6 ms·

You argue that publishers are being outcompeted because they don't provide value. First, publishers do provide value.[1] Making copies is a trivial part of pub

• leeoniya 9y ago
  do publishers provide more value than the peer reviewers and the authors? because the subscription & access fees charged by journals disproportionately favor the publishers by a huge margin. a fixed publication fee, peer review and editing should cost some affordable amount to the authors. online distribution should be open and free. want it printed on dead trees? then sure, pay for a hard copy.
  • allenz 9y ago
    No, and you don't understand the current scientific ecosystem. Researchers are paid for their work through salaries and grants, and therefore benefit from open access. Publishers are not. That's why PLOS must charge authors a fee.
    • leeoniya 9y ago
      > Researchers are paid for their work through salaries and grants researchers work 40+ hour weeks for months or years. the majority of the work in publishing is reviewing that research, which is outsourced to peers for free. the actual publication is a tiny part (time-investment wise) of the total value.
      • allenz 9y ago
        By all means, compensate the peer reviewers in addition. But you trivialize what publishers do. The role of the impartial gatekeeper is crucial in our current system. Publishers select the reviewers, analyze the reviews, and accept or reject. Orchestrating all this, by itself, is expensive! That $2000 figure for PLOS would be even higher if they paid reviewers. Further, peer reviewers review for free because they can afford to--they are being paid by government and industry. Publishers cannot survive without being paid.
        • leeoniya 9y ago
          > Publishers select the reviewers, analyze the reviews, and accept or reject. all this tells me is that there's a serious lack of adequate tools or some common, open platform to facilitate this. it was hard [expensive] to collaborate on sourcecode before Github; now it isnt. it was difficult to research prior art for patents, now it isnt via patents.stackexchange.
          • allenz 9y ago
            I agree, editorial committees based on a software workflow could be a real competitor to the current publishers. I'd caution that (1) everything sounds easy from a high level view, when we don't see the complexity, and (2) that the hardest problems are not technical, but social.
        • Mediterraneo10 9y ago
          > Publishers select the reviewers, analyze the reviews, and accept or reject. Orchestrating all this, by itself, is expensive. If academics can peer review, they can do the analysing of reviews and accepting/rejecting, too. Even for-profit publishers often put all that work on an unpaid editorial board. Also, the costs do not have to be so high that they make Wiley or Springer-type for-profit journals the only way of publishing scholarship. In my own field, the most respected journals are printed by learned societies founded on the basis of an endowment or national academies of science. Since the labour and coordination is already done for free here by academics -- just like with many for-profit journals -- the only additional costs are typesetting and coordination with the printer/distributor, and it turns out that these costs are not so high that you have to lock your content down. These journals do not even have to charge submission fees like other journals in the "open access" movement claim is necessary; it just all doesn't cost that much.
• sklivvz1971 9y ago
  An author is defined as someone that authors something and not someone that makes money out of something. When the market can't compensate authorship per copy this does not mean the author cannot exist, but that authors will be compensated differently. Do you seriously think that people would stop making music because they can't become millionaires? There's tons of people making a living playing on YouTube, filling the niche, and living off endorsments and side-selling of merch or lessons.
  • allenz 9y ago
    Sure, artists can now sell lessons, but that's not necessarily better than the publisher model. How do you think your analogy would apply to scientific publishing?
• austinjp 9y ago
  > Publishers add value in their role as gatekeepers and filters. And yet the peer review process relies on unpaid volunteers. Sure, there's some kudos. But the publishers are laughing all the way to the bank. > They provide an objective, systematic evaluation of research Publication bias is a thing. A hugely significant thing. > Piracy is not an alternative to publishing, so it isn't a competitor This is an odd semantic nitpick without any discernable meaning. I feel very certain that many who benefit from working within academic publication see piracy as a threat to their revenue streams, hence "competition". > piracy destroys the market No, the market has simply changed. > We need to collaboratively imagine and build a better system for communicating and evaluating science On this I completely agree.
  • allenz 9y ago
    > piracy as a threat to their revenue streams, hence "competition" By your logic, I can "compete" with GM by stealing all of their car inventory and blowing up all their factories in Detroit. I don't think that makes sense. > the market has simply changed Strongly disagree. What exactly is the new market? Selling journal t-shirts? > yet the peer review process relies on unpaid volunteers > Publication bias is a thing I say that publishers add much more value than pirates. Sure, publishers aren't perfect and others add value too. So what?
    • klipt 9y ago
      Pirates definitely add more value per dollar charged.
  • matt4077 9y ago
    You ignored the best argument: what does PLOS (a non-profit) do with those $2000 they charge the author? Nobody is disputing that Elsevier et al make a profit that isn't entirely deserved. You don't have to argue that point. But that glosses over the fact that their revenue is absolutely not pure profit. PLOS shows that there are costs associated with publishing, even if you get a lot of the work for free. Those $2000 are the value that publishers provide. Maybe they're charging $5000 for those $2000 right now, and that's morally suspect. But when that business model is destroyed, someone has to come up with a way to finance those $2000 of value by other means. Also: > Publication bias is a thing. A hugely significant thing. "Publication bias" isn't the arbitrary injection of a publisher's opinions into articles or something like that. It just describes the fact that more surprising, or positive results are more likely to get published. Doing away with publishers won't have any effect on this mechanism. Any sort of ranking or discovery mechanism will ultimately prefer the more spectacular result, because that's what people are looking for. In the specific case of pharmacology, mandatory pre-registration of trials, and all-encompassing meta-analysis of those is a good strategy, and it's completely orthogonal to the process of publishing the paper.
• naasking 9y ago
  > Publishers add value in their role as gatekeepers and filters. They provide an objective, systematic evaluation of research that others can rely on. That evaluation is expensive. Except it needn't be. Reddit-like voting and commenting site for scientists would work just as well to vet papers and provide valuable feedback to authors with nearly zero overhead.
  • jasode 9y ago
    >Reddit-like voting and commenting site for scientists would work just as well to vet papers Probably not. There's a well-known essay that explains why karma/votes/likes work very well for easy tidbits like cat photos, gifs, and puns. (The stuff that takes less than 5 seconds to evaluate and requires near-zero effort to judge whether one "likes" it or not.) Unfortunately, I don't have a cite because I forgot who the author was. Longer topics such as a 20000 word dense research paper with supporting data that requires at least 2 hours of study by a reader/reviewer doesn't work for a karma points system. The effort is too high to contribute significant # of votes. It's the same difficulty for other long form content such as manuscripts for novels/books. Instead of karma voting, these works require curation that passes the "signal of approval" from one person to the next. With book manuscripts, curation is first done by the literary agents and then the acquisition editors. With scholarly papers, it's a somewhat analogous process (committee 1st pass then forwards to the peer reviewers). Each "approver" has a reputation which signals to the next person that it's ok to invest the hours into studying the work. This social signaling mechanism is also similar for startup entrepreneurs' business plans and VCs. VCs would rather be exposed to your business idea from a referral rather than an unsolicited cold email. All 3 domain examples of book manuscripts, academic research, and business plans share the same theme: people have limited time to wade through a vast sea of poor quality content. I think people can conclude that flipping through 100 cat photos is different than slogging through 100 dense papers. Another example of this dynamic is the Stackoverflow voting system. There have been several meta discussions lamenting the fact that the "easy" questions attracts a high volume of activity (answers + votes) but the "hard" questions languishes with little attention. That's because the easy questions are more analogous to the low-effort cat photos. Another commenter in the thread mentioned that github solved workflow for programmers and the same could be done for peer reviewing academic papers. This is misunderstanding the underlying issue. Evaluating dense papers is not an "information technology workflow problem" that's waiting for collaboration software to solve. The bottleneck is human effort to properly read papers to judge its correctness and significance. In 1687, a human would read Newton's Principia Mathematica at ~200 words-per-minute and after several hours, maybe he'd conclude that "yes, F=ma looks reasonable here". It's 300 years later and we're still the same slow humans reading papers at ~200 wpm. It's worse now because there's a larger glut of bad papers to wade through than before. Peer review of novels, scientific papers, business plans, is not solvable by a Github/Sharepoint/DropBox. The bottleneck isn't the copying of pdf or LaTeX files from one person to the next. It's the hours of human effort to judge the papers and signal to the next person to also expend hours of human effort. The issue about publishers isn't the filtering. The real issue is that they they charge too much money for filtering. The high profits is misleading some people to think it's an easy problem solved by github or a reddit-like voting system.