3 ms·

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

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
  > Late addition: The cost of distribution of a scientific journal in electronic format is minuscule "The annual budget for arXiv is approximately $826,000 for 2013 to 2017, funded jointly by Cornell University Library, the Simons Foundation (in both gift and challenge grant forms) and annual fee income from member institutions." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv > Medium.com is free. Until its not, or until, as a commercial enterprise, Medium decides to completely pivot, or decides a controversial paper is too much bad publicity. If I publish to Medium, will future researchers be able to find my article in 10 years? In 50? Also I don't see how you've taken peer review into account here.

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
> Late addition: The cost of distribution of a scientific journal in electronic format is minuscule "The annual budget for arXiv is approximately $826,000 for 2013 to 2017, funded jointly by Cornell University Library, the Simons Foundation (in both gift and challenge grant forms) and annual fee income from member institutions." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ArXiv > Medium.com is free. Until its not, or until, as a commercial enterprise, Medium decides to completely pivot, or decides a controversial paper is too much bad publicity. If I publish to Medium, will future researchers be able to find my article in 10 years? In 50? Also I don't see how you've taken peer review into account here.