How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers? • Hacker News Board

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#31

Post by pwaring » Tue, Aug 30, 2011, 12:35 PM UTC

electrichead wrote: post #24

impendia wrote: post #20

I heard an interesting argument from my advisor (a very famous mathematician). I strongly disagree with it, but it is the only argument I have heard for keeping this system in place. His argument was the following: In many fields such as laboratory science, research is expensive; one has to apply for grants and then spend the money, and these departments have large budgets, and this all looks good to deans. If a depa…

I'm not sure about that. If you pump out a tonne of great research, but use relatively less money, wouldn't that make you look better? Or is the academic world that far removed from the rest of the economy?

Unfortunately it doesn't. If you hear the words 'efficiency' or 'value for money' being used at a UK university, it usually means they're about to announce a round of redundancies.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#32

Post by Duff » Tue, Aug 30, 2011, 12:40 PM UTC

electrichead wrote: post #24

impendia wrote: post #20

I heard an interesting argument from my advisor (a very famous mathematician). I strongly disagree with it, but it is the only argument I have heard for keeping this system in place. His argument was the following: In many fields such as laboratory science, research is expensive; one has to apply for grants and then spend the money, and these departments have large budgets, and this all looks good to deans. If a depa…

I'm not sure about that. If you pump out a tonne of great research, but use relatively less money, wouldn't that make you look better? Or is the academic world that far removed from the rest of the economy?

Remember that higher education is a bureaucracy, and since the types of conflict that spring up are really minor, they are particularly petty, nasty and status-centered.

In that sort of environment, your actual contribution to some objective goal has nothing at all to do with your position in the bureaucratic pecking order. That's why the basketball coach makes $2M/year, while the galley slaves teaching the classes make $20k, plus shitty health insurance.

Using less money, less staff, less equipment does not make you an alpha academic. In the 90's, that meant that an assistant professor in math or science had to have Sun workstation with a 21" monitor (~$12-15k). A full professor got a fancy SGI Octane that cost even more. At my college, the full math professors were mostly in their sixties -- my calculus professor used his SGI as a terminal emulator to futz around on the VAX. The screen savers were cool though.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#33

Post by decode » Tue, Aug 30, 2011, 12:48 PM UTC

roadnottaken wrote: post #27

This is not quite right. The NIH does, in fact, maintain a Public Access Policy: http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm which states that all NIH-funded research must be placed in this database ("PubMed Central") within 12 months of publication. I do not know how widely it is obeyed, but I know that the several labs I've been in regularly deposited their papers there.

Since the article mentions this, in what way is it not quite right?

"The National Institutes of Health in the US oblige anyone taking their grants to put their papers in an open-access archive(17)."

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#34

Post by eldina » Tue, Aug 30, 2011, 12:48 PM UTC

jpallen wrote: post #9

nagrom wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a lot of cases, you can find the pre-print of the paper on arXiv.org (at least that's the case for my field of nuclear and particle physics.) Copyright imposed by journals is an odd beast, since I think few people subscribe to them directly. Mostly, their money comes from academic institutions and unlike consumer-focused organisations like the RIAA, the journals won't usually go after the little guy. All that bein…

I recently published in JHEP and when I tried to view my paper outside the university I was greeted with a pay wall :(. They wanted the going rate of about £30. All of my research to date and the work in that paper has been funded by the UK taxpayer. There is something very wrong with that.

There is indeed something very wrong with that. You pay your taxes which help fund research and then you are charged exorbitant prices for access to the resulting articles. At the time I quit maths there were a smaller uprising among some mathematicians trying to break away from the large old, but unfortunately also still prestigious, journals. "Algebraic and Geometric Topology", an online journal, was formed when the entire group of editors on Elsevier's "Topology and its Applications" resigned as a reaction to Elsevier's increasingly whack pricing policies. Later the same happened for the top journal "Topology", the resignation letter is stil linked at John Baez's site: http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/topology-letter.pdf.

Likewise books, lecture notes etc. written by lecturers should be made freely available. You want to make money on a book you likely created most of while supposedly doing your paid job? GFY.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#35

Post by arethuza » Tue, Aug 30, 2011, 12:52 PM UTC

electrichead wrote: post #24

impendia wrote: post #20

I heard an interesting argument from my advisor (a very famous mathematician). I strongly disagree with it, but it is the only argument I have heard for keeping this system in place. His argument was the following: In many fields such as laboratory science, research is expensive; one has to apply for grants and then spend the money, and these departments have large budgets, and this all looks good to deans. If a depa…

I'm not sure about that. If you pump out a tonne of great research, but use relatively less money, wouldn't that make you look better? Or is the academic world that far removed from the rest of the economy?

Sayre's Law

"In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake." By way of corollary, it adds: "That is why academic politics are so bitter."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayre%27s_Law

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#36

Post by jpallen » Tue, Aug 30, 2011, 1:06 PM UTC

bedris wrote: post #25

jpallen wrote: post #3

> The reason is that the big publishers have rounded up the journals with the highest academic impact factors, in which publication is essential for researchers trying to secure grants and advance their careers(16). You can start reading open-access journals, but you can’t stop reading the closed ones. This is the only problem standing in the way of open access publishing. While the arXiv doesn't offer peer review an…

... the ecosystem would quickly adapt to open peer review A reviewer's comments and critiques of a scientific manuscript often say as much, or more, about the reviewer than they do about the work. The current system should definitely be made more transparent and papers should be more freely available, especially those funded by public money, but there are currently plenty of avenues to openly comment on a piece of wo…

I didn't have a specific system in mind for 'open peer review'. I just meant that while peer review only happens through journals at the moment it doesn't depend on them in any fundamental way. The reputation attached to them does.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#37

Post by donall » Tue, Aug 30, 2011, 1:40 PM UTC

retube wrote: post #4

Yes this is a problem. Occasionally I have to to resort to emailing authors directly and asking for a copy of the paper - in most cases they have been obliging. As far as I am concerned publicly funded research papers should (must) be freely available. If the public are funding it then the public has a right to the fruits of this investment. And newspapers must be able to link to or reference a source when they quote…

In my research group (in the School of Computing at Dublin City University), we publish all our papers to our web site and to the university's own research portal (doras.dcu.ie). They are free for anybody to access.

The version we publish is the "camera ready", which is to say the last version we submit for actual publication. It is not, however, the final published version (so, for example, they don't include an Elsevier logo or conference proceedings page numbers). I believe this is legal in our jurisdiction, or at least nobody has called us on it!

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#38

Post by jessriedel » Tue, Aug 30, 2011, 1:46 PM UTC

impendia wrote: post #15

retube wrote: post #4

Yes this is a problem. Occasionally I have to to resort to emailing authors directly and asking for a copy of the paper - in most cases they have been obliging. As far as I am concerned publicly funded research papers should (must) be freely available. If the public are funding it then the public has a right to the fruits of this investment. And newspapers must be able to link to or reference a source when they quote…

I can only assume that they are not allowed to, due to copyright imposed by the journals. This is probably true. Whenever I have published articles (I am a mathematician), I have been asked to sign some long agreement which I only skimmed. We have some rights to publish and distribute our work... but not unlimited... something complicated... In practice, I just put copies of all of my papers on my website where anyon…

What's the advantage over just using the arxiv? A bit better typesetting?

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#39

Post by jessriedel » Tue, Aug 30, 2011, 1:50 PM UTC

RyanMcGreal wrote: post #16

A professor emeritus recently sent me an article to publish on my web magazine. The turnaround time was around 18 hours and he replied to express his surprise at how quickly his piece was published. In contrast, he has had an article pending at an academic journal for three years now.

Usually this kind of long turn-around time is because it is held up by the referees, not the actual publishing process. That process is too slow (sometimes as much as a few months, but usually more like a few weeks), but it's not 3-years slow.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#40

Post by pbhjpbhj » Tue, Aug 30, 2011, 1:54 PM UTC

rmc wrote: post #18

University libraries are still mostly money grabbers aswell, but are slowly changing. In the 1830s Ireland was mapped to a great detail (for tax purposes) of 1:6500ish. These maps would still be very helpful for OpenStreetMap, and are obviously outside copyright. A few Irish universities have them (e.g. Trinity Map Library, a copyright deposit library for Ireland & the UK), however they charge €50,000ish for a copy o…

Presumably somewhere like the British Library has the scans for the maps on disk. They're a government institution aren't they so would a Freedom of Information Act demand supposedly liberate that data ... just a thought.

When I'm Prime Minister I'll instigate a government run academic library as the repository for all data originating from tax paid research with free access for individuals and paid access for profit yielding institutions; something along those lines anyway.