual cohort of passionately opinionated HN readers who don’t have a deep understanding about that which they’re passionately opinionated about.

You should elaborate with some detail instead of ad hominem.

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

#292

Post by dmitriid »

dougmccune wrote: post #271
dmitriid wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 subsc…

> 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.

It's not. Unless it's a way to drive people to buy subscription. That is: "pay $40 for a single article, or pay just $19.99 a month to access all of them". Which is also crappy.

> 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.

This is true, unfortunately (same goes for media such as audio and video, sadly).

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

#293

Post by mcbits »

nl wrote: post #203
mcbits wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd favor something like clustering and client-side filtering over gatekeeping. Mainstream academic research can coexist just fine with fringe theories and industry research in the same database as long as one can efficiently distinguish between them. And keeping everything together in one (de)central database would make it possible for people, so inclined, to annotate other people's work with new references to suppo…

Mainstream academic research can coexist just fine with fringe theories and industry research in the same database as long as one can efficiently distinguish between them How do you propose that is done? For my job I build neural networks for text processing. I spend a lot of time reading papers in the field. And yet if I look at something in an adjacent field (even something as close as something like open informati…

Arxiv accidentally created a crackpot filter from apparently a simple semantic classifier along with a count of stop words used in the article, which acts as a very coarse "style" metric.[1] Reasonable-looking crackpot work is usually classified as "general physics" instead of being rejected entirely. Unfortunately it also lumps some legitimate but unconventional research in with the crackpots and makes Arxiv itself somewhat of a gatekeeper.

What I'm imagining is a sort of layered approach with raw "article" (or some other unit) data at the bottom and indexing, tagging, clustering, filtering, reviewing, commenting, linking, etc. layered on top with possibly many implementations to choose from.

The analysis/filtering would also apply to people augmenting the data, so if some users are really good at tagging certain types of junk as junk, you could easily filter out that junk. If there emerges a cluster of users who keep tagging certain interesting material as "woo" then you could filter them out or even use them to discover interesting material.

I doubt there's a silver bullet (at least today) that could reliably distinguish between unconventional-bad and unconventional-good work, but keeping the baby and the bathwater together opens the door to such an algorithm in the future.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/1603.03824

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

#294

Post by benbreen »

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…

Respectfully, it troubles me a bit to see the burden of responsibility being shifted to "the academic community." On my docket for the day is completing a referee report for a 500-page academic book manuscript. It's my second time reading this ms and making pages of comments on it, and the publisher is paying me $80 for my time. That works out to pay of about $2/hour.

As I get further into academia I am amazed at the amount of work we do that is uncompensated yet required of us by the antiquated system of prestige that you mentioned in your parent comment. Perhaps it isn't so much that academics are stubbornly committed to an outmoded system, it's that we literally have no time or energy to do anything beyond the bare minimum of meeting that system's constraints.

Given that the public for-profit publishers are reporting profit margins that put tech companies to shame, I don't really buy the argument that it's the academic community who are holding things back. The perverse incentive here is clearly concentrated on the publisher side, not ours.

I really appreciate that you are taking the time to respond to comments in this thread though, thank you for posting.

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

#295

Post by dougmccune »

benbreen wrote: post #294
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…

Respectfully, it troubles me a bit to see the burden of responsibility being shifted to "the academic community." On my docket for the day is completing a referee report for a 500-page academic book manuscript. It's my second time reading this ms and making pages of comments on it, and the publisher is paying me $80 for my time. That works out to pay of about $2/hour. As I get further into academia I am amazed at the…

I think there's enough frustration to go around. I don't doubt your story. The life of an academic (especially a young, non-tenured academic) is brutal.

To provide a frustrating anecdote from the publisher's side: we'd love to heavily invest in launching new open access journals (which we do, but we'd love to do even more). The problem with launching a new journal (either subscription or OA) is that nobody will publish in it if it doesn't have an impact factor. Impact factor is controlled by a private, for-profit company (Clarivate) that's owned by a private equity firm. Getting an impact factor takes 3-5 years and also relies on the total crapshoot of what Clarivate decides to list or not list. So the prospect of launching a new OA journal is one where you are guaranteed to lose money for the first 3-5 years and then you have to put all your eggs in the impact factor basket, hope you get listed and receive an impact factor, and only after all that will academics choose your journal over any established legacy brand. And all this because at some point academia decided that they'd outsource academic career assessment to the magic number that is Impact Factor.

I also want to thank you and the other commenters for some good discourse here. This has been refreshing and I was only called an asshole once the whole time! But jokes aside, a sincere thanks :)

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

#296

Post by [deleted] »

jonathanstrange wrote: post #220
a3_nm wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that the vast majority of established researchers do not care that the system is broken. Why work against the system once you're at the top? Most of them haven't ever thought about it, and the ones who know usually don't do much, because, hey, that's the way it was always done, they are used to the current journals and conferences being prestigious, and they don't want to bother with the unglamorous wo…

My problem is that I'm being continuously evaluated on the basis of my publications and the future of my position literally depends on this evaluation every year. I have to get as many publications into as highly reputed international journals as possible if I want to have any chance at getting a permanent position, and the vast majority of all reputable journals in my area are behind private paywalls. There is a max…

[deleted]

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

#297

Post by logifail »

dougmccune wrote: post #295
benbreen wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, it troubles me a bit to see the burden of responsibility being shifted to "the academic community." On my docket for the day is completing a referee report for a 500-page academic book manuscript. It's my second time reading this ms and making pages of comments on it, and the publisher is paying me $80 for my time. That works out to pay of about $2/hour. As I get further into academia I am amazed at the…

I think there's enough frustration to go around. I don't doubt your story. The life of an academic (especially a young, non-tenured academic) is brutal. To provide a frustrating anecdote from the publisher's side: we'd love to heavily invest in launching new open access journals (which we do, but we'd love to do even more). The problem with launching a new journal (either subscription or OA) is that nobody will publi…

>> Impact factor is controlled by a private, for-profit company (Clarivate) that's owned by a private equity firm

In the first year of my PhD the final-year student on "our" project, who I shared a bench with, told me all about impact factors and which journals he was hoping to get his paper published in.

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

#299

Post by logifail »

chrisseaton wrote: post #259
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.

If your job is an academic then of course the job implicitly includes reviewing papers. That's what being an academic involves. It's part of your normal paid day-job if you have an academic position, either in industry or in a university. Do you think academics and industrial researchers take holiday when they have to travel to a program committee meeting? No of course not, they do it during work time and are paid fo…

[Speaking from my experiences as a PhD student] once an academic is sufficiently senior they can do what they damn well like. My boss came in late, took long lunch breaks, and went home early.

Back to the topic: if he received papers to be reviewed, he gave them to his post-docs.

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

#300

Post by eecc »

sweezyjeezy wrote: post #155
eecc wrote: post #152

Academics, I have a proposal/question and was curious if such a system would work for you. Here it goes: Take a P2P program similar to Kazaa or BitTorrent to share paper pdfs and datasets. Next to these files also share indexes, derived data for searching. Next to that, also share user generated review comments and endorsements to implement peer review and quality filtering. Finally, digitally sign all these data to…

Not sure that user generated review comments are a good idea - it would be to hard to convince people (me included), that they'd be a good replacement for peer-review. You don't know the user's expertise, you have no guarantee that they have read the paper. Granted that last one is sometimes not true in real world publishing either - but at least the social pressure is there. It could also lead to gaming, asking your…

Well the UGC I was thinking of is like http://www.openannotation.org mainly used to link to other papers and/or comment of draft papers. Also simple “Reviewed” tags, and other classification items.

Since any derived data would be signed and linked to the identity of its author a default filter removes anything that is not transitively included in your academic network.

Reviewed articles would just be “review count > N and reviewers in fieldNet”

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