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Let me give you an unpopular answer - - outside top 500 scientists across all the fields combined no one produces quality papers. - the manuscripts received b

Let me give you an unpopular answer - - outside top 500 scientists across all the fields combined no one produces quality papers. - the manuscripts received by EICs are garbage. EICs themselves rarely touch anything, or edit anything. - "peer review" process in all non-the-most-upper-tier publication is a joke. - copy-editing and proofreading is non-existent. About 15 years ago a lot of journals that are now owned by the major publishers were society publications. This means that societies owned the title, owned the copyright and owned the process. Societies could not find people capable and willing to run a journal for $5k or so a paper including distribution and printing. So the societies went to the likes of Springer, Informa, T&F, Elsevier etc. Those said "Ok, sure. $2k per paper and we produce and distribute it or $5k per paper and we do everything". That was too much for societies. Instead the societies said said "Hey, what if we sold you the rights to the journal? Would you in that case do all of it for free, and let our EIC suck his or her thumb while still being the man/woman on the title page?" "Of course" said the publishers. And so now we are here. Production costs did not go down. Distribution costs did not go down. In fact, distribution costs increased because before that the journals were printed by a little printers in the US as the volume of most of journals is microscopic ( later printing went to China in the same microscopic quantities ). Now, however, journals also need to be distributed in all kinds of wacky XML formats on all stages of production, which needs to be coded, in most cases by hand. So unless every Joe, Jack and Jill, the scientist, wants to go back into the publishing world nothing is going to change. [Source: pillow talk]

sixdimensional 9y ago
A root cause there would be the opportunity cost the scientist/society calculates to publish themselves vs have a publisher do it. The equation today isn't the same - with open source / community effort, I suspect the cost/effort of publication today doesn't even come close. I was just randomly looking at what it would cost (rough estimate) for 25TB of S3 storage - 2,000,000 put requests a month, 2,000,000 get requests, 25TB bandwidth OUT and 25TB bandwidth IN - and it's less than $3,500 per month. So the cost of hosting the published item seems actually quite reasonable... reducing the cost of the rest of the "publication" plumbing are problems that technology also helps address.
- notyourday 9y ago
  That's not the cost. The cost is to take a garbage paper with broken figures, broken text, in a barely parse-able English, written by someone who does not believe in citations or attributions, does not follow Chicago and produce a paper that is being distributed. Late addition: The cost of distribution of a scientific journal in electronic format is minuscule - put it on a blog. Medium.com is free. Another addition: I have seen a few of the author contacts. All of the ones that I saw said the author could publish his original manuscript on the web to free. The author could just not publish the result of the publisher's processing of the manuscript. Someone should ask the authors why aren't they publishing their original submissions.
  - sixdimensional 9y ago
    Agreed that the best publishers act as both a filter and improve the production quality of the papers, and that this is a true cost. I'd hope that they could continue to do what they do and also get paid by their subscribers. Ideally, they could do that AND the works could be published for free, and those who value their efforts would in turn reward the publishers for their efforts as well by subscribing to the paid version of their publications. That said, Wikipedia mostly works. Between professional editors and the community, decent knowledge is categorized, edited/peer-reviewed and interlinked. Why the same cannot be done with academic papers is beyond me, other than to assume people simply don't want to change the status quo. I also agree with your last point - so long as authors can contractually publish their own work, they should - and the Internet should make it as easy as humanely possible. I've published a paper before to an academic journal and had that clause, and then put it online on my own site as well (until I took my site down). Random thing - I do think the standards of what constitutes knowledge matter, but boy do we hold them so high. I think there are many forms knowledge comes in, and expecting them to all be polished perfection is perhaps too lofty a goal. Knowledge is always a work in progress. Discerning between fact and fiction is the same whether you have a polished paper or a garbage one, it's just one is a lot easier to consume and you have more trust inherent by the nature of the reputation associated with the publisher, author, citations, etc.
  - ssalazar 9y ago
majewsky 9y ago
> outside top 500 scientists across all the fields combined no one produces quality papers Just to make sure I read this correctly: Are you saying that, when judging by paper quality, there are only 500 good scientists on Earth?
- notyourday 9y ago
  Only about 500 produce readable manuscripts to start. Publishers have their names because it changes schedules that much.
  - mkl 9y ago
    That sounds absurd. What are your sources?
    - notyourday 9y ago
      Pillow talk with someone who ran production for hundreds of STEM journals for two of the publishers
icelancer 9y ago
>outside top 500 scientists across all the fields combined no one produces quality papers. This is an exceptionally incorrect statement to make. The other points are fine, which only makes it more baffling you would make this point.

sixdimensional 9y ago

A root cause there would be the opportunity cost the scientist/society calculates to publish themselves vs have a publisher do it. The equation today isn't the same - with open source / community effort, I suspect the cost/effort of publication today doesn't even come close. I was just randomly looking at what it would cost (rough estimate) for 25TB of S3 storage - 2,000,000 put requests a month, 2,000,000 get requests, 25TB bandwidth OUT and 25TB bandwidth IN - and it's less than $3,500 per month. So the cost of hosting the published item seems actually quite reasonable... reducing the cost of the rest of the "publication" plumbing are problems that technology also helps address.

notyourday 9y ago
That's not the cost. The cost is to take a garbage paper with broken figures, broken text, in a barely parse-able English, written by someone who does not believe in citations or attributions, does not follow Chicago and produce a paper that is being distributed. Late addition: The cost of distribution of a scientific journal in electronic format is minuscule - put it on a blog. Medium.com is free. Another addition: I have seen a few of the author contacts. All of the ones that I saw said the author could publish his original manuscript on the web to free. The author could just not publish the result of the publisher's processing of the manuscript. Someone should ask the authors why aren't they publishing their original submissions.
- sixdimensional 9y ago
  Agreed that the best publishers act as both a filter and improve the production quality of the papers, and that this is a true cost. I'd hope that they could continue to do what they do and also get paid by their subscribers. Ideally, they could do that AND the works could be published for free, and those who value their efforts would in turn reward the publishers for their efforts as well by subscribing to the paid version of their publications. That said, Wikipedia mostly works. Between professional editors and the community, decent knowledge is categorized, edited/peer-reviewed and interlinked. Why the same cannot be done with academic papers is beyond me, other than to assume people simply don't want to change the status quo. I also agree with your last point - so long as authors can contractually publish their own work, they should - and the Internet should make it as easy as humanely possible. I've published a paper before to an academic journal and had that clause, and then put it online on my own site as well (until I took my site down). Random thing - I do think the standards of what constitutes knowledge matter, but boy do we hold them so high. I think there are many forms knowledge comes in, and expecting them to all be polished perfection is perhaps too lofty a goal. Knowledge is always a work in progress. Discerning between fact and fiction is the same whether you have a polished paper or a garbage one, it's just one is a lot easier to consume and you have more trust inherent by the nature of the reputation associated with the publisher, author, citations, etc.
- ssalazar 9y ago

majewsky 9y ago

> outside top 500 scientists across all the fields combined no one produces quality papers Just to make sure I read this correctly: Are you saying that, when judging by paper quality, there are only 500 good scientists on Earth?

notyourday 9y ago
Only about 500 produce readable manuscripts to start. Publishers have their names because it changes schedules that much.
- mkl 9y ago
  That sounds absurd. What are your sources?
  - notyourday 9y ago
    Pillow talk with someone who ran production for hundreds of STEM journals for two of the publishers

icelancer 9y ago

>outside top 500 scientists across all the fields combined no one produces quality papers. This is an exceptionally incorrect statement to make. The other points are fine, which only makes it more baffling you would make this point.