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I am surprised that it took so long after the invention of the Internet. In the pre-Internet era, these journals used to play a significant role in distributing
by foo101 8y ago
I am surprised that it took so long after the invention of the Internet. In the pre-Internet era, these journals used to play a significant role in distributing research papers in physical paper form. It made sense then. There was no way to copy a 10 page research paper from Germany to China with a few finger taps at low cost. But with the advent of the Internet and its pervasiveness, it no longer makes sense to rely on a costly media based on physical printing, distribution, and centralized organizations milking money out of it.
I remember Timothy Gowers calling for a boycott of Elsevier back in 2012. It's 6 years since then and Elsevier is still alive. Influential researchers still submit their work to Elsevier! It took less time (a few weeks?) for everyone to boycott Digg!
It's surprising how the Internet has been used to distribute cat videos, advertisements, time-draining, and attention-draining content to a sickening degree but it is still underutilized to distribute good content like research papers such that the Internet becomes the primary and de facto media for such content.
- Iv 8y agoBecause as techies we fail to recognize that some things are the way they are not for lack of a better alternative, but because of entrenched interests. I am still amazed that the record industry managed to shut down what was likely to be the next iteration of internet: P2P exchanges. Now we have a centralized youtube solving in a bad way what eDonkey+VLC could have solved for two decades already.
- Razengan 8y ago> P2P exchanges. Now we have a centralized youtube solving in a bad way what eDonkey+VLC could have solved for two decades already. Hey, that can still happen..
- netheril96 8y agoHere in China, where privacy is rampant, P2P dies because of lack of public IPs.
- snovv_crash 8y agoWas that an accident, or was it on purpose because centralized systems are easier to monitor/censor?
- netheril96 8y agoChina does not have many public IPs (v4) in the first place, so I doubt it is in any way deliberate. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_IPv4_address_allocation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_IPv4_addr...: Country | Number of IPv4 addresses Per Person US | 4.91196 China | 0.24591
- snovv_crash 8y agoAnd IP addresses per internet-connected person?
- JFFalcon 8y agoSearching for 'China internet percentage' shows several sites claiming ~50%, so double the ratio to ~0.5, or 10 times less than the USA.
- netheril96 8y agoI don't know the numbers, but even if it exceeded one, it wouldn't mean every Chinese would get one public IP. Many IP addresses are still on sale.
- ohre1Eda 8y agoIsn't IPv6 widely deployed in china? Most major bittorrent clients have partial or complete IPv6 support these days - although IPv6 DHT support is still lacking apart from Transmission and BiglyBT. But I don't know about the state of things of the multi-network clients which are popular china.
- netheril96 8y ago
- vbezhenar 8y agoWhat do you mean by shutdown? I'm using torrents almost every day.
- Iv 8y agoBut you are not using P2P to exchange pictures or video with your friend or family. You store them in a big central server that somehow magically get paid for. Wikipedia still begs yearly for hosting whereas if people voluntered their bandwidth and space there would be no problem hosting it. I remember eDonkey fondly. The variety of things you can get with torrents pale in comparison of what was open to us: people would just share "their" files with a huge variety of different content. Nowadays you only get a few thousands of the most popular US movies.
- vbezhenar 8y agoCost of maintaining my pictures and videos is tiny, as is cost of maintaining Wikipedia (relative to its users). Simple VPS for $1/month is enough for me, and with economies of scale, I'm sure that it's few cents per user at most. Wikipedia has no problem getting enough donation to continue its work. I like the idea of P2P social network, but honestly I think that there's no problem to solve in the first place. While distribution of huge video files and music files is a problem and torrents solve it, that's why they are popular. It's not easy to host terabytes of video with thousands of downloads. But it's trivially solved with torrents.
- MrManatee 8y agoHosting costs are not the main reason for the yearly fundraisers on Wikipedia. From July 2016 to June 2017 the Wikimedia Foundation raised $87.5 million in donations and spent $2.2 million in hosting. https://annual.wikimedia.org/2017/financials.html https://annual.wikimedia.org/2017/financials.html
- kevin_thibedeau 8y agoWell you needed a robust hypermedia platform that permits low friction collaboration. Sharing DVIs via email, FTP, or Gopher doesn't cut it.
- Ma8ee 8y agoThis has nothing to do with the physical form of the media. Of course everything is digital and has been for decades. The root of the problem is that to make an academic career you have to publish is one of those journals. When you apply for a new position, the first thing they look for is how many papers you have published in high profile journals.
- foo101 8y agoIt has everything to do with physical form. The fact that research is carried out via centralized journals is a relic of a practice that is over 300 years old, when printed paper was the only feasible medium to distribute such research. If scientific research had started in this century, I am pretty sure no researcher would have ever thought of publishing research papers in a centralized journal where the journal gets to make so much money for a contribution that is not commensurate. Instead, they would have chosen an online platform that is funded and managed by the universities and research centers participating in this platform. What you are saying is equivalent to stating a tautology: Elsevier is still important for researchers' careers because Elsevier is still important for researchers' careers. The deeper question I ask is: Why is Elsevier or such centralized journals still important for researchers' careers? Why can't the academia move to a model where only the impact of the paper matter where the impact is measured by some open source metrics like citations, number of stars, etc. I am not suggesting these exact same metrics. These are only examples. But it should be possible. For example, in the software world, GNU, Linux, Node.js, Git, etc. did not become important by publishing in a centralized journal but by publishing on open repositories, some amount of marketing, and by the virtue of being very useful. What prevents existing researchers from moving to such a model? If enough influential people move to this model, Elsevier and others automatically become unimportant.
- dpq 8y agoCoordination is hard, otherwise this would already have happened. I recommend "Inadequate equilibria" by Eliezer Yudkowsky https://equilibriabook.com/ https://equilibriabook.com/ if you want a better grasp on how and why such situations arise and cannot be easily optimized.
- kilotaras 8y agoThis is not a technological problem, but a coordination one. Each of the individual researchers, faculty and grant committees are being perfectly rational in supporting status quo, they are just stuck in a suboptimal Nash equilibrium [1]. To quote Yudkowsky for a possible solution to this metaproblem "That’s why we have ... there doesn’t seem to be a word in your language for the timed-collective-action-threshold-conditional-commitment… hold on, this cultural translator isn’t making any sense. “Kickstarter”? You have the key concept, but you use it mainly for making video games?" [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium [2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x5ASTMPKPowLKpLpZ/moloch-s-toolbox-1-2 https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x5ASTMPKPowLKpLpZ/moloch-s-t...
- barry-cotter 8y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract > An assurance contract, also known as a provision point mechanism, or crowdaction[1], is a game theoretic mechanism and a financial technology that facilitates the voluntary creation of public goods and club goods in the face of collective action problems such as the free rider problem. ... > Dominant assurance contracts, created by Alex Tabarrok, involve an extra component, an entrepreneur who profits when the quorum is reached and pays the signors extra if it is not. If the quorum is not formed, the signors do not pay their share and indeed actively profit from having participated since they keep the money the entrepreneur paid them.
- Vinnl 8y agoThere's actually a publisher in the humanities that operates like this! Knowledge Unlatched funds monographs (i.e. books), then academic libraries pay a fee not to access those books, but to have them made available as Open Acess. It's actually been really successful in obtaining funds for open access publishing while circumventing the problem of people not paying for it because others might be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Unlatched https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Unlatched
- smaddox 8y ago
- Vinnl 8y agoThat's because, despite being called "publishers", publishing is not the main function academic publishers like Elsevier are being used for. Their main function is identifying and recognising the most valued academics in each field. So obviously academics are going to pay whatever amount of public money is needed and available to get that stamp of approval, because otherwise they'll be out of a job in a very competitive job market. Edit: The argument in more detail: https://medium.com/flockademic/to-fix-scholarly-publishing-decouple-credentialing-from-publishing-29b211f49acc https://medium.com/flockademic/to-fix-scholarly-publishing-d...
- pfortuny 8y agoThis is it. They are not distributors, they are the gateway to scientific professional advance. You will not get much just by posting things to arxiv.
- yason 8y agoSo that implies that a majority of academics, or at least a portion of them with meaningful power, of academics actually place value on the 'name stamp' that Elsevier and others apply to other researcher's work. They all could just read a PDF from the original researcher's own web page or university's online archive but they choose to prefer the 'Elsevier gated' papers instead. Otherwise people publishing via Elsevier wouldn't "get much" either. The question is whether that pays off in the end. That is, do Elsevier and others' papers have the bar high enough that it's absolutely not worth browsing and reading papers outside the commercial publication, or if it's just laziness and convenience acting up by placing trust in these academic publishers. The academics should be aware of the money and power game involved in commercial publishing, so they should be in a position to judge whether there is value to be trusted in it.
- pfortuny 8y agoThe fact that they put the 'name stamp' is due, essentially, to the referees that allow that paper to be published. Refereeing is also part of the CV of a researcher. So, unless you find another way to do the refereeing process, there is no alternative to the 'name stamp'. Just uploading to the arxiv will not guarantee that your paper has been reviewed.
- Mediterraneo10 8y agoYou shouldn't conflate the negative nature of for-profit scholarly publishing with the use of paper as a medium. In my own field, virtually all of our journals are produced by non-profit learned societies instead of companies like Elsevier or Springer. But thank goodness that these journals are still published on paper and collected in my library alongside the production of PDFs. Any work I write requires having several publications open in front of me at any given time, and that is a lot easier with paper journals instead of PDFs. Plus, printed journals in library holdings allow one to spend hours browsing through research without any of the distractions that electronics bring. I definitely appreciate having PDFs of articles, but paper still has its place.
- maccard 8y ago> Any journal submission I write requires having several publications open in front of me at any given time, and that is a lot easier with paper journals instead of PDFs. I strongly disagree I’ve writtrn two published articles and two dissertations, and PDF versions have made my life so much easier (mendeley in particular)
- Mediterraneo10 8y agoWhy "strongly disagree"? If PDFs have helped you, then that speaks for the value that I suggested of having both paper and PDF.
- tinus_hn 8y agoBehold the invention of the printer! You can turn PDFs into paper in the comfort of your own home!
- Mediterraneo10 8y agoWhen an entire department of researchers wants a publication on paper, as well as people in other departments who need to occasionally draw on this field’s research, it makes sense for a single paper copy to be produced and held in a library where everyone can readily consult it without having to incur their own printing costs.
- Bromskloss 8y agoWhy did people boycott Digg?