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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

#81

Post by yesenadam »

impendia wrote: post #18
Y7ZCQtNo39 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do peer reviews happen, then, if nobody gets paid to do them? Does research money (that goes to the production of the paper) not also cover peer-reviews? I wouldn't see any incentive for any work to be peer-reviewed, ever, then.

I'm a math professor, I can answer this. We tend to think of journals as being run by their editorial boards -- i.e., by scientists in our field. The publishers are in the background, not taking a very active role, simply skimming off truckloads of money in the process. In particular, peer-review requests tend to come from scientists whom we know at least by reputation, and often personally. When I spend serious time…

paying for peer review doesn't make much sense because the time required is highly variable.

Paying per paper maybe not, so maybe paying per hour makes sense?

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

#83

Post by 8bitsrule »

If publishing can't come up with a solution to limit cost and open up access, there are already online models for open publishing.

An online taxpayer-funded archive could be created/designated by statute. It would require that such articles be published there (before and after reviews). Publishers would pay to have access; their prices would reflect that cost and a cost-plus profit. Privately-funded org's could decide which game they prefer.

Make a fine memorial for Aaron Swartz.

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

#84

Post by gboudrias »

elvinyung wrote: post #72

Here's a Twitter thread with a director at Elsevier (@mrgunn) making extremely snarky comments about why they think academia shouldn't be free and widely available: https://twitter.com/dgmacarthur/status/1028489457803161600

Is this telling us anything we didn't already know?

Either way, I don't think he's helping the image issue.

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

#85

Post by icelancer »

elvinyung wrote: post #72

Here's a Twitter thread with a director at Elsevier (@mrgunn) making extremely snarky comments about why they think academia shouldn't be free and widely available: https://twitter.com/dgmacarthur/status/1028489457803161600

Absolutely disgusting. What a disgrace to science.

Alexandra Elbakyan has done and will do more for science than this rent-seeking asshole will ever do.

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

#86

Post by icelancer »

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.

Peer-review is a good tool, but it is not the only tool that should be considered. And the problem is not peer-review specifically, but the implementation of the system and rent-seeking middlemen like Elsevier who do nothing but extract payment from taxpayers and researchers.

PeerJ and PLOS One are good starts, but until academia is no longer a slave to "impact factor," it will have limited effect.

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

#87

Post by secabeen »

elvinyung wrote: post #72

Here's a Twitter thread with a director at Elsevier (@mrgunn) making extremely snarky comments about why they think academia shouldn't be free and widely available: https://twitter.com/dgmacarthur/status/1028489457803161600

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.

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

#88

Post by icelancer »

justinpombrio wrote: post #5

For anyone who still doesn't know this: publishers do not pay paper authors, in any field. I am also not aware of a publisher paying peer reviewers. (Lowly soon-to-be-postdoc here; a professor would be able to say more.)

I've shelled out a few thousand dollars to publish my last two papers, and my editors / reviewers got none of it.

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

#89

Post by avs733 »

Nasrudith wrote: post #65
avs733 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

gatekeeping in science is a theoretical good...the difficulty in practice is highlighted by the general 'three paths' for citations...articles that never get cited, articles that get cited a lot at first and then are forgotten, and articles that aren't cited until much later and then cited en masse. That last category is really the 'good science' because it does what we want foundational research to do - disrupt curr…

Here is a question what is the sort of theoretical good for the gatekeeping? What is the functional purpose of it? I think that answer would prove insightful for determining the future. I can see two noncynical reasons for it one. One is educational purposes. Two would be quality control - if it is already debunkable or widely known there is no point in publishing in Nature "thinking done in the brain". The cynical a…

>Here is a question what is the sort of theoretical good for the gatekeeping? What is the functional purpose of it? I think that answer would prove insightful for determining the future.

Because I am not at all prepared to assess the quality or accuracy of a quantum physics paper and I doubt a molecular biologist is prepared to assess the quality or accuracy of a sociology paper. In what I have seen there are a lot of cargo cultists who think kthey understand a field, and use big words, and just don't get it. I feel that there should be some filtering function to remove that.

As an example:

This guy: https://www.mountainproject.com/forum/topic/113602967/near-m...

This guy: https://www.reddit.com/r/badphilosophy/comments/7x3t1g/stand...

This guy: http://ecclesiastes911.net/

and

This guy: https://arxiv.org/search/math?searchtype=author&query=Simkin...

are all the same person.

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

#90

Post by avs733 »

Something1234 wrote: post #64
avs733 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually I came up with one... The top 50 research universities could get together and decide to no longer give consideration to pay-walled articles. It wouldn't affect them AT ALL...the research they do is already treated as pretty much cannon no matter where it appears. Everyone else would follow, and the journals would quickly respond with change. Yeah I know it's unlikely but they have enough social capital to ac…

That's not an alternative to peer review. It's a solution to remove the journals from the research, and it has a lot if's.

fair point.
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