8 ms·

ELI5: I'm not from academia so please help me understand. Are researchers who publish these [firewalled/copyrighted] papers likely to lose out on their earnings

ELI5: I'm not from academia so please help me understand. Are researchers who publish these [firewalled/copyrighted] papers likely to lose out on their earnings if this is 'open-sourced'? I'm honestly asking as I try to think through the whole 'open-source' paradigm and how it fits in a (mostly) capitalist, libertarian world. Thanks!

unlikelymordant 9y ago
The researchers will not lose anything, only the publishers. Researchers are paid by (usually) universities, and often post preprints i.e. the paper without the publishers formatting, since wider dissemination is usually better.
- Mic92 9y ago
  Luckily in computer science a lot people know how to host there files themselves or use https://arxiv.org/ https://arxiv.org/
- gituliar 9y ago
  That is right, researchers are paid by the universities. BUT, to be hired researchers need a strong list of publications in peer-reviewed journals. This is usually the most influential factor for ranking. For this reasons some journals charge fees for publishing your paper, not saying about being paid.
rvense 9y ago
Researchers get paid salaries by their institution. They are not paid for their publications directly, nor for reviewing or editing. All the money from journal subscriptions, book sales and per-article download fees go to the publishers of the journals.
- erikbye 9y ago
  No need to be paid directly when the indirect dollar-value of publication in the right journal can be six figures or more. With such incentive, it's no wonder many researchers skew their work towards whatever increases their chance of publication; dreaming of a Nobel Prize (apparently many in academia spend a lot of time fantasizing about it).
  - rvense 9y ago
    I don't agree. I think it's just tradition from back when academic journals had a much smaller circulation - and were physical things that needed to be printed and shipped - which justified this state of affairs. The vast majority of scientists never receive any of these prizes. A lot work in fields where no such prizes exists.
yreg 9y ago
Academic journals tend to require exclusivity. That means, if you want to publish in, say Nature, you will be asked to not publish the same article anywhere else. However, the researchers (at least in STEM) often publish these "in-progress" drafts that are very close to the final articles on their website or wherever.
- Mic92 9y ago
  In computer science we have more conference paper than journals. This is a good thing since you do not have to pay a shit load of money to get your article in. Also I have not experienced a license yet, where I was forbid to publish it on my own.
fdej 9y ago
We researchers don't get paid for our papers. We give the publishers our papers for free so that they can make money by putting them behind a paywall. We sometimes even need to pay the publishers to publish our papers. The paywall can sometimes be removed by paying the publisher even more to compensate for their loss of income.
roystonvassey 9y ago
Wow! This is ridiculous. How, and why, is such a business model still working? The only scenario I can think of is when an independent researcher wants to publish his/her research to disseminate to a wider audience and invite critiques. Or, is that also possible without these publishers?
- Vinnl 9y ago
  But researchers always want to disseminate their work to a wide audience (of other scientists that will cite their work and thus help them get a long-term job). I've been researching the industry for quite a while, and have written up the vicious cycle that keeps this in place in some more detail here: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarly-publishing-eef794937c9c https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...
- TeMPOraL 9y ago
  It's a coordination problems. Each individual researcher wants their work published in as high-impact paper as possible. Individually fighting against the very publisher you want to publish your work with is harmful to your career and will accomplish exactly nothing. It takes a critical mass of researchers, acting in coordinated way, for the attempt to change things not be suicidal.
  - FabHK 9y ago
    This is really the point. It's the tragedy of the commons. It needs coordination - sometimes it happens. Don Knuth managed to wrangle the Journal of Algorithms from Elsevier, but not all fields have such an engaged Nestor that puts in the work to pull this off. http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf I'm not really easily angered, but Elsevier (and, to a lesser extent, the other scientific publishers) are really despicable, earning above-market returns on equity off the labour of (publicly funded) scientists, then spending some of that money to make it harder to access the (publicly funded) research. Ceterum censeo Elsevier(um) esse delendum. Read the longest section of the Wikipedia entry on Elsevier ("Criticism"), and weep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Criticism_and_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Criticism_and_controv...
rspeer 9y ago
Researchers want you to pirate their paper as often as possible. You can only cite papers you've read, after all. The only royalty check I've ever seen from research I did is for a chapter of a book, and it was less than a dollar. Royalties don't matter.
- eesmith 9y ago
  "You can only cite papers you've read, after all." In practice, people cite unread papers pretty often. In some cases, the paper they cite doesn't even exist. http://blog.codalism.com/index.php/citing-papers-that-youve-never-read-or-that-were-never-written/ http://blog.codalism.com/index.php/citing-papers-that-youve-... gives an example of a non-existent paper which had been cited 215 times. http://judgestarling.tumblr.com/post/100771670031/seven-citations-of-a-paper-that-doesnt-exist-has http://judgestarling.tumblr.com/post/100771670031/seven-cita... gives some more examples of citations for papers which don't exist. The top rated answer at https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/45295/is-it-unethical-to-cite-a-paper-or-book-that-you-have-never-looked-at https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/45295/is-it-une... argues: > When you cite a source, you are not actually claiming that you have read it. What you are actually doing is staking your professional reputation on that source containing the information that you claim that it contains. I don't recall a paper ever being retracted because it cited a background paper which doesn't exist.
- yosamino 9y ago
  > The only royalty check [...] was less than a dollar. And to think that royalty is usually associated with crowns and gold and jewels and such ...
  - eesmith 9y ago
    Heinlein's "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" (1958), p14 in my copy: "I remember once, when the money baskey was empty, Dad told Mother that "a royalty was due." I hung around that day because I had never seen a king (I was eight) and when a visitor showed up I was disappointed because he didn't wear a crown. There was money in the basket the next day so I decided that he had been incognito (I was reading The Little Lame Prince) and had tossed Dad a purse of gold-it was at least a year before I found out that a "royalty" could be money from a patent or a book or business stock, and some of the glamour went out of life."
crispinb 9y ago
There can be some minuscule royalties, but by and large academic publishers are reviled for predatory practices. They get close to free content. They get free services from peer reviewers (the essential basis of what they're selling). They charge vast sums to educational libraries for access. They charge ludicrous per-article fees for any member of the public who has the temerity to wish to read about any of the research their taxes fund. Its in just about everyone's interests for for-profit academic publishers to collapse. If Sci-Hub can help bring this about, it will be a historic victory for the open internet.
- erikbye 9y ago
  Supposedly the Journal of Co-ordination Chemistry costs $11,367 per year, 24 issues [1]. [1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/why-are-journals-so-expensive/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/why... https://svpow.com/2012/01/13/the-obscene-profits-of-commercial-scholarly-publishers/ https://svpow.com/2012/01/13/the-obscene-profits-of-commerci...
  - crispinb 9y ago
    Hah - keeping some parasite's wine cellar very well-stocked no doubt. Not only does this rip off universities (which in most countries also means the taxpayer), it seriously limits access to information for citizens. Many more ordinary people access academic journal articles than I suspect research institutions fully realise. This is particularly true for legal and medical journals, access to which does have real (sometimes life-saving) effects.
beloch 9y ago
1. You produce novel research. 2. You submit novel research to the best journal you think will publish it. 3. The editor (the only person involved actually paid by the journal) invites other researchers to volunteer their time to peer review your research. 4. Assuming your research bears up under scrutiny and the peer reviewers are not actually competitors who decide to filibuster (this happens), your paper passes peer review. 5. Congratulations! The journal agrees to publish your novel research. For this, you must pay the journal. They do not pay you. You pay them. Color figures in the paper version nobody reads cost thousands extra. 6. Having been paid by you to publish your work, the journal sells your paper at exorbitant prices to university libraries (unless you paid them lots extra to just make it available for free). Taxes pay researchers to pay journals and taxes pay for university libraries to pay journals. Why on Earth do intelligent researchers (or taxpayers) put up with this crap? Being published in a good journal bumps up your impact factor and helps you win more grant money. If high impact factor journals go out of business because of piracy, others will just take their place. In short, pirates screwing over journals doesn't hurt researchers in the least. Shaking up the parasitic journal biz is actually long overdue. Journals put in only a tiny percentage of the labor involved in putting a paper through peer-review, but they soak everyone involved for massive amounts of time and money. It's time they died.
- comprev 9y ago
  Thanks, that makes it clearer for me (non-academic) to understand. It does astound me how much control the 'journals' have over the academic research world!
  - Pica_soO 9y ago
    They basically work as a "neutral" refree and communication medium between competing groups and meta groups (universitys) and create a neutral evaluation of the goods these rivaling organisations produce. The reason they are not replaced is for the same reason, stocktrading places can not simply be "replaced"- aka you cant open up a competing wall-street.
    - 9y ago
dnautics 9y ago
Arguably open source has a strong tradition of support withing procapitalist libertarians (and an equally strong tradition of opposition), starting from the 19th century debates between Benjamin Tucker and Lysander spooner, through CATB author Eric Raymond, and beyond.
jacquesm 9y ago
Researchers don't get a dime from those earnings.
JohnStrange 9y ago
Almost all top journals are in the hands of just a few global players such as DeGruyter, Elsevier, Springer, Sage, and Oxford Journals. These companies have lured independent journals into their traps by offering free Editorial Management Systems and other help to them or buying them. They have been doing that for many decades, with the result that there are only very few independent journals run by universities themselves left. We are trying to fight this by making our own open source journals, but it will take decades to replace to old, well-established journals if it happens at all. Until then, if you don't publish in a sizable number of firewalled/copyrighted top journals, your career will end at the postdoc level.
fsloth 9y ago
ELI5: Simplistically, academics don't get paid to write papers. The most important thing they get from writing papers is peer prestige. Which they need to be employed in an academic role. The academics are paid by the institutions which hire them, from research grants, and so on. The only link with financial renumeration and the papers is that the better reputation an academic has, the the better their financial situation is. Publishers require expensive subscriptions from academic universities to be able to read their published papers. So actually it goes the other way around. Academics have to pay to read papers, and to write papers. Scihub does not steal a dime from any original contributor. They actually save money from them.
ptero 9y ago
It is extremely unlikely that authors lose anything from open publication of their research (in fact some provide final versions themselves as preprints on their websites). Authors in general get no money for publications. In a weird setup of today authors get benefits from publications of prestige, career, hiring help and other scientists get curation / peer review benefits. If current publication system went away completely and quickly it would be a minor shock to the system, but IMO easy to survive as a replacement curation system would emerge (from conferences, arxiv style, etc.)

unlikelymordant 9y ago

The researchers will not lose anything, only the publishers. Researchers are paid by (usually) universities, and often post preprints i.e. the paper without the publishers formatting, since wider dissemination is usually better.

Mic92 9y ago
Luckily in computer science a lot people know how to host there files themselves or use https://arxiv.org/ https://arxiv.org/
gituliar 9y ago
That is right, researchers are paid by the universities. BUT, to be hired researchers need a strong list of publications in peer-reviewed journals. This is usually the most influential factor for ranking. For this reasons some journals charge fees for publishing your paper, not saying about being paid.

rvense 9y ago

Researchers get paid salaries by their institution. They are not paid for their publications directly, nor for reviewing or editing. All the money from journal subscriptions, book sales and per-article download fees go to the publishers of the journals.

erikbye 9y ago
No need to be paid directly when the indirect dollar-value of publication in the right journal can be six figures or more. With such incentive, it's no wonder many researchers skew their work towards whatever increases their chance of publication; dreaming of a Nobel Prize (apparently many in academia spend a lot of time fantasizing about it).
- rvense 9y ago
  I don't agree. I think it's just tradition from back when academic journals had a much smaller circulation - and were physical things that needed to be printed and shipped - which justified this state of affairs. The vast majority of scientists never receive any of these prizes. A lot work in fields where no such prizes exists.

yreg 9y ago

Academic journals tend to require exclusivity. That means, if you want to publish in, say Nature, you will be asked to not publish the same article anywhere else. However, the researchers (at least in STEM) often publish these "in-progress" drafts that are very close to the final articles on their website or wherever.

Mic92 9y ago
In computer science we have more conference paper than journals. This is a good thing since you do not have to pay a shit load of money to get your article in. Also I have not experienced a license yet, where I was forbid to publish it on my own.

fdej 9y ago

We researchers don't get paid for our papers. We give the publishers our papers for free so that they can make money by putting them behind a paywall. We sometimes even need to pay the publishers to publish our papers. The paywall can sometimes be removed by paying the publisher even more to compensate for their loss of income.

roystonvassey 9y ago

Wow! This is ridiculous. How, and why, is such a business model still working? The only scenario I can think of is when an independent researcher wants to publish his/her research to disseminate to a wider audience and invite critiques. Or, is that also possible without these publishers?

Vinnl 9y ago
But researchers always want to disseminate their work to a wide audience (of other scientists that will cite their work and thus help them get a long-term job). I've been researching the industry for quite a while, and have written up the vicious cycle that keeps this in place in some more detail here: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarly-publishing-eef794937c9c https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...
TeMPOraL 9y ago
It's a coordination problems. Each individual researcher wants their work published in as high-impact paper as possible. Individually fighting against the very publisher you want to publish your work with is harmful to your career and will accomplish exactly nothing. It takes a critical mass of researchers, acting in coordinated way, for the attempt to change things not be suicidal.
- FabHK 9y ago
  This is really the point. It's the tragedy of the commons. It needs coordination - sometimes it happens. Don Knuth managed to wrangle the Journal of Algorithms from Elsevier, but not all fields have such an engaged Nestor that puts in the work to pull this off. http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf I'm not really easily angered, but Elsevier (and, to a lesser extent, the other scientific publishers) are really despicable, earning above-market returns on equity off the labour of (publicly funded) scientists, then spending some of that money to make it harder to access the (publicly funded) research. Ceterum censeo Elsevier(um) esse delendum. Read the longest section of the Wikipedia entry on Elsevier ("Criticism"), and weep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Criticism_and_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Criticism_and_controv...

rspeer 9y ago

Researchers want you to pirate their paper as often as possible. You can only cite papers you've read, after all. The only royalty check I've ever seen from research I did is for a chapter of a book, and it was less than a dollar. Royalties don't matter.

eesmith 9y ago
"You can only cite papers you've read, after all." In practice, people cite unread papers pretty often. In some cases, the paper they cite doesn't even exist. http://blog.codalism.com/index.php/citing-papers-that-youve-never-read-or-that-were-never-written/ http://blog.codalism.com/index.php/citing-papers-that-youve-... gives an example of a non-existent paper which had been cited 215 times. http://judgestarling.tumblr.com/post/100771670031/seven-citations-of-a-paper-that-doesnt-exist-has http://judgestarling.tumblr.com/post/100771670031/seven-cita... gives some more examples of citations for papers which don't exist. The top rated answer at https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/45295/is-it-unethical-to-cite-a-paper-or-book-that-you-have-never-looked-at https://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/45295/is-it-une... argues: > When you cite a source, you are not actually claiming that you have read it. What you are actually doing is staking your professional reputation on that source containing the information that you claim that it contains. I don't recall a paper ever being retracted because it cited a background paper which doesn't exist.
yosamino 9y ago
> The only royalty check [...] was less than a dollar. And to think that royalty is usually associated with crowns and gold and jewels and such ...
- eesmith 9y ago
  Heinlein's "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel" (1958), p14 in my copy: "I remember once, when the money baskey was empty, Dad told Mother that "a royalty was due." I hung around that day because I had never seen a king (I was eight) and when a visitor showed up I was disappointed because he didn't wear a crown. There was money in the basket the next day so I decided that he had been incognito (I was reading The Little Lame Prince) and had tossed Dad a purse of gold-it was at least a year before I found out that a "royalty" could be money from a patent or a book or business stock, and some of the glamour went out of life."

crispinb 9y ago

There can be some minuscule royalties, but by and large academic publishers are reviled for predatory practices. They get close to free content. They get free services from peer reviewers (the essential basis of what they're selling). They charge vast sums to educational libraries for access. They charge ludicrous per-article fees for any member of the public who has the temerity to wish to read about any of the research their taxes fund. Its in just about everyone's interests for for-profit academic publishers to collapse. If Sci-Hub can help bring this about, it will be a historic victory for the open internet.

erikbye 9y ago
Supposedly the Journal of Co-ordination Chemistry costs $11,367 per year, 24 issues [1]. [1] https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/why-are-journals-so-expensive/ https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/information-culture/why... https://svpow.com/2012/01/13/the-obscene-profits-of-commercial-scholarly-publishers/ https://svpow.com/2012/01/13/the-obscene-profits-of-commerci...
- crispinb 9y ago
  Hah - keeping some parasite's wine cellar very well-stocked no doubt. Not only does this rip off universities (which in most countries also means the taxpayer), it seriously limits access to information for citizens. Many more ordinary people access academic journal articles than I suspect research institutions fully realise. This is particularly true for legal and medical journals, access to which does have real (sometimes life-saving) effects.

beloch 9y ago

1. You produce novel research. 2. You submit novel research to the best journal you think will publish it. 3. The editor (the only person involved actually paid by the journal) invites other researchers to volunteer their time to peer review your research. 4. Assuming your research bears up under scrutiny and the peer reviewers are not actually competitors who decide to filibuster (this happens), your paper passes peer review. 5. Congratulations! The journal agrees to publish your novel research. For this, you must pay the journal. They do not pay you. You pay them. Color figures in the paper version nobody reads cost thousands extra. 6. Having been paid by you to publish your work, the journal sells your paper at exorbitant prices to university libraries (unless you paid them lots extra to just make it available for free). Taxes pay researchers to pay journals and taxes pay for university libraries to pay journals. Why on Earth do intelligent researchers (or taxpayers) put up with this crap? Being published in a good journal bumps up your impact factor and helps you win more grant money. If high impact factor journals go out of business because of piracy, others will just take their place. In short, pirates screwing over journals doesn't hurt researchers in the least. Shaking up the parasitic journal biz is actually long overdue. Journals put in only a tiny percentage of the labor involved in putting a paper through peer-review, but they soak everyone involved for massive amounts of time and money. It's time they died.

comprev 9y ago
Thanks, that makes it clearer for me (non-academic) to understand. It does astound me how much control the 'journals' have over the academic research world!
- Pica_soO 9y ago
  They basically work as a "neutral" refree and communication medium between competing groups and meta groups (universitys) and create a neutral evaluation of the goods these rivaling organisations produce. The reason they are not replaced is for the same reason, stocktrading places can not simply be "replaced"- aka you cant open up a competing wall-street.
  - 9y ago

dnautics 9y ago

Arguably open source has a strong tradition of support withing procapitalist libertarians (and an equally strong tradition of opposition), starting from the 19th century debates between Benjamin Tucker and Lysander spooner, through CATB author Eric Raymond, and beyond.

jacquesm 9y ago

Researchers don't get a dime from those earnings.

JohnStrange 9y ago

Almost all top journals are in the hands of just a few global players such as DeGruyter, Elsevier, Springer, Sage, and Oxford Journals. These companies have lured independent journals into their traps by offering free Editorial Management Systems and other help to them or buying them. They have been doing that for many decades, with the result that there are only very few independent journals run by universities themselves left. We are trying to fight this by making our own open source journals, but it will take decades to replace to old, well-established journals if it happens at all. Until then, if you don't publish in a sizable number of firewalled/copyrighted top journals, your career will end at the postdoc level.

fsloth 9y ago

ELI5: Simplistically, academics don't get paid to write papers. The most important thing they get from writing papers is peer prestige. Which they need to be employed in an academic role. The academics are paid by the institutions which hire them, from research grants, and so on. The only link with financial renumeration and the papers is that the better reputation an academic has, the the better their financial situation is. Publishers require expensive subscriptions from academic universities to be able to read their published papers. So actually it goes the other way around. Academics have to pay to read papers, and to write papers. Scihub does not steal a dime from any original contributor. They actually save money from them.

ptero 9y ago

It is extremely unlikely that authors lose anything from open publication of their research (in fact some provide final versions themselves as preprints on their websites). Authors in general get no money for publications. In a weird setup of today authors get benefits from publications of prestige, career, hiring help and other scientists get curation / peer review benefits. If current publication system went away completely and quickly it would be a minor shock to the system, but IMO easy to survive as a replacement curation system would emerge (from conferences, arxiv style, etc.)