20 ms·

Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

697 points by joeyespo 8y ago

Latteland 8y ago
This would be great, many people support this idea. You'll need generational change to get there.
- FlyMoreRockets 8y ago
  "Truth never triumphs—its opponents just die out." - Max Planck
rasengan 8y ago
From the article: > the business of publishing tax-funded research and then selling it to tax-funded institutions has produced the most profitable industry in the world How is this not illegal?
- Jhsto 8y ago
  I don't see why would it. You can submit papers without an affiliation, so the idea of publishing only tax-funded research is a generalization. That is, these organizations do work by being selective and then selling the collections of that selection process back.
  - killjoywashere 8y ago
    Granted the publishers do work. Even PLoS does work. It's the lack of access that is the problem. $42.50 for an article one of my colleagues at my own US Government institution wrote (random example from this weekend's work, American Journal of Bioethics) is ridiculous.
    - ams6110 8y ago
      I thought in most cases the author is free to provide copies of his/her own articles directly? Is it not true that you could just ask your colleague for a copy of what he submitted for publication?
- buboard 8y ago
  which part should be illegal, the selling of the subscriptions or the buying? That statement is misleading. Pblishers sell participation badges to the article authors, the authors put these badges in their CV, and when the time comes to ask for money from the governmnet, the gal with the most badges on her chest wins it. In addition, the authors have the right to upload a preprint (i.e. a copy identical in content) to a preprint server - virtually all journals allow it nowadays - although it doesn't happen. So, there is in theory no reason why anyone should go to these websites to download a copy. In practice, it is convenient for the parties involved (researchers & funding agencies).
- zhoujieyang 8y ago
  Even outside of research, in most economies there's a lot of money flows that look like this. Visited Europe last year, it's crazy how many of them are both funded by government grants and provide services to the government. Unfortunately curbing that would involve even more regulation making everything worse perhaps.
justinpombrio 8y ago
For anyone who still doesn't know this: publishers do not pay paper authors, in any field. I am also not aware of a publisher paying peer reviewers. (Lowly soon-to-be-postdoc here; a professor would be able to say more.)
- Y7ZCQtNo39 8y ago
  How do peer reviews happen, then, if nobody gets paid to do them? Does research money (that goes to the production of the paper) not also cover peer-reviews? I wouldn't see any incentive for any work to be peer-reviewed, ever, then.
  - rsa4046 8y ago
    The incentives are 1) professional responsibility; 2) the opportunity to participate in the direction of new research, stay abreast of the field, and maintain a high level of integrity; 3) young researchers joining the field benefit from the process, both as reviewers and authors.
    - Y7ZCQtNo39 8y ago
      I can't remember the last time I've read a headline about the peer-reviewer that confirmed some groundbreaking finding. Maybe it gives you the opportunity to network with higher-profile contributors to your field, if you offer to peer review their work (though to be honest, I don't know how the peer review process works, and if you can even "offer" to perform it for a specific paper).
      - ylmm 8y ago
        At least in the social sciences, journal editors delegate papers to reviewers. Your first sentence also suggests that you don't know what peer review is. Peer review is not the same thing as replication, which is replicating the results of a paper after it's been published (e.g., confirming some groundbreaking finding). Peer review happens at the stage before publication of the original paper. Researcher(s) submit the paper to the journal. The journal editor sends the paper out to some reviewers, who review the paper (this is the "peer review" stage). Pending reviewer feedback and editor approval, the paper is published. Edit: also the "benefit" that rsa4046 refers to probably doesn't mean networking. AFAIK, reviewers are always anonymous to the authors (which can generate its own problems e.g., if the reviewer gets a paper authored by someone he/she doesn't get along with). The benefit being referred to, I believe, is that of learning to write better reviews, and having reviewed other's work, learning how to improve your own.
avs733 8y ago
Add in that the quality of the system is massively massively broken...peer review is about as accurate as the flip of a coin. It does not promote gorund breaking or novel research, it barely (arguably doesn't) even contribute to quality research. I had a colleague recently be told by a journal editor 'we don't publish critiques from junior scholars.' So much for the nature of peer review being entirely driven by the quality of the work. As one of those academics...I keep getting requests to peer review, I respectfully make clear I don't review for non open source journals anymore. Same with publishing. I'm not tenure-track so am not primarily evaluated based on output. Publishing is broken, but it is really just part of the broader and even more broken nature of academic research.
- Angostura 8y ago
  What would be a good alternative to peer-review though? Genuinely interested.
  - ekianjo 8y ago
    > What would be a good alternative to peer-review though? Genuinely interested. Replicating researches? That's how we prove findings are not wrong or biased, usually.
    - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
      Yes. The fact that we have so much published research that can't be replicated indicates to me that peer-review is doing less work than we think it is.
  - lumost 8y ago
    It strikes me that the challenge of peer review is that it is non-transparent, and gate-keeping. It is impossible for one to read the peer review feedback related to a published paper, and it's similarly difficult to publish controversial pieces that break established norms. Contrast this to the peer review culture of popular open source projects - major pull requests have extensive and transparent dialogue, and disagreements known. Meanwhile there is no barrier to releasing anything new.
RMarcus 8y ago
It's worth noting that the computer science community (at least in systems and machine learning) have already made some strides in this direction. Systems conferences like VLDB and CIDR post the proceedings online for free (and most ICDE and SIGMOD articles are available through the author's website). In machine learning, almost every conference paper is also available via arXiv. When a paper is seemingly not available online, I've always gotten a free copy via an email to the author... And then there's sci-hub. It's not the way it should be (i.e. you shouldn't have to hunt around for publicly-funded research), but at least it's something.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
eigenman 8y ago
There are many perverse incentives in this system, but one that tends to be overlooked is the incentive for faculty to publish in predatory journals. It's not that most want to publish there, but when even 3rd tier schools require their faculty to publish a certain number of articles a year under pain of not making tenure or an increased teaching load, submitting work to an undiscriminating journal is the easiest way to check that box.
jacknews 8y ago
According to the opposition open letter, Plan S includes "A prohibition on publishing in either subscription or “hybrid” (i.e. partially open access) journals," I don't see why that should be a requirement. So long as papers are made available for free, why should it matter if they are also available in a paid journal?
QML 8y ago
Why don't people just publish through Arxiv? Is there not a discussion forum where people can post, discover, and comment on new papers? If you know of one for CS, do comment.
- avs733 8y ago
  because while that might make sense at the field level, it relies on scholars getting credit for that work, which few do.
  - QML 8y ago
    Could you elaborate on what you mean by scholars getting credit for their work?
    - Fomite 8y ago
      Very few tenure committees, funding agencies, etc. give equal weight to an arXiv pre-print and a published paper.
- tnecniv 8y ago
  > Why don't people just publish through Arxiv? ArXiv is not peer reviewed.
- ms013 8y ago
  Posting on arxiv is useful for making results available early, and to make published work available in some form that isn’t pay walled, but posting on arxiv on its own is not publishing as it isn’t peer reviewed.
peter303 8y ago
Note several major research universities require faculty to place an online copy of their papers in an open university server within a year of publication. The problem may be subject-themed fashion like in a journal. Now and them an energetic individual might create a mirror TOC page of a joirnal. For example someone does this for SIIGRAPH's flahship journal Computer Graphics.
ekianjo 8y ago
> The answer is academic publishing. Its profit margins are vast, reportedly in the region of 40 per cent. That's an extraordinary claim to make. I would seriously doubt the "best" profit margin cross-industries is capped at 40%.
sitkack 8y ago
While we are at it, lets change the format from .pdf to .zip to include source, data and other information that a hypothesis and test and resulting analysis can encompass. First step is to put the pdf into the zip and have existing tools be able to navigate the hierarchy. Could include notebooks, bibtex, tex, data, images, etc. And semantic scholar is in exactly the right place to institute this evolution.
- icelancer 8y ago
  The OA community - particularly PeerJ - has solved this problem by forcing you to upload supplementary data either to their website (if it's small enough) or to Figshare, which does not allow you to delete data once it is uploaded and paired to a research study. It works rather well.
elvinyung 8y ago
Here's a Twitter thread with a director at Elsevier (@mrgunn) making extremely snarky comments about why they think academia shouldn't be free and widely available: https://twitter.com/dgmacarthur/status/1028489457803161600 https://twitter.com/dgmacarthur/status/1028489457803161600
- gboudrias 8y ago
  Is this telling us anything we didn't already know? Either way, I don't think he's helping the image issue.
- icelancer 8y ago
  Absolutely disgusting. What a disgrace to science. Alexandra Elbakyan has done and will do more for science than this rent-seeking asshole will ever do.
- secabeen 8y ago
  He claims that digital distribution isn't cheaper than analog. I don't doubt that, given the amounts of money it probably costs to build effective DRM and paywall systems. Were all journals open-access, their costs would be a lot lower too. Sci-Hub hosts 85% of the articles published in paywalled scholarly journals on a shoe-string.
  - ben_jones 8y ago
    I think it should be acknowledged that there are likely a number of accessibility and similar requirements that at scale bear non-trivial costs. I.e. building a website with top of the line accessibility, providing resources for auditory and visually impared, etc. I'm not saying current publishers are great at these things, just that they should not be forgotten and should be improved on if a new order was to take shape.
    - secabeen 8y ago
      That's a good point, and accessibility of science is a big issue across the academy, as the Berkeley captioning case shows. The DRM/subscription piece of digital publishing is still probably the biggest cost of their model. I remember but can't find a citation for an apocryphal story that the administrative overhead of metering, tracking and billing phone calls in the Ma Bell days was more than 50% of the cost.
dustycat 8y ago
People have been trying to set up web-based academic publishing for at least twenty years, and they've failed. The obvious explanation is that it does actually cost money to publish academic research.
panic 8y ago
The most direct way to do this would be to legalize sites like Sci-Hub. It's hard to argue you're performing a valuable service when you have to use legal power to prevent others from doing that service for free.
8bitsrule 8y ago
If publishing can't come up with a solution to limit cost and open up access, there are already online models for open publishing. An online taxpayer-funded archive could be created/designated by statute. It would require that such articles be published there (before and after reviews). Publishers would pay to have access; their prices would reflect that cost and a cost-plus profit. Privately-funded org's could decide which game they prefer. Make a fine memorial for Aaron Swartz.
thoughtexplorer 8y ago
> HERE is a trivia question for you: what is the most profitable business in the world? You might think oil, or maybe banking. You would be wrong. The answer is academic publishing. Its profit margins are vast, reportedly in the region of 40 per cent. Interesting. Does anyone know what the volume is like?
Aelius 8y ago
This comment is more directed at hn commenters than the article itself. I'm led to believe that free journals aren't successful precisely because they don't have standards. They don't have standards because they can't fund people to do basic vetting (this is not the same as peer review), or otherwise are eager to accept whatever comes their way- which are usually papers that have been rejected by the reputable journals. Assuming there is no money driven agenda, even the reputable journals have the issue where much of the content doesn't get peer reviewed. The findings are far from concrete. But money driven agendas definitely exist too, and without basic vetting a journal finds itself hosting bs lobbyist material with sloppy "science" finding favorable results for anti-GMO, alternative medicines, organic farming, anti-vaccine, etc. The problem also exists that these entities are effectively funding their own journals to buy "legitimacy"- and they certainly would pose a threat to any journal that doesn't have high vetting standards. As of yet, free access journals aren't reputable or actually desirable because they don't have adequate quality control. Free access to information is a worthy and noble goal, but we can't render the information useless in the process.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
  What’s wrong with organic farming? It’s the only kind of produce I want to eat.
  - NateEag 8y ago
    Organic farming does not mean farming without weedkillers or pesticides. It means farming with weedkillers and pesticides that are largely unstudied, compared with known quantities like Monsanto's products (whose positive and negative effects are well documented and widely understood). The 'organic' products may be better on balance, but we don't actually know that, because the body of knowledge isn't nearly as developed yet. That's my layperson's understanding, anyway. I could be wrong.
  - Aelius 8y ago
    It's entirely marketing, there is no actual data supporting the claim that it's healthier for you. It succeeds by the "appeal to nature" fallacy, which causes a bunch of problems and gets decidedly anti-science in a few ways. Using only "natural" pesticides because they are "healthier". This is unsubstantiated, again it's just an appeal to nature. It can become problematic because natural pesticides often aren't as effective, thus certain farms/crops require using an excessive amount- way more than they would if they used the more effective synthetic pesticides. The synthetic pesticides are of course accused of being unhealthy (because unnatural)- though this is generally untrue. Furthermore, even the natural pesticides cause pollution problems, and overusing them isn't good. Because the organic lobby succeeds by the appeal to nature, they are also anti-gmo. Which is a big problem. While there are entirely organic farms, a lot of organic products are really not even what they advertise themselves to be, as many organic farmers don't actually run organic farms: they run normal farms with a section of it that adheres to organic standards. These standards are pretty arbitrary, except for the fact that organic farming is a significantly less efficient use of farmland, which is going to become a problem within the next century. We need to be making efficient use of our arable land, as we don't actually have much left on the planet unless we start turning national parks + protected areas into farmland. Largely, organic farming is a faux luxury built on anti-scientific ideas that does nothing except waste valuable land resources, sold to relatively privileged people who are willing to pay a premium to feel better about what they eat.
dougmccune 8y ago
Academic publishing is a favorite recurring topic on HN, and it's one I've occasionally dipped into discussing, although these discussions are typically 99% one-sided and void of nuance or reasoned arguments. It's like discussing politics online. I'm a shareholder and board member of a large privately-held, family-owned academic publishing company. If anyone is interested in trying to understand what makes the industry work, why it's so hard to disrupt it, etc. I'd love to engage or put you in touch with people within the industry smarter than me - my email is in my profile. I know the industry is particularly frustrating to the HN crowd. We want to think it's a technology problem - that distributing PDFs is a solved problem (which it obviously is). But the root of the problems (of which there are many) are all cultural and much harder to change. If you're going to jump in and try to "fix" the industry or put publishers out of business, I highly encourage you to engage with folks in the industry with an open mind and really try to understand why things work the way they work. You're not going to have any success unless you truly understand the incentive structure of academia and the social and cultural aspects of inertia that are at play. If you go in thinking you can build a better "publishing" mousetrap you will fail. You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business. And when you start peeling back the onion of how academics are assessed, given jobs, given tenure, etc you start seeing how hard changing behavior can be.
- colordrops 8y ago
  Sorry if my reply seems trite, but the same sorts of things could be said about the cab, bookstore, and music industries. They were entrenched and difficult to take down, but most are better for it.
  - dougmccune 8y ago
    Sure, I wasn't saying it's not possible to disrupt publishers, and I'm not discouraging anyone from trying. I'm simply saying that to do so you're absolutely going to have to understand what makes the industry work the way it does. If you don't understand your users (in this case academics, tenure committees, universities, grant funding bodies, etc) then you're not going to make a dent in the status quo. I'm more just trying to counter the argument that there's no reason for publishers to exist, therefore it should be easy to make them obsolete. There are tons of reasons publishers and the entire system as it is exists, and if you want to change it you need to understand it.
sytelus 8y ago
HERE is a trivia question for you: what is the most profitable business in the world? You might think oil, or maybe banking. You would be wrong. The answer is academic publishing. Its profit margins are vast, reportedly in the region of 40 per cent. 40% are very normal and consider healthy margins for many businesses. The business with largest possible profit margins I know of is political donations. For mere $100K, one can own vast public land for mining and selling resources worth billions for many generations. That's 1000000% margin for you.
- Vinnl 8y ago
  Consistent 40% margins, year over year, for decades, are rarely seen in other industries. For example, Apple's brand is very strong, so it can ask a very steep markup on their products. Nevertheless, its profit margins are lower than those of the big five publishers, usually.
- ailideex 8y ago
  Please give the name of a mining company with more than 40% profit margin.
shrimpx 8y ago
The trouble here is that the entire academic structure is extremely difficult to question and change. Disrupting academia is kind of like disrupting the Catholic Church. It's so entrenched in its assumptions and rituals that trying to bring revolutionary change to it is pretty hopeless. Professors gained their status in this archaic structure and will resist challenging it. I mean, your PhD advisor will make sure you never challenge the research status quo with your thesis topic, let alone partaking in the academic publishing structure being fundamentally restructured.
- Fomite 8y ago
  > I mean, your PhD advisor will make sure you never challenge the research status quo with your thesis topic This will come as a surprise to both my PhD advisor and my current advisee
  - ms013 8y ago
    Same for my PhD advisor and current/past students. Unfortunately, this HN post seems to be full of the usual cohort of passionately opinionated HN readers who don’t have a deep understanding about that which they’re passionately opinionated about.
    - shrimpx 8y ago
      You should elaborate with some detail instead of ad hominem.
  - shrimpx 8y ago
    You should elaborate. In my experience academia is largely a status structure where people are groomed to be hirable at schools X, Y, Z and publish regularly in conferences/journals A, B, C. You're saying this is fertile ground for hardcore innovation? No way. The extreme majority of the work is incremental and predictable; small low-impact results. (Disclaimer: My experience is in CS.)
    - Fomite 8y ago
known 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_to_know https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_to_know though I do not endorse it for academic research
eecc 8y ago
Academics, I have a proposal/question and was curious if such a system would work for you. Here it goes: Take a P2P program similar to Kazaa or BitTorrent to share paper pdfs and datasets. Next to these files also share indexes, derived data for searching. Next to that, also share user generated review comments and endorsements to implement peer review and quality filtering. Finally, digitally sign all these data to guarantee provenance and credibility of the data found on the network. Let me know what you think of it. I’ve been loosely working on a prototype application that does all that for a while.
- sweezyjeezy 8y ago
  Not sure that user generated review comments are a good idea - it would be to hard to convince people (me included), that they'd be a good replacement for peer-review. You don't know the user's expertise, you have no guarantee that they have read the paper. Granted that last one is sometimes not true in real world publishing either - but at least the social pressure is there. It could also lead to gaming, asking your colleagues to give good reviews, or worse, companies that are paid to write good reviews, same as what has happened with Amazon etc. Academia is largely a social construct, that's why it's hard to replace with 100% technology.
  - eecc 8y ago
    Well the UGC I was thinking of is like http://www.openannotation.org http://www.openannotation.org mainly used to link to other papers and/or comment of draft papers. Also simple “Reviewed” tags, and other classification items. Since any derived data would be signed and linked to the identity of its author a default filter removes anything that is not transitively included in your academic network. Reviewed articles would just be “review count > N and reviewers in fieldNet”
- ms013 8y ago
  The problem isn’t technical. The current flaws in the publishing system are not due to lack of indexing, data distribution, provenance, or filtering. And please, please, please, don’t turn reviews into some user driven drivel like amazon product reviews or other systems that are easily gamed or prone to the whims of the masses. We already have problems with gaming and personal agendas making reviews less than impartial: don’t make something that makes it 10x worse. (CS academic publishing and refereeing for 20+ years here).
gigatexal 8y ago
How about this: after 1 year peer reviewed publications get released under a BSD license? Because this research needs to be available to all and this would give publishing shops enough time to sell to universities and people who want it now.
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  BSD is a licence for software. Papers are literature. How’s that going to work?
  - gigatexal 8y ago
    A community open free to the world license then. The exact license isn’t the point but that the research is not locked away behind a paywall but free to benefit society and not let a few pocket and profit from the research often done by public institutions like universities and such.
aj7 8y ago
If you think about the insurance business, it’s only economic value added is fraud detection and minimization. Someone needs to have an incentive to prevent fraudulent claims. The economic value of publishing is orderly and dispassionate administration of intellectual property ownership. Successfully publishing a paper entitles the author to permanent ownership of the work. The author name never changes. A paper that leads to tenure at a major research university has a discounted value of more than 7 figures (USD or Euros.) This is why the academic beneficiaries of this system, who further control research, are not eager for alternative methods, or they could bring it down rapidly.
gandalfian 8y ago
This remarkable article explains how it all came to be this way; https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b... (The good stuff starts where Robert Maxwell appears)
neilwilson 8y ago
Surely the system should be like ... Hacker News. We publish here, and the stuff that is good rises to the top with upvotes from our peers, and it is all subject to review in the comments where many an interesting discussion is had. We all gain by sharing ideas as widely as possible. We just need a way for that to happen.
- chaosite 8y ago
  Or, maybe not. An academic article is not a blog post. Also, only the most popular posts get discussed here -- tons of stuff is lost if it's not initially popular. Timing your submission allows for gaming the system. All scholarly articles need to go through peer review and receive honest, constructive feedback -- especially the bad ones, and Hacker News (and Reddit and Slashdot and any system like that which doesn't assign reviewers to articles) isn't very good at that.
  - vanderZwan 8y ago
    > All scholarly articles need to go through peer review and receive honest, constructive feedback Which is also a system that can be gamed, by the way. For example, by the reviewers: - "Oh dammit, we got scooped... better use the insights from here to help us past our hurdles, while stating this work is not original enough to be published so we can quickly submit our own and get published earlier after all!" - "I see that this paper belongs to Camp A with regards to these two competing hypotheses explaining unexplained phenomenon X, I am in Camp B. Therefore, I will consider this paper rubbish by definition." - "I am an old researcher who does not believe in some of the newer findings that contradict longstanding assumptions that I "grew up with", and therefore will never allow this paper to pass." - "I am a very insulated researcher who cannot make sense of this multidisciplinary work, therefore reject the parts that lie outside of my field as rubbish." - "This paper is a by a researcher competing for the same position/grant/etc. as me. Better make sure they don't get too much credit." - "I'm not sexist/racist/etc but... totally clearly biased in my judgement of this paper because..." Now, I'm obviously describing worst-case scenarios here. But my point is: it's human politics all the way down.
BurnGpuBurn 8y ago
I've always wondered why scientists, arguably the smartest people around, would fall for this blatantly obvious racket. And why they keep going back to the racketeer for years on end too, wasting millions in tax money while keeping the valuables behind lock and key for most of us. It's so obvious you're being ripped off. What the heck scientists? No wonder people believe in conspiracy theories, with a bunch of scientists denying them the knowledge while a bunch of business suits hoard the cash.
- dalore 8y ago
  Because of the prestige of being in a journal.
unixhero 8y ago
Welp. It already has been broken up. Scihub is going strong and so is the push and emphasis on open journals such as Arxiv and others

697 points by joeyespo 8y ago

Latteland 8y ago

This would be great, many people support this idea. You'll need generational change to get there.

FlyMoreRockets 8y ago
"Truth never triumphs—its opponents just die out." - Max Planck

rasengan 8y ago

From the article: > the business of publishing tax-funded research and then selling it to tax-funded institutions has produced the most profitable industry in the world How is this not illegal?

Jhsto 8y ago
I don't see why would it. You can submit papers without an affiliation, so the idea of publishing only tax-funded research is a generalization. That is, these organizations do work by being selective and then selling the collections of that selection process back.
- killjoywashere 8y ago
  Granted the publishers do work. Even PLoS does work. It's the lack of access that is the problem. $42.50 for an article one of my colleagues at my own US Government institution wrote (random example from this weekend's work, American Journal of Bioethics) is ridiculous.
  - ams6110 8y ago
    I thought in most cases the author is free to provide copies of his/her own articles directly? Is it not true that you could just ask your colleague for a copy of what he submitted for publication?
buboard 8y ago
which part should be illegal, the selling of the subscriptions or the buying? That statement is misleading. Pblishers sell participation badges to the article authors, the authors put these badges in their CV, and when the time comes to ask for money from the governmnet, the gal with the most badges on her chest wins it. In addition, the authors have the right to upload a preprint (i.e. a copy identical in content) to a preprint server - virtually all journals allow it nowadays - although it doesn't happen. So, there is in theory no reason why anyone should go to these websites to download a copy. In practice, it is convenient for the parties involved (researchers & funding agencies).
zhoujieyang 8y ago
Even outside of research, in most economies there's a lot of money flows that look like this. Visited Europe last year, it's crazy how many of them are both funded by government grants and provide services to the government. Unfortunately curbing that would involve even more regulation making everything worse perhaps.

justinpombrio 8y ago

For anyone who still doesn't know this: publishers do not pay paper authors, in any field. I am also not aware of a publisher paying peer reviewers. (Lowly soon-to-be-postdoc here; a professor would be able to say more.)

Y7ZCQtNo39 8y ago
How do peer reviews happen, then, if nobody gets paid to do them? Does research money (that goes to the production of the paper) not also cover peer-reviews? I wouldn't see any incentive for any work to be peer-reviewed, ever, then.
- rsa4046 8y ago
  The incentives are 1) professional responsibility; 2) the opportunity to participate in the direction of new research, stay abreast of the field, and maintain a high level of integrity; 3) young researchers joining the field benefit from the process, both as reviewers and authors.
  - Y7ZCQtNo39 8y ago
    I can't remember the last time I've read a headline about the peer-reviewer that confirmed some groundbreaking finding. Maybe it gives you the opportunity to network with higher-profile contributors to your field, if you offer to peer review their work (though to be honest, I don't know how the peer review process works, and if you can even "offer" to perform it for a specific paper).
    - ylmm 8y ago
      At least in the social sciences, journal editors delegate papers to reviewers. Your first sentence also suggests that you don't know what peer review is. Peer review is not the same thing as replication, which is replicating the results of a paper after it's been published (e.g., confirming some groundbreaking finding). Peer review happens at the stage before publication of the original paper. Researcher(s) submit the paper to the journal. The journal editor sends the paper out to some reviewers, who review the paper (this is the "peer review" stage). Pending reviewer feedback and editor approval, the paper is published. Edit: also the "benefit" that rsa4046 refers to probably doesn't mean networking. AFAIK, reviewers are always anonymous to the authors (which can generate its own problems e.g., if the reviewer gets a paper authored by someone he/she doesn't get along with). The benefit being referred to, I believe, is that of learning to write better reviews, and having reviewed other's work, learning how to improve your own.

avs733 8y ago

Add in that the quality of the system is massively massively broken...peer review is about as accurate as the flip of a coin. It does not promote gorund breaking or novel research, it barely (arguably doesn't) even contribute to quality research. I had a colleague recently be told by a journal editor 'we don't publish critiques from junior scholars.' So much for the nature of peer review being entirely driven by the quality of the work. As one of those academics...I keep getting requests to peer review, I respectfully make clear I don't review for non open source journals anymore. Same with publishing. I'm not tenure-track so am not primarily evaluated based on output. Publishing is broken, but it is really just part of the broader and even more broken nature of academic research.

Angostura 8y ago
What would be a good alternative to peer-review though? Genuinely interested.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  > What would be a good alternative to peer-review though? Genuinely interested. Replicating researches? That's how we prove findings are not wrong or biased, usually.
  - amanaplanacanal 8y ago
    Yes. The fact that we have so much published research that can't be replicated indicates to me that peer-review is doing less work than we think it is.
- lumost 8y ago
  It strikes me that the challenge of peer review is that it is non-transparent, and gate-keeping. It is impossible for one to read the peer review feedback related to a published paper, and it's similarly difficult to publish controversial pieces that break established norms. Contrast this to the peer review culture of popular open source projects - major pull requests have extensive and transparent dialogue, and disagreements known. Meanwhile there is no barrier to releasing anything new.

RMarcus 8y ago

It's worth noting that the computer science community (at least in systems and machine learning) have already made some strides in this direction. Systems conferences like VLDB and CIDR post the proceedings online for free (and most ICDE and SIGMOD articles are available through the author's website). In machine learning, almost every conference paper is also available via arXiv. When a paper is seemingly not available online, I've always gotten a free copy via an email to the author... And then there's sci-hub. It's not the way it should be (i.e. you shouldn't have to hunt around for publicly-funded research), but at least it's something.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

eigenman 8y ago

There are many perverse incentives in this system, but one that tends to be overlooked is the incentive for faculty to publish in predatory journals. It's not that most want to publish there, but when even 3rd tier schools require their faculty to publish a certain number of articles a year under pain of not making tenure or an increased teaching load, submitting work to an undiscriminating journal is the easiest way to check that box.

jacknews 8y ago

According to the opposition open letter, Plan S includes "A prohibition on publishing in either subscription or “hybrid” (i.e. partially open access) journals," I don't see why that should be a requirement. So long as papers are made available for free, why should it matter if they are also available in a paid journal?

QML 8y ago

Why don't people just publish through Arxiv? Is there not a discussion forum where people can post, discover, and comment on new papers? If you know of one for CS, do comment.

avs733 8y ago
because while that might make sense at the field level, it relies on scholars getting credit for that work, which few do.
- QML 8y ago
  Could you elaborate on what you mean by scholars getting credit for their work?
  - Fomite 8y ago
    Very few tenure committees, funding agencies, etc. give equal weight to an arXiv pre-print and a published paper.
tnecniv 8y ago
> Why don't people just publish through Arxiv? ArXiv is not peer reviewed.
ms013 8y ago
Posting on arxiv is useful for making results available early, and to make published work available in some form that isn’t pay walled, but posting on arxiv on its own is not publishing as it isn’t peer reviewed.

peter303 8y ago

Note several major research universities require faculty to place an online copy of their papers in an open university server within a year of publication. The problem may be subject-themed fashion like in a journal. Now and them an energetic individual might create a mirror TOC page of a joirnal. For example someone does this for SIIGRAPH's flahship journal Computer Graphics.

ekianjo 8y ago

> The answer is academic publishing. Its profit margins are vast, reportedly in the region of 40 per cent. That's an extraordinary claim to make. I would seriously doubt the "best" profit margin cross-industries is capped at 40%.

sitkack 8y ago

While we are at it, lets change the format from .pdf to .zip to include source, data and other information that a hypothesis and test and resulting analysis can encompass. First step is to put the pdf into the zip and have existing tools be able to navigate the hierarchy. Could include notebooks, bibtex, tex, data, images, etc. And semantic scholar is in exactly the right place to institute this evolution.

icelancer 8y ago
The OA community - particularly PeerJ - has solved this problem by forcing you to upload supplementary data either to their website (if it's small enough) or to Figshare, which does not allow you to delete data once it is uploaded and paired to a research study. It works rather well.

elvinyung 8y ago

Here's a Twitter thread with a director at Elsevier (@mrgunn) making extremely snarky comments about why they think academia shouldn't be free and widely available: https://twitter.com/dgmacarthur/status/1028489457803161600 https://twitter.com/dgmacarthur/status/1028489457803161600

gboudrias 8y ago
Is this telling us anything we didn't already know? Either way, I don't think he's helping the image issue.
icelancer 8y ago
Absolutely disgusting. What a disgrace to science. Alexandra Elbakyan has done and will do more for science than this rent-seeking asshole will ever do.
secabeen 8y ago
He claims that digital distribution isn't cheaper than analog. I don't doubt that, given the amounts of money it probably costs to build effective DRM and paywall systems. Were all journals open-access, their costs would be a lot lower too. Sci-Hub hosts 85% of the articles published in paywalled scholarly journals on a shoe-string.
- ben_jones 8y ago
  I think it should be acknowledged that there are likely a number of accessibility and similar requirements that at scale bear non-trivial costs. I.e. building a website with top of the line accessibility, providing resources for auditory and visually impared, etc. I'm not saying current publishers are great at these things, just that they should not be forgotten and should be improved on if a new order was to take shape.
  - secabeen 8y ago
    That's a good point, and accessibility of science is a big issue across the academy, as the Berkeley captioning case shows. The DRM/subscription piece of digital publishing is still probably the biggest cost of their model. I remember but can't find a citation for an apocryphal story that the administrative overhead of metering, tracking and billing phone calls in the Ma Bell days was more than 50% of the cost.

dustycat 8y ago

People have been trying to set up web-based academic publishing for at least twenty years, and they've failed. The obvious explanation is that it does actually cost money to publish academic research.

panic 8y ago

The most direct way to do this would be to legalize sites like Sci-Hub. It's hard to argue you're performing a valuable service when you have to use legal power to prevent others from doing that service for free.

8bitsrule 8y ago

If publishing can't come up with a solution to limit cost and open up access, there are already online models for open publishing. An online taxpayer-funded archive could be created/designated by statute. It would require that such articles be published there (before and after reviews). Publishers would pay to have access; their prices would reflect that cost and a cost-plus profit. Privately-funded org's could decide which game they prefer. Make a fine memorial for Aaron Swartz.

thoughtexplorer 8y ago

> HERE is a trivia question for you: what is the most profitable business in the world? You might think oil, or maybe banking. You would be wrong. The answer is academic publishing. Its profit margins are vast, reportedly in the region of 40 per cent. Interesting. Does anyone know what the volume is like?

Aelius 8y ago

This comment is more directed at hn commenters than the article itself. I'm led to believe that free journals aren't successful precisely because they don't have standards. They don't have standards because they can't fund people to do basic vetting (this is not the same as peer review), or otherwise are eager to accept whatever comes their way- which are usually papers that have been rejected by the reputable journals. Assuming there is no money driven agenda, even the reputable journals have the issue where much of the content doesn't get peer reviewed. The findings are far from concrete. But money driven agendas definitely exist too, and without basic vetting a journal finds itself hosting bs lobbyist material with sloppy "science" finding favorable results for anti-GMO, alternative medicines, organic farming, anti-vaccine, etc. The problem also exists that these entities are effectively funding their own journals to buy "legitimacy"- and they certainly would pose a threat to any journal that doesn't have high vetting standards. As of yet, free access journals aren't reputable or actually desirable because they don't have adequate quality control. Free access to information is a worthy and noble goal, but we can't render the information useless in the process.

mrhappyunhappy 8y ago
What’s wrong with organic farming? It’s the only kind of produce I want to eat.
- NateEag 8y ago
  Organic farming does not mean farming without weedkillers or pesticides. It means farming with weedkillers and pesticides that are largely unstudied, compared with known quantities like Monsanto's products (whose positive and negative effects are well documented and widely understood). The 'organic' products may be better on balance, but we don't actually know that, because the body of knowledge isn't nearly as developed yet. That's my layperson's understanding, anyway. I could be wrong.
- Aelius 8y ago
  It's entirely marketing, there is no actual data supporting the claim that it's healthier for you. It succeeds by the "appeal to nature" fallacy, which causes a bunch of problems and gets decidedly anti-science in a few ways. Using only "natural" pesticides because they are "healthier". This is unsubstantiated, again it's just an appeal to nature. It can become problematic because natural pesticides often aren't as effective, thus certain farms/crops require using an excessive amount- way more than they would if they used the more effective synthetic pesticides. The synthetic pesticides are of course accused of being unhealthy (because unnatural)- though this is generally untrue. Furthermore, even the natural pesticides cause pollution problems, and overusing them isn't good. Because the organic lobby succeeds by the appeal to nature, they are also anti-gmo. Which is a big problem. While there are entirely organic farms, a lot of organic products are really not even what they advertise themselves to be, as many organic farmers don't actually run organic farms: they run normal farms with a section of it that adheres to organic standards. These standards are pretty arbitrary, except for the fact that organic farming is a significantly less efficient use of farmland, which is going to become a problem within the next century. We need to be making efficient use of our arable land, as we don't actually have much left on the planet unless we start turning national parks + protected areas into farmland. Largely, organic farming is a faux luxury built on anti-scientific ideas that does nothing except waste valuable land resources, sold to relatively privileged people who are willing to pay a premium to feel better about what they eat.

dougmccune 8y ago

Academic publishing is a favorite recurring topic on HN, and it's one I've occasionally dipped into discussing, although these discussions are typically 99% one-sided and void of nuance or reasoned arguments. It's like discussing politics online. I'm a shareholder and board member of a large privately-held, family-owned academic publishing company. If anyone is interested in trying to understand what makes the industry work, why it's so hard to disrupt it, etc. I'd love to engage or put you in touch with people within the industry smarter than me - my email is in my profile. I know the industry is particularly frustrating to the HN crowd. We want to think it's a technology problem - that distributing PDFs is a solved problem (which it obviously is). But the root of the problems (of which there are many) are all cultural and much harder to change. If you're going to jump in and try to "fix" the industry or put publishers out of business, I highly encourage you to engage with folks in the industry with an open mind and really try to understand why things work the way they work. You're not going to have any success unless you truly understand the incentive structure of academia and the social and cultural aspects of inertia that are at play. If you go in thinking you can build a better "publishing" mousetrap you will fail. You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business. And when you start peeling back the onion of how academics are assessed, given jobs, given tenure, etc you start seeing how hard changing behavior can be.

colordrops 8y ago
Sorry if my reply seems trite, but the same sorts of things could be said about the cab, bookstore, and music industries. They were entrenched and difficult to take down, but most are better for it.
- dougmccune 8y ago
  Sure, I wasn't saying it's not possible to disrupt publishers, and I'm not discouraging anyone from trying. I'm simply saying that to do so you're absolutely going to have to understand what makes the industry work the way it does. If you don't understand your users (in this case academics, tenure committees, universities, grant funding bodies, etc) then you're not going to make a dent in the status quo. I'm more just trying to counter the argument that there's no reason for publishers to exist, therefore it should be easy to make them obsolete. There are tons of reasons publishers and the entire system as it is exists, and if you want to change it you need to understand it.

sytelus 8y ago

HERE is a trivia question for you: what is the most profitable business in the world? You might think oil, or maybe banking. You would be wrong. The answer is academic publishing. Its profit margins are vast, reportedly in the region of 40 per cent. 40% are very normal and consider healthy margins for many businesses. The business with largest possible profit margins I know of is political donations. For mere $100K, one can own vast public land for mining and selling resources worth billions for many generations. That's 1000000% margin for you.

Vinnl 8y ago
Consistent 40% margins, year over year, for decades, are rarely seen in other industries. For example, Apple's brand is very strong, so it can ask a very steep markup on their products. Nevertheless, its profit margins are lower than those of the big five publishers, usually.
ailideex 8y ago
Please give the name of a mining company with more than 40% profit margin.

shrimpx 8y ago

The trouble here is that the entire academic structure is extremely difficult to question and change. Disrupting academia is kind of like disrupting the Catholic Church. It's so entrenched in its assumptions and rituals that trying to bring revolutionary change to it is pretty hopeless. Professors gained their status in this archaic structure and will resist challenging it. I mean, your PhD advisor will make sure you never challenge the research status quo with your thesis topic, let alone partaking in the academic publishing structure being fundamentally restructured.

Fomite 8y ago
> I mean, your PhD advisor will make sure you never challenge the research status quo with your thesis topic This will come as a surprise to both my PhD advisor and my current advisee
- ms013 8y ago
  Same for my PhD advisor and current/past students. Unfortunately, this HN post seems to be full of the usual cohort of passionately opinionated HN readers who don’t have a deep understanding about that which they’re passionately opinionated about.
  - shrimpx 8y ago
    You should elaborate with some detail instead of ad hominem.
- shrimpx 8y ago
  You should elaborate. In my experience academia is largely a status structure where people are groomed to be hirable at schools X, Y, Z and publish regularly in conferences/journals A, B, C. You're saying this is fertile ground for hardcore innovation? No way. The extreme majority of the work is incremental and predictable; small low-impact results. (Disclaimer: My experience is in CS.)
  - Fomite 8y ago

known 8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_to_know https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_to_know though I do not endorse it for academic research

eecc 8y ago

Academics, I have a proposal/question and was curious if such a system would work for you. Here it goes: Take a P2P program similar to Kazaa or BitTorrent to share paper pdfs and datasets. Next to these files also share indexes, derived data for searching. Next to that, also share user generated review comments and endorsements to implement peer review and quality filtering. Finally, digitally sign all these data to guarantee provenance and credibility of the data found on the network. Let me know what you think of it. I’ve been loosely working on a prototype application that does all that for a while.

sweezyjeezy 8y ago
Not sure that user generated review comments are a good idea - it would be to hard to convince people (me included), that they'd be a good replacement for peer-review. You don't know the user's expertise, you have no guarantee that they have read the paper. Granted that last one is sometimes not true in real world publishing either - but at least the social pressure is there. It could also lead to gaming, asking your colleagues to give good reviews, or worse, companies that are paid to write good reviews, same as what has happened with Amazon etc. Academia is largely a social construct, that's why it's hard to replace with 100% technology.
- eecc 8y ago
  Well the UGC I was thinking of is like http://www.openannotation.org http://www.openannotation.org mainly used to link to other papers and/or comment of draft papers. Also simple “Reviewed” tags, and other classification items. Since any derived data would be signed and linked to the identity of its author a default filter removes anything that is not transitively included in your academic network. Reviewed articles would just be “review count > N and reviewers in fieldNet”
ms013 8y ago
The problem isn’t technical. The current flaws in the publishing system are not due to lack of indexing, data distribution, provenance, or filtering. And please, please, please, don’t turn reviews into some user driven drivel like amazon product reviews or other systems that are easily gamed or prone to the whims of the masses. We already have problems with gaming and personal agendas making reviews less than impartial: don’t make something that makes it 10x worse. (CS academic publishing and refereeing for 20+ years here).

gigatexal 8y ago

How about this: after 1 year peer reviewed publications get released under a BSD license? Because this research needs to be available to all and this would give publishing shops enough time to sell to universities and people who want it now.

chrisseaton 8y ago
BSD is a licence for software. Papers are literature. How’s that going to work?
- gigatexal 8y ago
  A community open free to the world license then. The exact license isn’t the point but that the research is not locked away behind a paywall but free to benefit society and not let a few pocket and profit from the research often done by public institutions like universities and such.

aj7 8y ago

If you think about the insurance business, it’s only economic value added is fraud detection and minimization. Someone needs to have an incentive to prevent fraudulent claims. The economic value of publishing is orderly and dispassionate administration of intellectual property ownership. Successfully publishing a paper entitles the author to permanent ownership of the work. The author name never changes. A paper that leads to tenure at a major research university has a discounted value of more than 7 figures (USD or Euros.) This is why the academic beneficiaries of this system, who further control research, are not eager for alternative methods, or they could bring it down rapidly.

gandalfian 8y ago

This remarkable article explains how it all came to be this way; https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b... (The good stuff starts where Robert Maxwell appears)

neilwilson 8y ago

Surely the system should be like ... Hacker News. We publish here, and the stuff that is good rises to the top with upvotes from our peers, and it is all subject to review in the comments where many an interesting discussion is had. We all gain by sharing ideas as widely as possible. We just need a way for that to happen.

chaosite 8y ago
Or, maybe not. An academic article is not a blog post. Also, only the most popular posts get discussed here -- tons of stuff is lost if it's not initially popular. Timing your submission allows for gaming the system. All scholarly articles need to go through peer review and receive honest, constructive feedback -- especially the bad ones, and Hacker News (and Reddit and Slashdot and any system like that which doesn't assign reviewers to articles) isn't very good at that.
- vanderZwan 8y ago
  > All scholarly articles need to go through peer review and receive honest, constructive feedback Which is also a system that can be gamed, by the way. For example, by the reviewers: - "Oh dammit, we got scooped... better use the insights from here to help us past our hurdles, while stating this work is not original enough to be published so we can quickly submit our own and get published earlier after all!" - "I see that this paper belongs to Camp A with regards to these two competing hypotheses explaining unexplained phenomenon X, I am in Camp B. Therefore, I will consider this paper rubbish by definition." - "I am an old researcher who does not believe in some of the newer findings that contradict longstanding assumptions that I "grew up with", and therefore will never allow this paper to pass." - "I am a very insulated researcher who cannot make sense of this multidisciplinary work, therefore reject the parts that lie outside of my field as rubbish." - "This paper is a by a researcher competing for the same position/grant/etc. as me. Better make sure they don't get too much credit." - "I'm not sexist/racist/etc but... totally clearly biased in my judgement of this paper because..." Now, I'm obviously describing worst-case scenarios here. But my point is: it's human politics all the way down.

BurnGpuBurn 8y ago

I've always wondered why scientists, arguably the smartest people around, would fall for this blatantly obvious racket. And why they keep going back to the racketeer for years on end too, wasting millions in tax money while keeping the valuables behind lock and key for most of us. It's so obvious you're being ripped off. What the heck scientists? No wonder people believe in conspiracy theories, with a bunch of scientists denying them the knowledge while a bunch of business suits hoard the cash.

dalore 8y ago
Because of the prestige of being in a journal.

unixhero 8y ago

Welp. It already has been broken up. Scihub is going strong and so is the push and emphasis on open journals such as Arxiv and others