4 ms·

SAGE Publications' busts of the peer review and citation ring back in 2014 was great work. Might it be possible for you to expand on SAGE's position of Sci-Hub

by nxzero 10y ago

SAGE Publications' busts of the peer review and citation ring back in 2014 was great work. Might it be possible for you to expand on SAGE's position of Sci-Hub?

dougmccune 10y ago
There's no official position. It's a messy issue, with what I'm sure are lots of conflicting opinions among various people at Sage. I don't see perfectly eye to eye on this with other board members (one of whom is my father) or upper management. That's not a bad thing. The issue of paywalls and piracy is a really complicated thing, even though most HN commenters would make it seem like a black and white good vs bad issue. Sage is in a particularly interesting position because we serve so much of the humanities and social sciences (HSS). In STM you can make the legit argument that all published research should be open access and the cost of that should come out of the same funding that funded the research (ie NIH or private funding agencies). But in the social sciences there isn't the same funding picture. So even if we decided we were going to be super ambitious and flip all of our journals tomorrow to author-pays OA, it's hard to imagine that working in HSS. What would end up happening? Hard to say, but my guess is that a lot of our journals would collapse for lack of submissions and the vast majority of the content would go to our competitors' paywall journals. And remember that a lot of our journals are academic society journals and the societies rely on the journal revenue to operate. So it would also meant the implosion of significant societies that currently serve their members (well, in reality it would just mean they'd migrate their journals to another paywall publisher). The whole thing is super messy and complicated. The competing interests of societies, academics, universities, funding bodies, tenure committees, etc all make it a big complicated mess (particularly when focusing on HSS). I wish we could have some of these debates in forums like HN in an intelligent way, but that's pretty hard to do given how quickly the pitchforks come out.
- nxzero 10y ago
  Understand, thank you for everything you're doing - keep up the good work.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  > In STM you can make the legit argument that all published research should be open access and the cost of that should come out of the same funding that funded the research. There is no cost of publishing your/my papers as open access. Just follow these easy steps: 1. Write paper, send to journal 2. Do the peer review hokey pokey until paper is accepted 3. Upload preprint version to preprint server (arXiv etc.), with link to journal version If you're brave, you can do step 3 before step 2. This whole concept of paying for open access is ridiculous and should go die in a fire.
  - dougmccune 10y ago
    That hokey pokey you refer to does cost money. So yes, you can use a system that has costs associated with it, then attempt to ensure those costs can't be recouped. But if that's successful the system will collapse. I assume you'd think that would be good in this case. But I find it funny reasoning to say you should opt-in to publisher-facilitated peer review while trying to tear it down. Wouldn't avoiding publishers altogether be the more ideologically consistent method?
    - merraksh 10y ago
      If the collapsing part of the system is the one containing middlemen who earn millions taking advantage of free labor from academicians, it will be a success. The only current effect of sci-hub is that research is really open.
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      SciHub is costing around $50k a year to host 50 million papers for free. Elselvier makes a 37% profit margin on 2.07 billion pounds a year. Funny enough, SciHub shows Elselvier could host all scientific knowledge for under 1% of 1% of its revenue while making an operating profit. I'm sure we can find a better trade between widespread access and profitable management of that access than Elselvier. ;)
      - dougmccune 10y ago

by nxzero 10y ago

SAGE Publications' busts of the peer review and citation ring back in 2014 was great work. Might it be possible for you to expand on SAGE's position of Sci-Hub?

dougmccune 10y ago

There's no official position. It's a messy issue, with what I'm sure are lots of conflicting opinions among various people at Sage. I don't see perfectly eye to eye on this with other board members (one of whom is my father) or upper management. That's not a bad thing. The issue of paywalls and piracy is a really complicated thing, even though most HN commenters would make it seem like a black and white good vs bad issue. Sage is in a particularly interesting position because we serve so much of the humanities and social sciences (HSS). In STM you can make the legit argument that all published research should be open access and the cost of that should come out of the same funding that funded the research (ie NIH or private funding agencies). But in the social sciences there isn't the same funding picture. So even if we decided we were going to be super ambitious and flip all of our journals tomorrow to author-pays OA, it's hard to imagine that working in HSS. What would end up happening? Hard to say, but my guess is that a lot of our journals would collapse for lack of submissions and the vast majority of the content would go to our competitors' paywall journals. And remember that a lot of our journals are academic society journals and the societies rely on the journal revenue to operate. So it would also meant the implosion of significant societies that currently serve their members (well, in reality it would just mean they'd migrate their journals to another paywall publisher). The whole thing is super messy and complicated. The competing interests of societies, academics, universities, funding bodies, tenure committees, etc all make it a big complicated mess (particularly when focusing on HSS). I wish we could have some of these debates in forums like HN in an intelligent way, but that's pretty hard to do given how quickly the pitchforks come out.

nxzero 10y ago
Understand, thank you for everything you're doing - keep up the good work.
semi-extrinsic 10y ago
> In STM you can make the legit argument that all published research should be open access and the cost of that should come out of the same funding that funded the research. There is no cost of publishing your/my papers as open access. Just follow these easy steps: 1. Write paper, send to journal 2. Do the peer review hokey pokey until paper is accepted 3. Upload preprint version to preprint server (arXiv etc.), with link to journal version If you're brave, you can do step 3 before step 2. This whole concept of paying for open access is ridiculous and should go die in a fire.
- dougmccune 10y ago
  That hokey pokey you refer to does cost money. So yes, you can use a system that has costs associated with it, then attempt to ensure those costs can't be recouped. But if that's successful the system will collapse. I assume you'd think that would be good in this case. But I find it funny reasoning to say you should opt-in to publisher-facilitated peer review while trying to tear it down. Wouldn't avoiding publishers altogether be the more ideologically consistent method?
  - merraksh 10y ago
    If the collapsing part of the system is the one containing middlemen who earn millions taking advantage of free labor from academicians, it will be a success. The only current effect of sci-hub is that research is really open.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    SciHub is costing around $50k a year to host 50 million papers for free. Elselvier makes a 37% profit margin on 2.07 billion pounds a year. Funny enough, SciHub shows Elselvier could host all scientific knowledge for under 1% of 1% of its revenue while making an operating profit. I'm sure we can find a better trade between widespread access and profitable management of that access than Elselvier. ;)
    - dougmccune 10y ago