5 ms·

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 pa

by 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.
  - Vinnl 9y ago
    > create a neutral evaluation of the goods these rivaling organisations produce Well... They mostly facilitate the evaluation of the goods. The evaluation itself is still done by scientists and scholars that are not employed by the publishers.
    - Pica_soO 9y ago
      If those would routinely abuse the power bestowed upon them, they would threaten the magazines. Its in there own best interest to not abuse there review-powers, or there reputation could be ruined by the very same marketplace. You cant just open another marketplace at the same location, because that has you at a automatic disadvantage. You could however ruin the marketplaces reputation, trying to shift customers to yours. You can also, wrap the market-place as in- provide a vital layer they need to function, and thus turn them into a organella of a bigger market-place.
  - jdietrich 9y ago
    >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. Ahem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-the-counter_(finance) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-the-counter_(finance)
Vinnl 9y ago
Some plugs since I've spent quite some time learning about this issue and writing that up, and like seeing the number of reads go up: More about the Impact Factor: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-can-make-or-break-academic-careers-704e00ae070a https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-ca... More about why intelligent people "put up" with this: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarly-publishing-eef794937c9c https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl... An overview of some hopeful initiatives by people who aren't putting up with this: https://medium.com/flockademic/these-trailblazers-are-paving-the-way-for-open-access-7d098172112b https://medium.com/flockademic/these-trailblazers-are-paving...
Athas 9y ago
Not all fields suffer from this to the same degree. For example, I am a fledgling computing scientist. I mostly publish in ACM-related conferences and workshops, where ACM is an organisation run by and for academics and professionals in the computing field, not a for-profit publisher. My submission experience is: 1. You produce novel research. 2. You submit novel research to the best conference or workshop you think will publish it. 3. The editor (a volunteer) 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 reject (this supposedly happens, but is rare), your paper passes peer review. 5. Congratulations! The conference or workshop agrees to publish your novel research. For this, you generally must show up to the conference or workshop to present your work in person. This costs money (conference registration), and also travel cost and such. However, if you were going to the conference anyway, there is no added expenditure. 6. Having been paid by you to publish your work, ACM sells your paper at somewhat exorbitant prices to university libraries (unless you paid them lots extra to just make it available for free). However, at no cost to you, you are also explicitly allowed to post a "pre-print", identical to the published paper, on your personal/university website, where it will be promptly found by Google. However, the hosting is your own concern. (You can also upload the preprint to arXiv.) It's a decent procedure. ACM also publishes journals, which do not require you to present anything in person. I do not know whether any author-borne costs are involved if you go that route.
- superasn 9y ago
  So does the piracy affect you? Are you in favor of sites like sci-hub?
  - lorenzhs 9y ago
    I'm in a very similar position as the OP (Computer Science PhD student). Piracy doesn't affect me at all. I'm very happy if someone wants to read my papers, however, you don't have to use sci-hub etc to access them - I've published preprints of all of them on arxiv.org. Usually I do this right after I submit to a conference and update it later to reflect any changes made before publication. This also allows me to timestamp my results - say my paper gets rejected because the reviewers think it's a bad fit for the conference, or they didn't understand my point because my writing was bad, etc. Now I have to improve it and submit it to another conference. If someone else publishes similar results in the meantime, then I can always point to the preprint and say that I did it first ;)
adtac 9y ago
Even though I'm not a researcher (yet; still doing my undergrad), this infuriates me to no end. I'd be glad to help any movement that attempts to break this by volunteering code and time.
matt4077 9y ago
You are incorrect, at least for my branch (biology), and the traditional publishers like Elsevier, and well-known journals like Science, Nature, or PNAS: Publishing in such a journal does not cost money. It also doesn't pay the authors. Only the readers pay for the journal subscription. Then about 15 years ago, a movement started to invert this process. This is called Open Access. Under this model, the author pays to have their paper reviewed, and it is published with a copyleft license, free to access by the public. In the last years, traditional journals have started similar offerings, sometimes graduated (i. e. you pay only a little, and the article is embargoed for a year). Sci-Hub is attacking this problem with technology. That is the second-best solution only. It would be much better if the scientific community could throw their weight behind legal Open Access publishing. That's because there simply are costs involved in the review process, even if the reviewers as well as the authors are not paid. Copyediting, infrastructure, coordination, public relations, data retention, and other work that goes into publishing is done by full-time employees. As one point of reference: PLOS One, the largest Open Access publisher, charges around $600 for a publishing a manuscript. That's a non-profit, and it represents the best current effort to manage this process.
- Vinnl 9y ago
  > Under this model, the author pays to have their paper reviewed Note: it's not necessarily the case that the author pays. For example, the Open Library of Humanities [1] is funded by contributions my academic libraries, and is thus both free to read and to publish in. Something that's also referred to as Open Access (the "green" variant - I wrote about the different flavours at [2]) is when authors post a version of their article elsewhere, e.g. at their institution or on ArXiV. The confusion is common though: there are lot of terms, and publishers have been exacerbating it by co-opting the terms (which I wrote about at [3]). [1] http://openlibhums.org/ http://openlibhums.org/ [2] https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access-be-cf6662565ecd https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access-be-c... [3] https://medium.com/flockademic/what-legacy-publishers-mean-when-they-say-9dd67447a50b https://medium.com/flockademic/what-legacy-publishers-mean-w...
throw2016 9y ago
If academics cannot get together to fix a model so absurdly broken their problem solving capabilities come into question. They had access to the Internet before the general public, they would have realized the ridiculousness of the journal model decades ago. You can't always be a victim.
- HaoZeke 9y ago
  You forget that before the internet, paper publishing was a thing and that actually cost money. Moreover most scientists are not tech savvy.
- Tomminn 9y ago
  This at first made me angry, but on reflection I think you're basically right. I think it's because modern academia lacks the slack in the system that is necessary to solve these kinds of problems.
FabHK 9y ago
Example: AAA (American Anthropological Association) sent out a reminder to its members recently. When someone publishes their own paper on ResearchGate or academia.edu, they are in violation of copyright (which they've signed over to the lovely scientific publisher). It's a mess. https://savageminds.org/2017/10/23/takedown-notice-aaa/ https://savageminds.org/2017/10/23/takedown-notice-aaa/ Ceterum censeo Elsevier(um) esse delendum.

by beloch 9y ago

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.
- Vinnl 9y ago
  > create a neutral evaluation of the goods these rivaling organisations produce Well... They mostly facilitate the evaluation of the goods. The evaluation itself is still done by scientists and scholars that are not employed by the publishers.
  - Pica_soO 9y ago
    If those would routinely abuse the power bestowed upon them, they would threaten the magazines. Its in there own best interest to not abuse there review-powers, or there reputation could be ruined by the very same marketplace. You cant just open another marketplace at the same location, because that has you at a automatic disadvantage. You could however ruin the marketplaces reputation, trying to shift customers to yours. You can also, wrap the market-place as in- provide a vital layer they need to function, and thus turn them into a organella of a bigger market-place.
- jdietrich 9y ago
  >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. Ahem. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-the-counter_(finance) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Over-the-counter_(finance)

Vinnl 9y ago

Some plugs since I've spent quite some time learning about this issue and writing that up, and like seeing the number of reads go up: More about the Impact Factor: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-can-make-or-break-academic-careers-704e00ae070a https://medium.com/flockademic/the-ridiculous-number-that-ca... More about why intelligent people "put up" with this: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarly-publishing-eef794937c9c https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl... An overview of some hopeful initiatives by people who aren't putting up with this: https://medium.com/flockademic/these-trailblazers-are-paving-the-way-for-open-access-7d098172112b https://medium.com/flockademic/these-trailblazers-are-paving...

Athas 9y ago

Not all fields suffer from this to the same degree. For example, I am a fledgling computing scientist. I mostly publish in ACM-related conferences and workshops, where ACM is an organisation run by and for academics and professionals in the computing field, not a for-profit publisher. My submission experience is: 1. You produce novel research. 2. You submit novel research to the best conference or workshop you think will publish it. 3. The editor (a volunteer) 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 reject (this supposedly happens, but is rare), your paper passes peer review. 5. Congratulations! The conference or workshop agrees to publish your novel research. For this, you generally must show up to the conference or workshop to present your work in person. This costs money (conference registration), and also travel cost and such. However, if you were going to the conference anyway, there is no added expenditure. 6. Having been paid by you to publish your work, ACM sells your paper at somewhat exorbitant prices to university libraries (unless you paid them lots extra to just make it available for free). However, at no cost to you, you are also explicitly allowed to post a "pre-print", identical to the published paper, on your personal/university website, where it will be promptly found by Google. However, the hosting is your own concern. (You can also upload the preprint to arXiv.) It's a decent procedure. ACM also publishes journals, which do not require you to present anything in person. I do not know whether any author-borne costs are involved if you go that route.

superasn 9y ago
So does the piracy affect you? Are you in favor of sites like sci-hub?
- lorenzhs 9y ago
  I'm in a very similar position as the OP (Computer Science PhD student). Piracy doesn't affect me at all. I'm very happy if someone wants to read my papers, however, you don't have to use sci-hub etc to access them - I've published preprints of all of them on arxiv.org. Usually I do this right after I submit to a conference and update it later to reflect any changes made before publication. This also allows me to timestamp my results - say my paper gets rejected because the reviewers think it's a bad fit for the conference, or they didn't understand my point because my writing was bad, etc. Now I have to improve it and submit it to another conference. If someone else publishes similar results in the meantime, then I can always point to the preprint and say that I did it first ;)

adtac 9y ago

Even though I'm not a researcher (yet; still doing my undergrad), this infuriates me to no end. I'd be glad to help any movement that attempts to break this by volunteering code and time.

matt4077 9y ago

You are incorrect, at least for my branch (biology), and the traditional publishers like Elsevier, and well-known journals like Science, Nature, or PNAS: Publishing in such a journal does not cost money. It also doesn't pay the authors. Only the readers pay for the journal subscription. Then about 15 years ago, a movement started to invert this process. This is called Open Access. Under this model, the author pays to have their paper reviewed, and it is published with a copyleft license, free to access by the public. In the last years, traditional journals have started similar offerings, sometimes graduated (i. e. you pay only a little, and the article is embargoed for a year). Sci-Hub is attacking this problem with technology. That is the second-best solution only. It would be much better if the scientific community could throw their weight behind legal Open Access publishing. That's because there simply are costs involved in the review process, even if the reviewers as well as the authors are not paid. Copyediting, infrastructure, coordination, public relations, data retention, and other work that goes into publishing is done by full-time employees. As one point of reference: PLOS One, the largest Open Access publisher, charges around $600 for a publishing a manuscript. That's a non-profit, and it represents the best current effort to manage this process.

Vinnl 9y ago
> Under this model, the author pays to have their paper reviewed Note: it's not necessarily the case that the author pays. For example, the Open Library of Humanities [1] is funded by contributions my academic libraries, and is thus both free to read and to publish in. Something that's also referred to as Open Access (the "green" variant - I wrote about the different flavours at [2]) is when authors post a version of their article elsewhere, e.g. at their institution or on ArXiV. The confusion is common though: there are lot of terms, and publishers have been exacerbating it by co-opting the terms (which I wrote about at [3]). [1] http://openlibhums.org/ http://openlibhums.org/ [2] https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access-be-cf6662565ecd https://medium.com/flockademic/how-open-can-open-access-be-c... [3] https://medium.com/flockademic/what-legacy-publishers-mean-when-they-say-9dd67447a50b https://medium.com/flockademic/what-legacy-publishers-mean-w...

throw2016 9y ago

If academics cannot get together to fix a model so absurdly broken their problem solving capabilities come into question. They had access to the Internet before the general public, they would have realized the ridiculousness of the journal model decades ago. You can't always be a victim.

HaoZeke 9y ago
You forget that before the internet, paper publishing was a thing and that actually cost money. Moreover most scientists are not tech savvy.
Tomminn 9y ago
This at first made me angry, but on reflection I think you're basically right. I think it's because modern academia lacks the slack in the system that is necessary to solve these kinds of problems.

FabHK 9y ago

Example: AAA (American Anthropological Association) sent out a reminder to its members recently. When someone publishes their own paper on ResearchGate or academia.edu, they are in violation of copyright (which they've signed over to the lovely scientific publisher). It's a mess. https://savageminds.org/2017/10/23/takedown-notice-aaa/ https://savageminds.org/2017/10/23/takedown-notice-aaa/ Ceterum censeo Elsevier(um) esse delendum.