7 ms·

I'm not generally a fan of arbitrarily "disrupting" things, but the whole academia publishing system is a creaky historical relic that's going to come crashing

by TillE 10y ago

I'm not generally a fan of arbitrarily "disrupting" things, but the whole academia publishing system is a creaky historical relic that's going to come crashing down sooner or later. There are better ways to do science in a world with computers and the internet.

FabHK 10y ago
Absolutely. And in the meantime, Elsevier and the other cynical crooks are making some unparalleled 30+% return on equity. Disgusting. Hope they come crashing down sooner rather than later.
- cwilkes 10y ago
  What do you think is an acceptable return on equity (I'm not sure what "equity" means in this sense)?
  - FabHK 10y ago
    ROE is a financial performance indicator. They're generally in the single digits, low double digits is considered good. In a competitive market, they should converge to round about the same number on average, even across industries (module riskyness, correlation with market as a whole, and such factors). The ROE of academic publishers is abnormally high, indicating some sort of market failure. In this case, scientists do almost all of the work (write, typeset (mostly), referee) for free (or nominal amounts), so expenses are low. The publishers charge libraries inordinate amounts for subscriptions (dollars per page). And scientist need to publish, and they need to publish in high prestige/impact journals, and the prestige/impact is tied to the title, and the publishers own the titles, it is hard for competitors to enter.
  - digler999 10y ago
    any return obtained by legitimate means. what makes their gains illegitimate is the market manipulation combined with abuse of IP law. Their "license" (who needs a "license" to print pages of information to be distributed to other humans, anyway?) lets them "own" the IP that was created by funding public institutions. Thus, their gains are illegitimate. That 30% ultimately comes from taxpayers (which is then ultimately pocketed by shareholders).
  - euyyn 10y ago
    You got downvoted, but thanks for asking this, because I didn't know either and now I know.
ksk 10y ago
>There are better ways to do science in a world with computers and the internet. Well, propose an alternate system that stands a chance of being adopted then.
- paulsutter 10y ago
  AI research is experimenting organically with ways to identify important papers (everything gets published on arxiv.org, but that's far from a replacement). A new system is more likely to emerge from all this experimentation than to be invented in whole. Conferences play a large role, and automated tools like arxiv-sanity.com and Google Scholar (for mapping citations) help. Even Twitter is important, if a major figure tweets about a paper, many people will read it. Conferences are experimenting with models to reduce the lag time from submissions and trying different systems for selecting papers. We'll see where it goes.
  - ksk 10y ago
    Well, all of those things you mentioned are voluntary, optional and not guaranteed. I think having people whose job it is to peer-review, be selective, be vigilant of bad-science, etc is a good thing. I'm completely for open-access, but I'm against having zero selection criteria. It puts a drag of everyone if they have to wade through thousands of junk papers while doing research. If hacker news did not have a voting system/flagging system/banning system it would just be a giant cesspool of links and comments submitted by bots.
    - zaphos 10y ago
      No one's job is to peer review for established journals. Peer review is unpaid.
      - ksk 10y ago
        To your point, yes, there are plenty of journals that don't pay (but pay for other activities). Perhaps I should have just called it a fee instead of a job. Here are some that do pay - http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/20930/ http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/20930/
davidmr 10y ago
I spent 15 years in academia and now work with dozens of former academics. In all my time, I don't think I've ever met a single person who didn't loathe the journal system from top to bottom, and that includes at least a couple journal editors. I seethe in anger every time something I'm looking into ends in a IEEE or other journal who militantly police arXiv preprints. The day we bury the last for-profit closed access journal will be a momentous day in the history of science.
- trendia 10y ago
  Many people outside academia assume that researchers receive some sort of financial benefit when their paper is distributed, read, or bought for $35 on Elsevier. But in fact, the publishing companies receive money from both the researcher and the reader. They charge the researcher up to $1,500 to publish the article, and then they extract money from the readers by charging a subscription fee to their institution (which constitute a large portion of the library budget). Not even the editors or reviewers receive any financial compensation -- they often volunteer their time for the peer-review process. The entire procedure and profit extraction is a disgrace.
  - snthd 10y ago
    Interesting. Maybe a court could find the contract between a researcher and the publisher to be unconscionable - and therefore non-binding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscionability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscionability
  - anon4this1 10y ago
    Elsevier look like a ripe target for a worldwide campaign to cancel access to their journals unless fees arnt dropped. Germany are (have?) Pulled access, some other south american countries have also with local academics saying that everyone uses sci-hub for everything anyway. Could be a good target for an activist hedge fund investor to short the stock and attack the company.
  - jcranmer 10y ago
    Note that in general, you either need to pay to submit the article xor pay to read the article, almost never do you need to do both.

by TillE 10y ago

FabHK 10y ago

Absolutely. And in the meantime, Elsevier and the other cynical crooks are making some unparalleled 30+% return on equity. Disgusting. Hope they come crashing down sooner rather than later.

cwilkes 10y ago
What do you think is an acceptable return on equity (I'm not sure what "equity" means in this sense)?
- FabHK 10y ago
  ROE is a financial performance indicator. They're generally in the single digits, low double digits is considered good. In a competitive market, they should converge to round about the same number on average, even across industries (module riskyness, correlation with market as a whole, and such factors). The ROE of academic publishers is abnormally high, indicating some sort of market failure. In this case, scientists do almost all of the work (write, typeset (mostly), referee) for free (or nominal amounts), so expenses are low. The publishers charge libraries inordinate amounts for subscriptions (dollars per page). And scientist need to publish, and they need to publish in high prestige/impact journals, and the prestige/impact is tied to the title, and the publishers own the titles, it is hard for competitors to enter.
- digler999 10y ago
  any return obtained by legitimate means. what makes their gains illegitimate is the market manipulation combined with abuse of IP law. Their "license" (who needs a "license" to print pages of information to be distributed to other humans, anyway?) lets them "own" the IP that was created by funding public institutions. Thus, their gains are illegitimate. That 30% ultimately comes from taxpayers (which is then ultimately pocketed by shareholders).
- euyyn 10y ago
  You got downvoted, but thanks for asking this, because I didn't know either and now I know.

ksk 10y ago

>There are better ways to do science in a world with computers and the internet. Well, propose an alternate system that stands a chance of being adopted then.

paulsutter 10y ago
AI research is experimenting organically with ways to identify important papers (everything gets published on arxiv.org, but that's far from a replacement). A new system is more likely to emerge from all this experimentation than to be invented in whole. Conferences play a large role, and automated tools like arxiv-sanity.com and Google Scholar (for mapping citations) help. Even Twitter is important, if a major figure tweets about a paper, many people will read it. Conferences are experimenting with models to reduce the lag time from submissions and trying different systems for selecting papers. We'll see where it goes.
- ksk 10y ago
  Well, all of those things you mentioned are voluntary, optional and not guaranteed. I think having people whose job it is to peer-review, be selective, be vigilant of bad-science, etc is a good thing. I'm completely for open-access, but I'm against having zero selection criteria. It puts a drag of everyone if they have to wade through thousands of junk papers while doing research. If hacker news did not have a voting system/flagging system/banning system it would just be a giant cesspool of links and comments submitted by bots.
  - zaphos 10y ago
    No one's job is to peer review for established journals. Peer review is unpaid.
    - ksk 10y ago
      To your point, yes, there are plenty of journals that don't pay (but pay for other activities). Perhaps I should have just called it a fee instead of a job. Here are some that do pay - http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/20930/ http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/20930/

davidmr 10y ago

I spent 15 years in academia and now work with dozens of former academics. In all my time, I don't think I've ever met a single person who didn't loathe the journal system from top to bottom, and that includes at least a couple journal editors. I seethe in anger every time something I'm looking into ends in a IEEE or other journal who militantly police arXiv preprints. The day we bury the last for-profit closed access journal will be a momentous day in the history of science.

trendia 10y ago
Many people outside academia assume that researchers receive some sort of financial benefit when their paper is distributed, read, or bought for $35 on Elsevier. But in fact, the publishing companies receive money from both the researcher and the reader. They charge the researcher up to $1,500 to publish the article, and then they extract money from the readers by charging a subscription fee to their institution (which constitute a large portion of the library budget). Not even the editors or reviewers receive any financial compensation -- they often volunteer their time for the peer-review process. The entire procedure and profit extraction is a disgrace.
- snthd 10y ago
  Interesting. Maybe a court could find the contract between a researcher and the publisher to be unconscionable - and therefore non-binding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscionability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscionability
- anon4this1 10y ago
  Elsevier look like a ripe target for a worldwide campaign to cancel access to their journals unless fees arnt dropped. Germany are (have?) Pulled access, some other south american countries have also with local academics saying that everyone uses sci-hub for everything anyway. Could be a good target for an activist hedge fund investor to short the stock and attack the company.
- jcranmer 10y ago
  Note that in general, you either need to pay to submit the article xor pay to read the article, almost never do you need to do both.