9 ms·

Is the business of scientific publishing bad for science?

170 points by a_w 9y ago

arcanus 9y ago
Betteridge's law be damned, the business of scientific publishing is bad for science. Scientific publishing is a complete mess. We have a large scale business built around an industry funded by public money. This creates barriers to scientists getting access to research papers. As research papers are the lifeblood of discourse in the sciences, we are artificially limiting the effectiveness of our scientists. In case you were not paying attention, science and engineering is ultimately responsible for all economic growth, so the public has a vested interest in enabling successful outcomes in this space.
6stringmerc 9y ago
Anything with an emotional component of drive that exceeds rationality with respect to holding out for money will of course be exploited. That's a really high minded way of saying "For every Artist, Musician, Scientist, or Teacher trying to make $1, there's a Shitty C-Student there making $5 before letting go of the rest downstream." It might sound harsh but it's a fundamental human truth in the US business model of Art-as-Commercial.
justicezyx 9y ago
There should not be an industry for scientific publishing in the first place.
- Aeolun 9y ago
  Of course there should be. Scientists can't publish and format their own journal articles for printing. Having dedicated reviewers to decide what enters the journal is also great. You also need someone to coordinate the peer-review so it's as painless for the involved scientists as possible. The question is whether those things are worth the exorbitant cost that's currently being charged.
  - new299 9y ago
    > Of course there should be. Scientists can't publish and format their own journal articles for printing. They already do! Many (most?/all?) journals require authors to format the paper in journal style. > Having dedicated reviewers to decide what enters the journal is also great. In the vast majority of cases (non-tier one journals, basically not Science and Nature) this doesn't happen. They just look at the tick boxes the referees select (Accept with minor revisions, accept with major revisions etc). > You also need someone to coordinate the peer-review so it's as painless for the involved scientists as possible. You need a website where reviews can be uploaded. These already exist, and are not a huge infrastructure burden. > The question is whether those things are worth the exorbitant cost that's currently being charged. It's clear to most scientists that they're not. What you're paying for is the lockin effect these journals have by virtue of having a high impact factor.
    - Fomite 9y ago
      > They already do! Many (most?/all?) journals require authors to format the paper in journal style. Not in many biomedical journals where Word is the standard format for a paper to be submitted in. > In the vast majority of cases (non-tier one journals, basically not Science and Nature) this doesn't happen. They just look at the tick boxes the referees select (Accept with minor revisions, accept with major revisions etc). I've appealed and/or argued successfully with editors to change a decision from "what the referees ticked" on a number of occasions. > It's clear to most scientists that they're not. What you're paying for is the lockin effect these journals have by virtue of having a high impact factor. It should be noted its not just impact factor that goes into prestige. For example, at it's height, PLoS ONE had an impact factor comparable to several major society-level journals that carried considerably more weight. "I publish all my work in PLoS ONE" versus "I publish all my work in Epidemiology and AJE" would likely result in very different yearly evaluations.
      - new299 9y ago
        > Not in many biomedical journals where Word is the standard format for a paper to be submitted in. I don't know about all journals. The ones I've submitted to usually provide a Word or Latex template. > I've appealed and/or argued successfully with editors to change a decision from "what the referees ticked" on a number of occasions. In almost all journals editors are not paid staff. They are volunteers. Personally I've never seen a paper will all negative reviews get accepted by an editor, but they have some sway it's true.
dang 9y ago
Savvy headline writers flip the bit on Betteridge. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14658308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14658308 and marked it off topic.
deleted 9y ago
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deleted 9y ago
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HarryHirsch 9y ago
In the old days there were the journals from the scientific societies and the Elsevier-Pergamon duopoly. Society journals were respectable, generally speaking, and subscriptions were affordable. Elsevier/Pergamon was expensive, pretty bad, and something you could do without if you had to. If the library wouldn't subscribe you'd ask for a reprint. Things weren't great 30 years ago but manageable. Several things have happened since. The society journals have mostly been sold to commercial publishers, and prices have gone up steeply, Elsevier is as sketchy as always but even more expensive, and the various open-access journals have popped up, with a quality even worse than Elsevier. Finally, even academics at teaching institutions are forced to publish thanks to clueless administrators and a general shortage of funds. Scientific publishing is fully out of control. Librarians thought they had it bad in 2001, but look at it now!
- FabHK 9y ago
  Sorry, I really meant to refrain from it, but having read the article, I'm again forced to say: Ceterum censeo Elsevier esse delendum. (Could be Elsevierum, depending which declension - it's an accusativus cum infinitivo)
rgejman 9y ago
I think about this problem a lot because the whole biomedical publishing industry is so backwards. One of the reasons why scientists are currently dependent on the journal industry is because the journals control peer review. Unfortunately, instead of merely reviewing manuscripts for correctness, the journals link peer review to "impact," which is a prospective measure of importance (i.e. whether they are likely to get many citations). Every journal you submit your manuscript to will put it through a new round of peer review looking for both correctness and impact. Massive amounts of time are wasted by working scientists and journal editors attempting to prospectively "grade" manuscripts on how important they will be (along with checking the correctness of the manuscript). Upon rejection for either correctness or impact, authors resubmit their manuscript to a lower tier journal (+/- revision) and wait for the next round of reviews. Rinse/repeat. Eventually, assuming the paper is not awful, it will be published. How could we do it differently? One idea is to disentangle impact from correctness and eliminate the journals from peer review. Scientists already review each others manuscripts pro-bono, so here's a proposal: Scientists submit manuscripts to bioRxiv as "pre-prints" for a nominal fee (say $1000) and request peer review. An editor selects 3-4 potential reviewers and reviewers are paid a nominal fee (~$150) to perform the review. The money paid by authors covers the reviewer fees and editors salaries. After peer review, authors can decide whether they want to submit their articles for additional peer review and fancy publication in a journal. Impact is thereafter judged only by how many citations a paper gets, not which glossy magazine it gets published in.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- currymj 9y ago
  that is more or less the PLoS One or Scientific Reports model, right? you pay the fee, it gets peer reviewed for correctness but not impact, and then published open access.
  - rgejman 9y ago
    Yes to PLoS One. I think Scientific Reports (as a NPG journal) still tries to be somewhat selective, but I'm not sure. My proposal is a bit different because it establishes a preliminary and public review process that is separate from "publication." You cannot take your PLoS One article and now get it published at Nature or Science. But you could do that if your paper was "reviewed" at bioRxiv, meaningfully improved and corrected, and then submitted for publication elsewhere.
comstock 9y ago
Yes, next question. More seriously, it's hard to see what value publishers possibly be adding to the publishing process. Beyond tier one journals, full time editors don't really seem to do very much. But I'd love to see some data supporting the argument that they're of value.
lallysingh 9y ago
Wasn't the point of the web to be a replacement for this? Nobody's done the meta level work of making reviews of URLs easy to access in a relevant way, I think. But that would be the best replacement, right?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
aj7 9y ago
We haven't even addressed the distortion that negative results, such as the results of failed experiments, are never published, yet are extremely valuable. Perhaps scientists wish to condemn their peers to fighting battles already lost.
- jabl 9y ago
  IME, scientists have wildly different outlooks here. Some are all flowers and unicorns "we're doing it to better humanity" etc., others are fighting vicious (if imaginary?) battles against their scientific peers (=competitors) about who can publish the most (impactful) papers. For the latter group, if you manage to trick your competitor into a year-long wild goose chase, all the better.
guscost 9y ago
Corrupt institutions are trying to claim ownership of science? What a surprise...
- HarryHirsch 9y ago
  More like rent-seeking. Everyone wants a piece of the action, everyone wants to be a middleman, especially when the taxpayer pays the bill.
  - convolvatron 9y ago
    the really funny thing is that they have found a strategic position, a local minimum, so deep that apparently they cant get dislodged. even though everyone hates them. even though they provide no demonstrable value. even though, arguably, the process they embody is detrimental to the host (science, humanity, the progress of knowledge). this is the inarguable sign of a corrupt process - 'eh, i know its wrong, but what are you gonna do?' i hate the fact that i pay acm membership so i can read papers when i want. i still do every year.
zenkat 9y ago
Why haven't PLoS and Science One eaten Elsivier's cake? Their model makes perfect sense in a web-based world. Why are scientists still playing Elsivier's game?
- jhbadger 9y ago
  Because a lot of scientists work at large research universities that simply subscribe to the complete set of Elsevier and Springer and so don't see the problem. I'm a big fan of open access, even though I'm at an institution now that subscribes widely, because I worked for a decade at a small research institute that ran up against paywalls constantly.
  - Fomite 9y ago
    Beyond not seeing it as a problem, it is a genuine cost. A publication in PLOS Medicine costs ~ $3000. That's a postdoc's laptop. That's several conferences. And it's a single-digit percentage of my startup funding. It's not insane to not pay that if you don't have to.
- AlexCoventry 9y ago
  There just isn't as much prestige associated with those journals, and conventional success in an academic career is all about garnering prestige. It's explained in the last part of the article, about the rise of Cell as the magazine everyone wanted to get published in.
- kem 9y ago
  Pay-to-publish has its own problems. I think the current model has issues, and there should be a movement in general toward open dissemination of research, but I'm not sure the PLoS model is much better in a lot of ways. Maybe not worse, but maybe not better. Where this is all headed is anyone's guess. If I had to, eventually most scientific research will just appear in blogs, being treated like personal journals or something, or in research society journals, kind of like what is referenced in the article, basically run by academic research organizations. My experience with the second model is that there are organizations that would like to run things that way, but run into problems with copyediting, layout and design, and reviewing infrastructure. They kind of think it's something they can just do on the fly but as they do it they realize it's more work. Maybe a company that just provides the tools is the way to go, but at some point that would probably basically become a publisher.
nnfy 9y ago
If I'm not mistaken, many publicly funded studies end up behind paywalls. Terrible model. Especially in the age of wiki based media. Combine this problem with low quality science necessitated by the publish or perish doctrine, failure to incentivize publishing of negative results, p-value misuse, and the reproducibility crisis of soft sciences, and it is almost a wonder that we make any progress at all! Also ironic that an institution dedicated to order and objectivity suffers from problems with both. Loosley related commentary: perhaps it is illustrative of the difficulty in bridging the steep impedance mismatch between idea and practice.
robertwalsh0 9y ago
I'm excited about the increasing frequency in which articles on this topic are showing up on HN. I believe that many of the problems in academic publishing can be remedied by giving the scholarly community affordable tools to manage and publish journals. After all, they are already writing and peer-reviewing the material themselves. Full disclosure: I'm a founder of a company called Scholastica (https://www.scholasticahq.com https://www.scholasticahq.com), a peer-review and publishing platform used by hundreds of journals across a variety of disciplines ranging from law to mathematics. Sir Timothy Gowers, the Fields Medal winner and Cambridge Mathematics prof, launched a high-quality ArXiv overlay journal on the platform about a year ago (http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/ http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/) which I think lends credence to the idea that the scholarly community can write, review, and publish work without relying on the current corporate publisher status quo.
- tehwalrus 9y ago
  How is your business tackling the current "impact factor" protection scam? (I am a fan of projects like yours, just much more pessimistic!)
darawk 9y ago
Yes, definitely. Is this even a discussion? Scientific journal companies extract enormous rents and add literally zero value. I'm not using 'literally' in the not-actually-literally sense that people sometimes use it. I mean literally zero value. They either don't pay, or barely pay, the peer researchers who review the material (the only valuable part). Aside from that, they do what, exactly? Publish it? The thing that costs effectively zero dollars to do on the internet now? It's disgusting that this business still exists.
- santaclaus 9y ago
  > Aside from that, they do what, exactly? In CS the ACM organizes conferences... beyond that they are an effectively useless organization.
  - darawk 9y ago
    Ya, but the ACM is also a professional organization. That's a fine service to provide, but it doesn't need to be comingled with publishing.
- Fomite 9y ago
  A number of journals provide copy-editing and layout services. My own papers have been improved by both.
  - darawk 9y ago
    Fair. Likely the worlds most expensive copy-editing and layout services, though :) (considering the access price of the journals as the cost of those services).
  - averagewall 9y ago
    Why is this even relevant? Few people actually read published papers compared to, say, blogs, so the standard needn't be so high - inconveniencing 100 people is better than inconveniencing 1000. Yet nobody pays for copy editing and layout of their blog. It's not only trivial but also not important if it isn't quite right. If readability is important for journal articles, then layout is the least important way to achieve that. The whole style of writing needs to be changed. They're notoriously hard to read even for other researchers in similar fields. I'm not saying dumb it down but, for example, perhaps they could be structured a bit like a newspaper story with a quick overview using common vocabulary first, then more details and more precise language later. That's just one idea but my general point is that readability is not what they're aiming for anyway so why bother making it look pretty?
jogundas 9y ago
My feeling is that the misery is inhomogeneously distributed when it comes to scientific disciplines. In physics the situation does not seem too terrible. The American Physical Society is a nonprofit which runs a family of go-to subscription-type journals. Preprints on arxiv are the standard. Publishing innovations are popping up from time to time. A prominent example is scipost.org, which is funded by national funding agencies and is free to both publish and read. Also, their peer-review is public. Full disclosure: I have published in various APS journals.
- jabl 9y ago
  > My feeling is that the misery is inhomogeneously distributed when it comes to scientific disciplines. >In physics the situation does not seem too terrible. Yes, but I'd add that also in physics the misery is quite inhomogeneous. High Energy Physics seems to lean heavily towards arxiv and open access, whereas in some other subfields, such as my own in my previous life, some Elsevier journal is #1. Or lets say, on my own case, I guess one could (mostly, at least) publish in non-Elsevier journals with no serious career repercussions, but we're still very far from being able give Elsevier the finger and get by without an Elsevier subscription since one needs to read what others are doing. I'm somewhat hopeful for the longer term, but progress is painfully slow.
  - jogundas 9y ago
    Just curious: which physics subfield is that? Perhaps my previous comment was overly optimistic, as both Journal of High Energy Physics and the Nature family are published by Springer nowadays.
    - jabl 9y ago
      I worked in, broadly speaking, computational studies of surfaces and reactions on them (adsorption, heterogeneous catalysis, AFM, STEM, etc.). In this area, the #1 journal is (the aptly named) Surface Science, published by Elsevier. Although us computational guys do also publish a lot in PRB/PRL and a smattering of other journals as well of course, but particularly for experimentalists Surface Science is clearly #1. So you still have to read a lot of SS articles.
matthewmacleod 9y ago
Jason Hoyt (of PeerJ) wrote an interesting commentary on this article: https://twitter.com/jasonHoyt/status/879624241817296896 https://twitter.com/jasonHoyt/status/879624241817296896 Ultimately it's a bit more complex than "all publishers are evil". There are a while slew of low-cost, open-access journals out there, but the wider academic community still places far too much weight on individual journals' impact factors. Is it the responsibility of publishers to try to effect a wider change in attitudes? It seems doomed to failure to try and make them, and it seems like pressure from within might be the only way to deal with the problem.
honestoHeminway 9y ago
I think, its a artificial status symbol for universitys- if you cant afford it - you are not really a scientistic institution. Like all statussymbols, it could easily be replaced with something more pragmatic - and will never be, because ironically - in something as meritocratic as the sciences, the caste longs for the aristocratic.

170 points by a_w 9y ago

Betteridge's law be damned, the business of scientific publishing is bad for science. Scientific publishing is a complete mess. We have a large scale business built around an industry funded by public money. This creates barriers to scientists getting access to research papers. As research papers are the lifeblood of discourse in the sciences, we are artificially limiting the effectiveness of our scientists. In case you were not paying attention, science and engineering is ultimately responsible for all economic growth, so the public has a vested interest in enabling successful outcomes in this space.

6stringmerc 9y ago

Anything with an emotional component of drive that exceeds rationality with respect to holding out for money will of course be exploited. That's a really high minded way of saying "For every Artist, Musician, Scientist, or Teacher trying to make $1, there's a Shitty C-Student there making $5 before letting go of the rest downstream." It might sound harsh but it's a fundamental human truth in the US business model of Art-as-Commercial.

justicezyx 9y ago

There should not be an industry for scientific publishing in the first place.

Aeolun 9y ago
Of course there should be. Scientists can't publish and format their own journal articles for printing. Having dedicated reviewers to decide what enters the journal is also great. You also need someone to coordinate the peer-review so it's as painless for the involved scientists as possible. The question is whether those things are worth the exorbitant cost that's currently being charged.
- new299 9y ago
  > Of course there should be. Scientists can't publish and format their own journal articles for printing. They already do! Many (most?/all?) journals require authors to format the paper in journal style. > Having dedicated reviewers to decide what enters the journal is also great. In the vast majority of cases (non-tier one journals, basically not Science and Nature) this doesn't happen. They just look at the tick boxes the referees select (Accept with minor revisions, accept with major revisions etc). > You also need someone to coordinate the peer-review so it's as painless for the involved scientists as possible. You need a website where reviews can be uploaded. These already exist, and are not a huge infrastructure burden. > The question is whether those things are worth the exorbitant cost that's currently being charged. It's clear to most scientists that they're not. What you're paying for is the lockin effect these journals have by virtue of having a high impact factor.
  - Fomite 9y ago
    > They already do! Many (most?/all?) journals require authors to format the paper in journal style. Not in many biomedical journals where Word is the standard format for a paper to be submitted in. > In the vast majority of cases (non-tier one journals, basically not Science and Nature) this doesn't happen. They just look at the tick boxes the referees select (Accept with minor revisions, accept with major revisions etc). I've appealed and/or argued successfully with editors to change a decision from "what the referees ticked" on a number of occasions. > It's clear to most scientists that they're not. What you're paying for is the lockin effect these journals have by virtue of having a high impact factor. It should be noted its not just impact factor that goes into prestige. For example, at it's height, PLoS ONE had an impact factor comparable to several major society-level journals that carried considerably more weight. "I publish all my work in PLoS ONE" versus "I publish all my work in Epidemiology and AJE" would likely result in very different yearly evaluations.
    - new299 9y ago
      > Not in many biomedical journals where Word is the standard format for a paper to be submitted in. I don't know about all journals. The ones I've submitted to usually provide a Word or Latex template. > I've appealed and/or argued successfully with editors to change a decision from "what the referees ticked" on a number of occasions. In almost all journals editors are not paid staff. They are volunteers. Personally I've never seen a paper will all negative reviews get accepted by an editor, but they have some sway it's true.

dang 9y ago

Savvy headline writers flip the bit on Betteridge. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14658308 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14658308 and marked it off topic.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

HarryHirsch 9y ago

In the old days there were the journals from the scientific societies and the Elsevier-Pergamon duopoly. Society journals were respectable, generally speaking, and subscriptions were affordable. Elsevier/Pergamon was expensive, pretty bad, and something you could do without if you had to. If the library wouldn't subscribe you'd ask for a reprint. Things weren't great 30 years ago but manageable. Several things have happened since. The society journals have mostly been sold to commercial publishers, and prices have gone up steeply, Elsevier is as sketchy as always but even more expensive, and the various open-access journals have popped up, with a quality even worse than Elsevier. Finally, even academics at teaching institutions are forced to publish thanks to clueless administrators and a general shortage of funds. Scientific publishing is fully out of control. Librarians thought they had it bad in 2001, but look at it now!

FabHK 9y ago
Sorry, I really meant to refrain from it, but having read the article, I'm again forced to say: Ceterum censeo Elsevier esse delendum. (Could be Elsevierum, depending which declension - it's an accusativus cum infinitivo)

rgejman 9y ago

I think about this problem a lot because the whole biomedical publishing industry is so backwards. One of the reasons why scientists are currently dependent on the journal industry is because the journals control peer review. Unfortunately, instead of merely reviewing manuscripts for correctness, the journals link peer review to "impact," which is a prospective measure of importance (i.e. whether they are likely to get many citations). Every journal you submit your manuscript to will put it through a new round of peer review looking for both correctness and impact. Massive amounts of time are wasted by working scientists and journal editors attempting to prospectively "grade" manuscripts on how important they will be (along with checking the correctness of the manuscript). Upon rejection for either correctness or impact, authors resubmit their manuscript to a lower tier journal (+/- revision) and wait for the next round of reviews. Rinse/repeat. Eventually, assuming the paper is not awful, it will be published. How could we do it differently? One idea is to disentangle impact from correctness and eliminate the journals from peer review. Scientists already review each others manuscripts pro-bono, so here's a proposal: Scientists submit manuscripts to bioRxiv as "pre-prints" for a nominal fee (say $1000) and request peer review. An editor selects 3-4 potential reviewers and reviewers are paid a nominal fee (~$150) to perform the review. The money paid by authors covers the reviewer fees and editors salaries. After peer review, authors can decide whether they want to submit their articles for additional peer review and fancy publication in a journal. Impact is thereafter judged only by how many citations a paper gets, not which glossy magazine it gets published in.

deleted 9y ago
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currymj 9y ago
that is more or less the PLoS One or Scientific Reports model, right? you pay the fee, it gets peer reviewed for correctness but not impact, and then published open access.
- rgejman 9y ago
  Yes to PLoS One. I think Scientific Reports (as a NPG journal) still tries to be somewhat selective, but I'm not sure. My proposal is a bit different because it establishes a preliminary and public review process that is separate from "publication." You cannot take your PLoS One article and now get it published at Nature or Science. But you could do that if your paper was "reviewed" at bioRxiv, meaningfully improved and corrected, and then submitted for publication elsewhere.

comstock 9y ago

Yes, next question. More seriously, it's hard to see what value publishers possibly be adding to the publishing process. Beyond tier one journals, full time editors don't really seem to do very much. But I'd love to see some data supporting the argument that they're of value.

lallysingh 9y ago

Wasn't the point of the web to be a replacement for this? Nobody's done the meta level work of making reviews of URLs easy to access in a relevant way, I think. But that would be the best replacement, right?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]

aj7 9y ago

We haven't even addressed the distortion that negative results, such as the results of failed experiments, are never published, yet are extremely valuable. Perhaps scientists wish to condemn their peers to fighting battles already lost.

jabl 9y ago
IME, scientists have wildly different outlooks here. Some are all flowers and unicorns "we're doing it to better humanity" etc., others are fighting vicious (if imaginary?) battles against their scientific peers (=competitors) about who can publish the most (impactful) papers. For the latter group, if you manage to trick your competitor into a year-long wild goose chase, all the better.

guscost 9y ago

Corrupt institutions are trying to claim ownership of science? What a surprise...

HarryHirsch 9y ago
More like rent-seeking. Everyone wants a piece of the action, everyone wants to be a middleman, especially when the taxpayer pays the bill.
- convolvatron 9y ago
  the really funny thing is that they have found a strategic position, a local minimum, so deep that apparently they cant get dislodged. even though everyone hates them. even though they provide no demonstrable value. even though, arguably, the process they embody is detrimental to the host (science, humanity, the progress of knowledge). this is the inarguable sign of a corrupt process - 'eh, i know its wrong, but what are you gonna do?' i hate the fact that i pay acm membership so i can read papers when i want. i still do every year.

zenkat 9y ago

Why haven't PLoS and Science One eaten Elsivier's cake? Their model makes perfect sense in a web-based world. Why are scientists still playing Elsivier's game?

jhbadger 9y ago
Because a lot of scientists work at large research universities that simply subscribe to the complete set of Elsevier and Springer and so don't see the problem. I'm a big fan of open access, even though I'm at an institution now that subscribes widely, because I worked for a decade at a small research institute that ran up against paywalls constantly.
- Fomite 9y ago
  Beyond not seeing it as a problem, it is a genuine cost. A publication in PLOS Medicine costs ~ $3000. That's a postdoc's laptop. That's several conferences. And it's a single-digit percentage of my startup funding. It's not insane to not pay that if you don't have to.
AlexCoventry 9y ago
There just isn't as much prestige associated with those journals, and conventional success in an academic career is all about garnering prestige. It's explained in the last part of the article, about the rise of Cell as the magazine everyone wanted to get published in.
kem 9y ago
Pay-to-publish has its own problems. I think the current model has issues, and there should be a movement in general toward open dissemination of research, but I'm not sure the PLoS model is much better in a lot of ways. Maybe not worse, but maybe not better. Where this is all headed is anyone's guess. If I had to, eventually most scientific research will just appear in blogs, being treated like personal journals or something, or in research society journals, kind of like what is referenced in the article, basically run by academic research organizations. My experience with the second model is that there are organizations that would like to run things that way, but run into problems with copyediting, layout and design, and reviewing infrastructure. They kind of think it's something they can just do on the fly but as they do it they realize it's more work. Maybe a company that just provides the tools is the way to go, but at some point that would probably basically become a publisher.

nnfy 9y ago

If I'm not mistaken, many publicly funded studies end up behind paywalls. Terrible model. Especially in the age of wiki based media. Combine this problem with low quality science necessitated by the publish or perish doctrine, failure to incentivize publishing of negative results, p-value misuse, and the reproducibility crisis of soft sciences, and it is almost a wonder that we make any progress at all! Also ironic that an institution dedicated to order and objectivity suffers from problems with both. Loosley related commentary: perhaps it is illustrative of the difficulty in bridging the steep impedance mismatch between idea and practice.

robertwalsh0 9y ago

I'm excited about the increasing frequency in which articles on this topic are showing up on HN. I believe that many of the problems in academic publishing can be remedied by giving the scholarly community affordable tools to manage and publish journals. After all, they are already writing and peer-reviewing the material themselves. Full disclosure: I'm a founder of a company called Scholastica (https://www.scholasticahq.com https://www.scholasticahq.com), a peer-review and publishing platform used by hundreds of journals across a variety of disciplines ranging from law to mathematics. Sir Timothy Gowers, the Fields Medal winner and Cambridge Mathematics prof, launched a high-quality ArXiv overlay journal on the platform about a year ago (http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/ http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/) which I think lends credence to the idea that the scholarly community can write, review, and publish work without relying on the current corporate publisher status quo.

tehwalrus 9y ago
How is your business tackling the current "impact factor" protection scam? (I am a fan of projects like yours, just much more pessimistic!)

darawk 9y ago

Yes, definitely. Is this even a discussion? Scientific journal companies extract enormous rents and add literally zero value. I'm not using 'literally' in the not-actually-literally sense that people sometimes use it. I mean literally zero value. They either don't pay, or barely pay, the peer researchers who review the material (the only valuable part). Aside from that, they do what, exactly? Publish it? The thing that costs effectively zero dollars to do on the internet now? It's disgusting that this business still exists.

santaclaus 9y ago
> Aside from that, they do what, exactly? In CS the ACM organizes conferences... beyond that they are an effectively useless organization.
- darawk 9y ago
  Ya, but the ACM is also a professional organization. That's a fine service to provide, but it doesn't need to be comingled with publishing.
Fomite 9y ago
A number of journals provide copy-editing and layout services. My own papers have been improved by both.
- darawk 9y ago
  Fair. Likely the worlds most expensive copy-editing and layout services, though :) (considering the access price of the journals as the cost of those services).
- averagewall 9y ago
  Why is this even relevant? Few people actually read published papers compared to, say, blogs, so the standard needn't be so high - inconveniencing 100 people is better than inconveniencing 1000. Yet nobody pays for copy editing and layout of their blog. It's not only trivial but also not important if it isn't quite right. If readability is important for journal articles, then layout is the least important way to achieve that. The whole style of writing needs to be changed. They're notoriously hard to read even for other researchers in similar fields. I'm not saying dumb it down but, for example, perhaps they could be structured a bit like a newspaper story with a quick overview using common vocabulary first, then more details and more precise language later. That's just one idea but my general point is that readability is not what they're aiming for anyway so why bother making it look pretty?

jogundas 9y ago

My feeling is that the misery is inhomogeneously distributed when it comes to scientific disciplines. In physics the situation does not seem too terrible. The American Physical Society is a nonprofit which runs a family of go-to subscription-type journals. Preprints on arxiv are the standard. Publishing innovations are popping up from time to time. A prominent example is scipost.org, which is funded by national funding agencies and is free to both publish and read. Also, their peer-review is public. Full disclosure: I have published in various APS journals.

jabl 9y ago
> My feeling is that the misery is inhomogeneously distributed when it comes to scientific disciplines. >In physics the situation does not seem too terrible. Yes, but I'd add that also in physics the misery is quite inhomogeneous. High Energy Physics seems to lean heavily towards arxiv and open access, whereas in some other subfields, such as my own in my previous life, some Elsevier journal is #1. Or lets say, on my own case, I guess one could (mostly, at least) publish in non-Elsevier journals with no serious career repercussions, but we're still very far from being able give Elsevier the finger and get by without an Elsevier subscription since one needs to read what others are doing. I'm somewhat hopeful for the longer term, but progress is painfully slow.
- jogundas 9y ago
  Just curious: which physics subfield is that? Perhaps my previous comment was overly optimistic, as both Journal of High Energy Physics and the Nature family are published by Springer nowadays.
  - jabl 9y ago
    I worked in, broadly speaking, computational studies of surfaces and reactions on them (adsorption, heterogeneous catalysis, AFM, STEM, etc.). In this area, the #1 journal is (the aptly named) Surface Science, published by Elsevier. Although us computational guys do also publish a lot in PRB/PRL and a smattering of other journals as well of course, but particularly for experimentalists Surface Science is clearly #1. So you still have to read a lot of SS articles.

matthewmacleod 9y ago

Jason Hoyt (of PeerJ) wrote an interesting commentary on this article: https://twitter.com/jasonHoyt/status/879624241817296896 https://twitter.com/jasonHoyt/status/879624241817296896 Ultimately it's a bit more complex than "all publishers are evil". There are a while slew of low-cost, open-access journals out there, but the wider academic community still places far too much weight on individual journals' impact factors. Is it the responsibility of publishers to try to effect a wider change in attitudes? It seems doomed to failure to try and make them, and it seems like pressure from within might be the only way to deal with the problem.

honestoHeminway 9y ago

I think, its a artificial status symbol for universitys- if you cant afford it - you are not really a scientistic institution. Like all statussymbols, it could easily be replaced with something more pragmatic - and will never be, because ironically - in something as meritocratic as the sciences, the caste longs for the aristocratic.