19 ms·

When you really think about it, it's pretty enraging. How much human progress has been lost to academic profiteering? What could we have accomplished if knowled

When you really think about it, it's pretty enraging. How much human progress has been lost to academic profiteering? What could we have accomplished if knowledge flowed more freely? I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers, but the system that we have now seems broken.

dojor 8y ago
Not that much human progress honestly. Most of the people who push the progress ball forward, do so not just because of access to information. They need to be in the right labs, receiving the right training, surrounded by the right mentors etc.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
  I suspect your being downvoted because labs, training, and mentors are knowledge.
  - projektir 8y ago
    To be fair, they're not equivalent knowledge. Labs often imply equipment that cannot be gotten by normal means. Training and mentors know which knowledge is important, and sometimes possess knowledge that is hard to find because it's too specific and/or deep. Research papers are a more obvious problem that is also easier to fix, but labs is nonetheless also a problem. Especially in fields where physical experiments are required, such as biology and chemistry, it's really hard to get anywhere without a lab, and running your own may be prohibitive and at times even illegal.
- akqu 8y ago
  I do think you have a good point. What I have been telling people who wants to learn things for a few years now is to make sure they have a pipeline to test their ideas. To many people are perpetually learning, tinkering and building fantasies in their head without having the opportunity to make something out of it. I would say "to each their own" if it wasn't for the fact that it usually becomes sort of destructive. So while I do support more generous access to information it is also important that it doesn't just become "window shopping".
wolfgke 8y ago
> How much human progress has been lost to academic profiteering? More general: How much human progress has been lost to copyright laws?
- squarefoot 8y ago
  I have this recurring vision since years: scientists from a far remote future or planet attempting to study the remains of our society of a few decades from now, just like many did with ancient Egypt ruins and elsewhere. This time however all their efforts fail because of DRMed documents and strong encryption, including the only still working AI computer which refuses to share any data to protect its company from liability. That would make a plot for a short film maybe. To illustrate the problem, just think of what could have happened in the past had the Rosetta Stone been DRMed and encrypted.
  - goliatone 8y ago
    So, maybe Indiana Jones was just fighting against arcane DRMs?
    - wolfgke 8y ago
      > So, maybe Indiana Jones was just fighting against arcane DRMs? Weren't the Grail trials in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade a kind of DRM to prevent people people who no license from accessing the Grail? And isn't the scene where the grail temple callapsed when Elsa tried to steal the Grail just a second layer of the Grail's physical DRM system?
      - tomxor 8y ago
        The lost ark had much more brutal DRM as far as I remember... rather than just scramble the picture they melt your eyes off.
        TeMPOraL 8y ago
        I'm pretty sure companies would be happy to brick your computer for trying to access unlicensed copy of "their" data, if it wasn't for legal consequences that would follow.
tejtm 8y ago
Where "academic profiteering" is not profiting the academics, they were already paid by us through our governments to do the work and neither see nor expect anything from these fees (if they did they would be going through their institution's Tech Transfer office). This extortion is inflicted by non corporal parasites. And sorry the costs of copying and storing bits grows smaller every day, as it has since forever.
- stale2002 8y ago
  Unfortunately the problem is that University's promote professors based on publications. The solution to this problem seems to be to get rid of promotions based on these for profit publications. If your research isn't open access, then it can't be taken into account for promotions or hiring decisions.
  - apathy 8y ago
    For profit is fine, although their APCs are much higher for OA. The trouble is that even if you do pay the APC, journals routinely screw around by delaying or "erroring" the open version to try and extort suckers. (And they wonder why we now submit our proofs directly to sci-hub...) You pays your money and... (Ask me how I know this) It doesn't take that long to count citations, which defuses the usual excuse for using impact factor as a metric. (And some really shitty journals have surprisingly high impact factors -- they just don't publish much of anything in a given year, e.g. Science Immunology has exactly one primary research article in its entire August 2018 issue!) Ultimately, it's funders who decide what "counts", because indirects from grants (money money money) is the only real currency. You can publish once every five years in the Journal of Irreproducible Results, but if you have a $20M P01 for those five years, you're getting promoted anyways. So when Chan-Zuckerberg or the Gates foundation says "OA or nothing", then it matters. Universities will keep licking their balls until the purse strings tighten, but once that happens, hoo-eee! It's amazing how quick them OA pubs count for promotion. (Secret: it was never the publications.)
  - OnlyLys 8y ago
    > Unfortunately the problem is that University's promote professors based on publications. Not just that. At some universities professors can lose their jobs if they don't get enough funding within a year. “I am of the opinion that you are struggling to fulfil the metrics of a Professorial post at Imperial College which include maintaining established funding in a programme of research with an attributable share of research spend of £200k p.a and must now start to give serious consideration as to whether you are performing at the expected level of a Professor at Imperial College." http://www.dcscience.net/2014/12/23/some-experiences-of-life-at-imperial-college-london-an-external-inquiry-is-needed-after-the-death-of-stefan-grimm/ http://www.dcscience.net/2014/12/23/some-experiences-of-life...
TACIXAT 8y ago
I know this is a controversial view, but how much progress has been lost to intellectual property in general? I do not think the temporary monopoly on an idea incentives innovation. If it does, it encourages the people who I don't want to be innovating in the first place. If someone sees that as attractive they will probably take other anti-competitive steps once in a position of power. If people were free to copy ideas and products, we would make an extraordinary amount of progress in a very short time.
- projektir 8y ago
  I would say the motivation is important. We do not live in a society where one can simply do a lot of work and see nothing for it without consequence. The problem is not originally with intellectual property, the problem is that every person has to justify their right to exist, and they do that through acquiring money by some means, which means a big chunk of what they're doing has to be concerned with acquiring money. Things like research and innovation take a lot of time. We already have somewhat of this situation in reality. Many people involved in research a very poorly paid. Is it really resulting in better/faster research, or just people moving from academia to industry, and a lot of benefits pocketed by side actors? > If it does, it encourages the people who I don't want to be innovating in the first place. I.e., people who do not have lots of resources and need to figure out how to survive? You only want to see innovation from rich people with nice safety nets?
  - akqu 8y ago
    The problem with intellectual property is that it favors the sum, rather than the rate, of innovation. Companies have a natural incentive not to innovate. Since you make profit by not spending the revenue of your previous innovation on new innovation. If you want to have continuous innovation the profit should instead be based on your rate of innovation. Meaning that you don't get a monopoly on past achievements. That is how you don't have to wait decades for new cars or rockets while people with spreadsheets calculate their most opportune moment to start innovating again.
    - 8y ago
apathy 8y ago
> I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers Not that much. Nature sends me paper versions of most of their journals for free (so does Blood, so do some others) for (as far as I can tell) the sole purpose of getting me to read the ads. It's fine, I suppose, but I preprint all my papers anyways (some go to Nature-brand journals, most don't), and honestly their editing isn't even playing the same sport as, say, NEJM (which really does add a lot). Most of the time the versions on *Xiv (not just my papers, but most other authors' too) are at least as good as the ones that get published in vanity journals. Sometimes they're better, since there are times that a topic really is complicated enough to take 50 pages and 30 figures. Rarely, but still -- it's not like the same 30 figures aren't just crammed into "panels" (smaller, harder to read figures) in glamor journals (or tossed into the supplement; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/tileshop_pmc_inline.html?title=Click%20on%20image%20to%20zoom&p=PMC3&id=4158312_nihms607979f10.jpg https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/t... is one of my favorite figures of all time and it's stuffed into an "Extended Data Figure" FFS!). Chan-Zuckerberg and the Simons Foundation pay for bioRxiv and arXiv respectively, seemingly without much trouble, so I contend that publishing papers isn't actually that expensive, certainly relative to the benefit of doing so in a way that is accessible to the public who funds most of them.
garmaine 8y ago
> I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers, but the system that we have now seems broken. Why? For what gain? Wikipedia seems to handle much higher hosting costs alright. Why can't we do the same for open access journals?
JadeNB 8y ago
> How much human progress has been lost to academic profiteering? As an academic, I hope that it is reasonable to claim that it is not academic profiteering; it is publisher profiteering. Academics don't see a dime from (and often spend many dimes on) the usurious fees imposed by publishers.
betterunix2 8y ago
"I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers" This is news to me. The last article I published was automatically typeset using LaTeX, following a template provided by the publisher that has not really changed in years. Hardly anyone, universities included, actually request or require printed copies; those who prefer paper copies typically print a PDF of the article they want using a generic office printer. Articles are selected for publication by volunteer reviewers, and in many cases the editors are also volunteers. At this point there is no actual need for publishing companies, which is why the system seems like it is broken.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  Publishing doesn't cost money, that's true. But the publishing companies are still filling two needs, represented by these two questions: - 3,700 papers in my field were published last week. Which, if any, should I read? - How's Bob's career doing? Should he get tenure? A promotion? A grant? Under the system we have now, you should read papers in your field if they have been published in a journal you respect, and your career is a success if you're getting published in journals that your evaluators respect. If everyone self-published their own work -- which is the historical norm -- people would need to work out other methods of judging the quality of a paper than "Elsevier said this was good".
  - justinpombrio 8y ago
    > Which, if any, should I read? Excuse me, but this decision is not being made by the publisher. It's being made by hard working volunteer reviewers, who are typically not paid by the publisher. These reviewers are the people actually deciding what papers are accepted or rejected, and thus deciding which you read, and they deserve credit for it. I think you mean to point out that the publishers are the abstract entities to which prestige is attached (often for historical reasons), which they certainly are. Though that's slowly starting to change, as researchers move towards open access and away from for-profit publishers.
    - thaumasiotes 8y ago
ggchappell 8y ago
> I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers, .... Does it? The authors are not paid. The referees (who do peer review) are not paid. The editors are not paid. The authors submit LaTeX, so no professional typesetters are needed. Eliminate the hard-copy printed journal, which no one reads these days, and all you are left with are the costs of hosting and maintaining a website -- which doesn't need to be at all fancy. That's dirt cheap.

dojor 8y ago

Not that much human progress honestly. Most of the people who push the progress ball forward, do so not just because of access to information. They need to be in the right labs, receiving the right training, surrounded by the right mentors etc.

TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
I suspect your being downvoted because labs, training, and mentors are knowledge.
- projektir 8y ago
  To be fair, they're not equivalent knowledge. Labs often imply equipment that cannot be gotten by normal means. Training and mentors know which knowledge is important, and sometimes possess knowledge that is hard to find because it's too specific and/or deep. Research papers are a more obvious problem that is also easier to fix, but labs is nonetheless also a problem. Especially in fields where physical experiments are required, such as biology and chemistry, it's really hard to get anywhere without a lab, and running your own may be prohibitive and at times even illegal.
akqu 8y ago
I do think you have a good point. What I have been telling people who wants to learn things for a few years now is to make sure they have a pipeline to test their ideas. To many people are perpetually learning, tinkering and building fantasies in their head without having the opportunity to make something out of it. I would say "to each their own" if it wasn't for the fact that it usually becomes sort of destructive. So while I do support more generous access to information it is also important that it doesn't just become "window shopping".

wolfgke 8y ago

> How much human progress has been lost to academic profiteering? More general: How much human progress has been lost to copyright laws?

squarefoot 8y ago
I have this recurring vision since years: scientists from a far remote future or planet attempting to study the remains of our society of a few decades from now, just like many did with ancient Egypt ruins and elsewhere. This time however all their efforts fail because of DRMed documents and strong encryption, including the only still working AI computer which refuses to share any data to protect its company from liability. That would make a plot for a short film maybe. To illustrate the problem, just think of what could have happened in the past had the Rosetta Stone been DRMed and encrypted.
- goliatone 8y ago
  So, maybe Indiana Jones was just fighting against arcane DRMs?
  - wolfgke 8y ago
    > So, maybe Indiana Jones was just fighting against arcane DRMs? Weren't the Grail trials in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade a kind of DRM to prevent people people who no license from accessing the Grail? And isn't the scene where the grail temple callapsed when Elsa tried to steal the Grail just a second layer of the Grail's physical DRM system?
    - tomxor 8y ago
      The lost ark had much more brutal DRM as far as I remember... rather than just scramble the picture they melt your eyes off.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        I'm pretty sure companies would be happy to brick your computer for trying to access unlicensed copy of "their" data, if it wasn't for legal consequences that would follow.

tejtm 8y ago

Where "academic profiteering" is not profiting the academics, they were already paid by us through our governments to do the work and neither see nor expect anything from these fees (if they did they would be going through their institution's Tech Transfer office). This extortion is inflicted by non corporal parasites. And sorry the costs of copying and storing bits grows smaller every day, as it has since forever.

stale2002 8y ago
Unfortunately the problem is that University's promote professors based on publications. The solution to this problem seems to be to get rid of promotions based on these for profit publications. If your research isn't open access, then it can't be taken into account for promotions or hiring decisions.
- apathy 8y ago
  For profit is fine, although their APCs are much higher for OA. The trouble is that even if you do pay the APC, journals routinely screw around by delaying or "erroring" the open version to try and extort suckers. (And they wonder why we now submit our proofs directly to sci-hub...) You pays your money and... (Ask me how I know this) It doesn't take that long to count citations, which defuses the usual excuse for using impact factor as a metric. (And some really shitty journals have surprisingly high impact factors -- they just don't publish much of anything in a given year, e.g. Science Immunology has exactly one primary research article in its entire August 2018 issue!) Ultimately, it's funders who decide what "counts", because indirects from grants (money money money) is the only real currency. You can publish once every five years in the Journal of Irreproducible Results, but if you have a $20M P01 for those five years, you're getting promoted anyways. So when Chan-Zuckerberg or the Gates foundation says "OA or nothing", then it matters. Universities will keep licking their balls until the purse strings tighten, but once that happens, hoo-eee! It's amazing how quick them OA pubs count for promotion. (Secret: it was never the publications.)
- OnlyLys 8y ago
  > Unfortunately the problem is that University's promote professors based on publications. Not just that. At some universities professors can lose their jobs if they don't get enough funding within a year. “I am of the opinion that you are struggling to fulfil the metrics of a Professorial post at Imperial College which include maintaining established funding in a programme of research with an attributable share of research spend of £200k p.a and must now start to give serious consideration as to whether you are performing at the expected level of a Professor at Imperial College." http://www.dcscience.net/2014/12/23/some-experiences-of-life-at-imperial-college-london-an-external-inquiry-is-needed-after-the-death-of-stefan-grimm/ http://www.dcscience.net/2014/12/23/some-experiences-of-life...

TACIXAT 8y ago

I know this is a controversial view, but how much progress has been lost to intellectual property in general? I do not think the temporary monopoly on an idea incentives innovation. If it does, it encourages the people who I don't want to be innovating in the first place. If someone sees that as attractive they will probably take other anti-competitive steps once in a position of power. If people were free to copy ideas and products, we would make an extraordinary amount of progress in a very short time.

projektir 8y ago
I would say the motivation is important. We do not live in a society where one can simply do a lot of work and see nothing for it without consequence. The problem is not originally with intellectual property, the problem is that every person has to justify their right to exist, and they do that through acquiring money by some means, which means a big chunk of what they're doing has to be concerned with acquiring money. Things like research and innovation take a lot of time. We already have somewhat of this situation in reality. Many people involved in research a very poorly paid. Is it really resulting in better/faster research, or just people moving from academia to industry, and a lot of benefits pocketed by side actors? > If it does, it encourages the people who I don't want to be innovating in the first place. I.e., people who do not have lots of resources and need to figure out how to survive? You only want to see innovation from rich people with nice safety nets?
- akqu 8y ago
  The problem with intellectual property is that it favors the sum, rather than the rate, of innovation. Companies have a natural incentive not to innovate. Since you make profit by not spending the revenue of your previous innovation on new innovation. If you want to have continuous innovation the profit should instead be based on your rate of innovation. Meaning that you don't get a monopoly on past achievements. That is how you don't have to wait decades for new cars or rockets while people with spreadsheets calculate their most opportune moment to start innovating again.
  - 8y ago

apathy 8y ago

> I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers Not that much. Nature sends me paper versions of most of their journals for free (so does Blood, so do some others) for (as far as I can tell) the sole purpose of getting me to read the ads. It's fine, I suppose, but I preprint all my papers anyways (some go to Nature-brand journals, most don't), and honestly their editing isn't even playing the same sport as, say, NEJM (which really does add a lot). Most of the time the versions on *Xiv (not just my papers, but most other authors' too) are at least as good as the ones that get published in vanity journals. Sometimes they're better, since there are times that a topic really is complicated enough to take 50 pages and 30 figures. Rarely, but still -- it's not like the same 30 figures aren't just crammed into "panels" (smaller, harder to read figures) in glamor journals (or tossed into the supplement; https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/tileshop_pmc_inline.html?title=Click%20on%20image%20to%20zoom&p=PMC3&id=4158312_nihms607979f10.jpg https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/core/lw/2.0/html/tileshop_pmc/t... is one of my favorite figures of all time and it's stuffed into an "Extended Data Figure" FFS!). Chan-Zuckerberg and the Simons Foundation pay for bioRxiv and arXiv respectively, seemingly without much trouble, so I contend that publishing papers isn't actually that expensive, certainly relative to the benefit of doing so in a way that is accessible to the public who funds most of them.

garmaine 8y ago

> I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers, but the system that we have now seems broken. Why? For what gain? Wikipedia seems to handle much higher hosting costs alright. Why can't we do the same for open access journals?

JadeNB 8y ago

> How much human progress has been lost to academic profiteering? As an academic, I hope that it is reasonable to claim that it is not academic profiteering; it is publisher profiteering. Academics don't see a dime from (and often spend many dimes on) the usurious fees imposed by publishers.

betterunix2 8y ago

"I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers" This is news to me. The last article I published was automatically typeset using LaTeX, following a template provided by the publisher that has not really changed in years. Hardly anyone, universities included, actually request or require printed copies; those who prefer paper copies typically print a PDF of the article they want using a generic office printer. Articles are selected for publication by volunteer reviewers, and in many cases the editors are also volunteers. At this point there is no actual need for publishing companies, which is why the system seems like it is broken.

thaumasiotes 8y ago
Publishing doesn't cost money, that's true. But the publishing companies are still filling two needs, represented by these two questions: - 3,700 papers in my field were published last week. Which, if any, should I read? - How's Bob's career doing? Should he get tenure? A promotion? A grant? Under the system we have now, you should read papers in your field if they have been published in a journal you respect, and your career is a success if you're getting published in journals that your evaluators respect. If everyone self-published their own work -- which is the historical norm -- people would need to work out other methods of judging the quality of a paper than "Elsevier said this was good".
- justinpombrio 8y ago
  > Which, if any, should I read? Excuse me, but this decision is not being made by the publisher. It's being made by hard working volunteer reviewers, who are typically not paid by the publisher. These reviewers are the people actually deciding what papers are accepted or rejected, and thus deciding which you read, and they deserve credit for it. I think you mean to point out that the publishers are the abstract entities to which prestige is attached (often for historical reasons), which they certainly are. Though that's slowly starting to change, as researchers move towards open access and away from for-profit publishers.
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago

ggchappell 8y ago

> I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers, .... Does it? The authors are not paid. The referees (who do peer review) are not paid. The editors are not paid. The authors submit LaTeX, so no professional typesetters are needed. Eliminate the hard-copy printed journal, which no one reads these days, and all you are left with are the costs of hosting and maintaining a website -- which doesn't need to be at all fancy. That's dirt cheap.