6 ms·

Am I the only person left who still worries about the incentive alignment problem inherent in the pay-to-publish model? To a first approximation, everyone wants

Am I the only person left who still worries about the incentive alignment problem inherent in the pay-to-publish model? To a first approximation, everyone wants to make more money. Journals under an open access model make more money when they publish more articles, and the fastest way to publish more articles is to lower standards and accept more articles for publication. Researchers also have a strong incentive to publish as much as possible in order to boost their citation counts, which serve as a proxy for prestige these days and which factor heavily into tenure decisions. Since grants and institutions[1] pay for open access publication fees, researchers have an incentive to select "predatory" journals with low standards and high fees. We already see this dynamic developing. In short, all the incentives line up to encourage the publication of a large volume of low-quality research. Science already has a severe problem with junk research, especially in the social sciences where a large fraction of results simply do not reproduce. Do we want to make this problem even worse? I'm sure the specific people involved in the system have the best intentions, but as a matter of history and of human nature, good intentions are powerless in the face of incentives. The most dangerous four-word phrase in human history is "This time, it's different". [1] Google, for example, will pay open-access publication fees.

garmaine 8y ago
Why are you assuming the alternative is pay to publish?
- zerostar07 8y ago
  because thats what how open access mostly works today
- quotemstr 8y ago
  How else do you fund curation? Research without some kind of quality filtering mechanism is just a bunch of blog posts.
  - garmaine 8y ago
    Non-profit member-run organizations come to mind. “Pay” for publication with credits earned doing volunteer review work, or something like that. Or even just a pay to publish with a non profit mandate and board elected by the published researchers would eliminate much of the complained about incentive problem. The problem here is having a for profit publisher, not the way in which that publisher makes its revenue.
    - dorchadas 8y ago
      Yeah, that's what I was thinking. But even don't have them pay for credits. Have a set fee, based on the number of universities in the organization, and then those who help subsidize storage can upload for free and get it peer-reviewed. Let the reviewers work for free, or even use some of the money to hire reviewers, and have authors tag their work and then be placed in the correct categories. The whole problem with money and profit can be solved in as simple a way as making it an NPO.
  - dorchadas 8y ago
    Why not some type of model that has universities support it, and get interested parties to peer-review them (much as is done now, since peer-reviewers aren't paid). Make it a non-profit and basically the universities come together to subsidize the hosting of the articles. Get rid of multiple journals completely, and instead have a great tagging and filtering system.
  - ridgeguy 8y ago
    >How else do you fund curation? Academic institutions have financial incentives in seeing that their faculty publish. When faculty get grants, there's almost always an overhead component that goes to the grantee's institution. Maybe colleges/unis could explicitly pay faculty for their occasional service as peer reviewers. And/or offer some "softer" incentive, like an incremental advance towards tenure. The financial component could come out of grant overhead. A combo of these could motivate and pay for good curation.
dgacmu 8y ago
I don't think the incentives on the researcher side are that poor. I can't pay OA fees out of NSF awards. I have to do so out of discretionary funds, which are substantially harder to come by. I think carefully before paying them. Also, all of my colleagues would laugh at me if I published in a junk venue. There's no win, at least in the top tier.
- quotemstr 8y ago
  Sure: that's the case today. My argument is that the open-access world still has a quality bar due to social inertia, that this quality bar exists in spite of the current incentive structure, and that over time, the incentives will come to dominate outcomes.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  > Also, all of my colleagues would laugh at me if I published in a junk venue. That's the heart of the problem right there. Would you laugh your colleagues if they published in a junk venue? Or would you look at the work on its merits and ignore the medium?
  - dgacmu 8y ago
    I'd ask them what the hell they were doing if they published in a low quality, predatory "journal". I think it's ethically wrong to lend credence to leeches. I wouldn't do anything of the sort if they published on arxiv. We have a place to publish respectable work without fees and without peer-review. In some subfields of CS, we're also lucky enough to have high quality, open access venues without exorbitant fees (e.g., USENIX conferences). So pay-for-crap is not a necessary choice.
    - jacquesm 8y ago
      > I'd ask them what the hell they were doing if they published in a low quality, predatory "journal". I think it's ethically wrong to lend credence to leeches. That's the whole point of this debate. All the paid access journals are leeches in one form or another.
cassowary37 8y ago
yes, journals do depend on accepting a certain number of publications... the good news is that for a good journal, that number is far far less than the number of submissions. Journals care most about their brand - that is, if journal x gets a reputation for publishing everything, people will only send them crap, and/or will avoid publishing there entirely for fear of guilt-by-association. What open access journals are selling to authors is rigorous peer review, editing, and help with getting the word out. As more open access journals appear, the competition for high-quality submissions will only increase.

garmaine 8y ago

Why are you assuming the alternative is pay to publish?

zerostar07 8y ago
because thats what how open access mostly works today
quotemstr 8y ago
How else do you fund curation? Research without some kind of quality filtering mechanism is just a bunch of blog posts.
- garmaine 8y ago
  Non-profit member-run organizations come to mind. “Pay” for publication with credits earned doing volunteer review work, or something like that. Or even just a pay to publish with a non profit mandate and board elected by the published researchers would eliminate much of the complained about incentive problem. The problem here is having a for profit publisher, not the way in which that publisher makes its revenue.
  - dorchadas 8y ago
    Yeah, that's what I was thinking. But even don't have them pay for credits. Have a set fee, based on the number of universities in the organization, and then those who help subsidize storage can upload for free and get it peer-reviewed. Let the reviewers work for free, or even use some of the money to hire reviewers, and have authors tag their work and then be placed in the correct categories. The whole problem with money and profit can be solved in as simple a way as making it an NPO.
- dorchadas 8y ago
  Why not some type of model that has universities support it, and get interested parties to peer-review them (much as is done now, since peer-reviewers aren't paid). Make it a non-profit and basically the universities come together to subsidize the hosting of the articles. Get rid of multiple journals completely, and instead have a great tagging and filtering system.
- ridgeguy 8y ago
  >How else do you fund curation? Academic institutions have financial incentives in seeing that their faculty publish. When faculty get grants, there's almost always an overhead component that goes to the grantee's institution. Maybe colleges/unis could explicitly pay faculty for their occasional service as peer reviewers. And/or offer some "softer" incentive, like an incremental advance towards tenure. The financial component could come out of grant overhead. A combo of these could motivate and pay for good curation.

dgacmu 8y ago

I don't think the incentives on the researcher side are that poor. I can't pay OA fees out of NSF awards. I have to do so out of discretionary funds, which are substantially harder to come by. I think carefully before paying them. Also, all of my colleagues would laugh at me if I published in a junk venue. There's no win, at least in the top tier.

quotemstr 8y ago
Sure: that's the case today. My argument is that the open-access world still has a quality bar due to social inertia, that this quality bar exists in spite of the current incentive structure, and that over time, the incentives will come to dominate outcomes.
jacquesm 8y ago
> Also, all of my colleagues would laugh at me if I published in a junk venue. That's the heart of the problem right there. Would you laugh your colleagues if they published in a junk venue? Or would you look at the work on its merits and ignore the medium?
- dgacmu 8y ago
  I'd ask them what the hell they were doing if they published in a low quality, predatory "journal". I think it's ethically wrong to lend credence to leeches. I wouldn't do anything of the sort if they published on arxiv. We have a place to publish respectable work without fees and without peer-review. In some subfields of CS, we're also lucky enough to have high quality, open access venues without exorbitant fees (e.g., USENIX conferences). So pay-for-crap is not a necessary choice.
  - jacquesm 8y ago
    > I'd ask them what the hell they were doing if they published in a low quality, predatory "journal". I think it's ethically wrong to lend credence to leeches. That's the whole point of this debate. All the paid access journals are leeches in one form or another.

cassowary37 8y ago

yes, journals do depend on accepting a certain number of publications... the good news is that for a good journal, that number is far far less than the number of submissions. Journals care most about their brand - that is, if journal x gets a reputation for publishing everything, people will only send them crap, and/or will avoid publishing there entirely for fear of guilt-by-association. What open access journals are selling to authors is rigorous peer review, editing, and help with getting the word out. As more open access journals appear, the competition for high-quality submissions will only increase.