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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

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.
  - colordrops 8y ago
    Fair enough, makes sense.
  - TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
    I think HN has chewed all of the above to death. If you read previous comment threads it's obvious that the community actually does understand all of these things, and also understands why they're a problem. Personally I've lost count of the number of threads and posts where at least one person says "Publishers are in the reputation business." The fact that you seem unaware of this is curious. If you genuinely think that plans to disrupt the industry are going to be based on distributing PDFs, it's possible you may not be as familiar with the discussions here as perhaps you could be.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- ibuildthings 8y ago
  While agreeing to the general principle, incentive structures are wired quiet differently in academia vs end consumer oriented gig/service industries. Publications ( number, when, where, citations) is the primary currency/value in which one is judged within the peers in academia, and reputation outside the immediate academic community has a much lower weight. Whereas for online market places solid revune is the first priority and then comes reputation ( which is a means for the higher reveune). In academia it is the reverse, with reputation ( in a small clique) being the primary motivator, and funding being the means to gather it.
- dunk010 8y ago
  Just FYI although the music industry has changed (much lower profit margins now), it's still a cartel of companies who actually own the vast majority of the content, and extract a pound of flesh. Perhaps you think that Spotify "disrupted" the industry (and Last.fm / others before it), but everyone still pays the piper - the majors (and given that they own the content, they can choose how much to charge for it whenever their contracts renew, which they make sure is frequently).
- mmcwilliams 8y ago
  “Disruption” in those three industries you listed meant that large global monopolies or duopolies were created which captured the majority of the market. Do you think it’s easier or harder today vs. 10 years ago for an outsider or upstart to create a cab or ride sharing company? How about starting a book selling company? I’m not sure how those industries are better off except for the deeply-entrenched players that took over their respective markets.
garmaine 8y ago
Could you summarize, in 50 words or less, what tangible benefit your family’s business provides to justify the intermediation? I’ll wait.
- noobiemcfoob 8y ago
  Not OP, but maybe credibility through established published history and network effects? Facebook sucks and yet...
- dougmccune 8y ago
  Not sure if you're asking about the role that academic journals play in general, or about what specific actions publishers do. Journals in general serve to curate an ever-increasing body of research and provide a crude method of gauging scientific quality, relevance to your field, and importance. They provide a crude method of judging the impact of scholars without having to read every single paper ever published. Publishers specifically put in grunt work to make the curation process function. That means hiring people to coordinate the peer review process, identifying new fields that are in need of new journals to help disciplines form and mature, ensuring standards of the scientific method are being followed, and of course there's the commodity service of hosting digital content. I think a more interesting question is how much the role of a publisher is worth (as opposed to whether it should not exist), and whether there are ways to fill the same role with a cheaper alternative.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    What you say about journals is correct. But what you say about commercial academic publishers is a relatively recent development. Traditionally, universities and professional societies ran journals. As you say, publishers did the grunt work. However, they did it on a work-for-hire basis. It wasn't until the 50s or so that profiteers took over the academic publishing industry.
    - dougmccune 8y ago
      This is true. Someone else in this thread posted the long-form article about the history of Robert Maxwell, which is absolutely worth the read. I'm definitely not of the opinion that the existing publishing system is the only way (or the best way) for science to be conducted.
esfandia 8y ago
> You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business. That's right, and that's also why the prestigious researchers and universities, those with an already established reputation, have a responsibility: collectively leave the editorial boards of for-profit publishers, set up alternative venues with the help of university libraries. Share the archival, indexing and discovery effort among universities via peer-to-peer digital library federation. All the tools are there. The same way that places like Stanford, Berkeley and MIT made MOOCs a thing, they can revolutionize scientific publishing. There's already such venues such as JAIR for AI research (and that was set up looong ago without all the tech we have today), so it's certainly possible. It just needs to become the norm rather than the exception.
- a3_nm 8y ago
  The problem is that the vast majority of established researchers do not care that the system is broken. Why work against the system once you're at the top? Most of them haven't ever thought about it, and the ones who know usually don't do much, because, hey, that's the way it was always done, they are used to the current journals and conferences being prestigious, and they don't want to bother with the unglamorous work of setting up HotCRP or coordinating reviews. Plus they usually want to push their career further and they know perfectly well that fighting against established venues isn't the right way to do that. As a young tenured academic I have been systematically refusing to do reviews for non-open-access journals. (I'm certainly not senior enough to create a new journal and be taken seriously.) I hoped that this might give some ideas to my peers but it's seen at best as a weird quirk, at worst as a selfish move (because "the community" needs my help to review papers). Usually the answer is some variation of "yeah the system is not perfect". The only argument I have seen which motivates researchers to care about open access is when it's mandated by funding agencies (e.g., in Europe, the ERC). Researchers really want to get these grants, so when these agencies talk about open access, they listen very carefully. It both makes me somewhat optimistic and quite cynical that the only way to move towards open-access seems to be via funding agencies (as opposed to researchers caring about the problem). Plus, for many agencies, "open access" here means "gold open access", i.e., continuing to work with the usual publishers, who make the articles available online, but move the "costs" (and huge margin) to the authors, with "article processing charges" of $1000-$2000.
panic 8y ago
> You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business. Everyone realizes this. The problem is that you're abusing your position in this reputation system for profit. Do you think $40 is a fair price to read a paper from 1987? https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/109434208700100406 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/109434208700100...
- dougmccune 8y ago
  Nope. I'd be in favor of shorter copyright terms in general. The truth about $40 prices are that they aren't intended really to be the fair price of a good. They're there simply to allow the subscription business model to work. So no, I don't like the fact that we charge $40 for a 31 year-old paper. And I'm a huge proponent of shifting to a non-subscription business model. And the publishers are shifting, albeit slowly and only because they're being forced to. But they are shifting, at least in STM fields, and I'd guess that this $40 byproduct of the subscription model will indeed die out when the subscription model shifts to the open access author pays model (which, of course, we can also debate for a long time).
  - reacweb 8y ago
    When I was young, I have bought the standard C++ in pdf because it was less than $10. I think it was the maximum I was agreeing to pay for it. Sometimes I find a reference to research articles I would like to read. I have no access to university to get them freely. If article were accessible at a decent price (less than $2), I think I would buy a lot more of them. IMHO, academic publishing would still be profitable if prices were low.
    - dougmccune 8y ago
      I assume the price is probably too high, but for $50/month you can essentially get access to a Netflix for articles, called DeepDyve[1]. It's certainly not complete in that they don't have agreements with every publisher on the planet, but there's a lot of content on there. [1] https://www.deepdyve.com/ https://www.deepdyve.com/
  - 8y ago
pjc50 8y ago
I'm not sure people are trying to fix academic publishing so much as burn Elsevier to the ground. Whether or how they are replaced is a separate question. https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2016/12/12/why-i-still-wont-review-for-or-publish-with-elsevier-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/ https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2016/12/12/why-i-still-wont-...
- Topolomancer 8y ago
  Well, Elsevier is maybe for some people the worst of the bunch (cannot speak from experience, though). Springer, for example, has very relaxed and open copyright transfers. You basically retain the right to have copies on your website, on archives, etc., provided that they contain a link to the 'definitive version' of your paper. Elsevier does that to some extent as well, but Springer _also_ invests money to 'cross-fund' (if that is a word) books in fields that do not attract so many readers and that otherwise could not be published. So in that sense, Springer is giving back to the community and people are appreciating that more. I agree, however, that there seems to be generic and unspecified hatred against Elsevier; having not reviewed for them or published with them, I do not have a properly-formed opinion here.
- C1sc0cat 8y ago
  When I worked for RELEX (reed elsiveer) New Scientist was one of their "vanity" publications.
- dougmccune 8y ago
  Totally fair. You can definitely take the stance that without knowing what a substitute is for publishers it's still worth trying to destroy them, and have faith that something will rise up to fill the void. My argument would be that you need to be careful to not underestimate the publishers, particularly Elsevier. The shift to OA hasn't yet harmed the publishers. In fact, all the major publishers are among the largest publishers of OA articles. Elsevier is full of incredibly smart people who can adapt. So if your goal is to put them out of business, you need more than just a strategy to burn their business model (although if you could figure out how to remove money entirely from the process you'd succeed I suppose).
em-bee 8y ago
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. there is no doubt about that. but maybe it's time to question how science is done in general. in the end the goal is to advance our knowledge and bring humanity forward. but instead of everyone cooperating to do just that, they are competing with each other, and try to outdo each other. a lot of energy is wasted in preventing others from stealing your research ideas and being the first to publish on a particular topic. instead of looking at the benefits of the research published in a paper, and whether the results can be reproduced, instead what matters more is how many citations the paper can get. reputation has become more important than producing actual results. academics and academic institutions are measured not in the quality of their research, but in the amount of papers and citations they can produce, to the point that researchers who can't dedicate their life to their work, because they have family, or worse, are a single parent, can't get a job, let alone tenure, because they can't put in the time required even though they may well put in more effort than others into the time they do have. so yes, i acknowledge that changing this is going to be extremely hard. but it looks to me like changing the way papers are published will be the easiest step, because the components that actually matter are distribution, which is technology, and reviewers, which are academics. the only thing that i see publishers doing is to edit the journals and decide what to publish. but shouldn't exactly that, also be done by academics? how about a model like stackoverflow? papers are published like questions, and reviews are the answers. readers upvote good papers and good reviews, so that the most upvoted and most reviewed papers float to the top. the citation count can be included in the score too. greetings, eMBee.
- im3w1l 8y ago
  > which is technology, and reviewers, which are academics. There is another factor to consider - the outsiders. They need to know which research is good and which isn't and independent journals giving a stamp of approval to create "branded" science helps.
  - em-bee 8y ago
    the same can be done by independent reviewers. i would not trust a commercial entity whose goal is profit, to be able to decide for me what research is good, the same way that i don't trust movie distributors. i'll look for outside reviewers who earned my trust because they understand the subject matter.
randomsearch 8y ago
Allow me to turn the tables a little: - why don’t publishers pay reviewers for the extensive time they spend reviewing the paper? - why don’t publishers pay academics who edit journals, another time consuming task? - why don’t publishers pay academics or institutions for a product they sell? I can’t comment on your company, but the above is the status quo for most of academia. Do you think this business model is ethical?
- chrisseaton 8y ago
  Because those people are already being paid anyway - their full time jobs, whether that’s PhD student, lecturer, professor, or industrial researcher, includes the job of reviewing and editing for publications. It’s a society. You publish papers which get reviews, and you also work to review other people’s papers. Everyone contributes to make it work.
  - AsyncAwait 8y ago
    > Because those people are already being paid anyway What about when the tax payers fund the research and then they have to pay to access it? Didn't they "already pay for it"?
    - chrisseaton 8y ago
      You're asking a totally separate question - you're asking 'since tax payers funded the research shouldn't they be able to see the output?' That's a great question. But the question I was replying to was 'who is paying the reviewers'. The answer is that their employers are.
      - FabHK 8y ago
        The question wasn't "who is paying them?", the question was "why aren't the publishers paying them?". And that is a crucial question, and not answered by the observation that they are already paid by others.
dunk010 8y ago
I did a research masters and got VERY frustrated by how publishing worked. But I came to your conclusion, too. I'd put it like this: an academic's career prospects are controlled entirely by the journals and the journals' impact factors, so breaking the cycle a chicken-and-egg problem. There are some great strides towards something better though; like PLOS ONE, or university-specific ventures such as https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2018/jan/ucl-launches-open-access-megajournal-help-solve-worlds-biggest-challenges https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2018/jan/ucl-launches-open-access....
- FabHK 8y ago
  > so breaking the cycle a chicken-and-egg problem. Absolutely, huge coordination problem (prisoner's dilemma). Let's see what this cOAlition S can do about it.
Vinnl 8y ago
> You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business. Exactly. The name "publishers" makes people think that their primary business is publishing, but the main source of income is seeking rent on the use of their brand names.
YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
One upvote is not from agreement, but from interest to see replies to your comment (which upvoting it makes more likely). Personally, I do think the matter is complex. However, if you're trying to protect the current model by arguing that building a reputation costs money, you will not convince those who, quite reasonably, believe it should be earned by contributions to knowledge, instead.
- simonh 8y ago
  Do you think the current legacy model of journals and the peer review of articles isn't contributing to knowledge?
  - YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
    I'm sorry, I don't know what the legacy model is. If you mean the way academic publishing works right now, I don't think anyone disputes the fact that publishing to a journal, free or not, constitutes a contribution to knowledge. I mean, I sure do not. The way I understand the debate about reforming academic publishing, it's about the morality of profiting from resources set aside for public benefit, rather than private (or corporate) profit.
idiot900 8y ago
I agree, the solution is not a technical one, it's about money. If funding agencies require, as they should, day one free and open access, the problem will solve itself. Not without a good deal of temporary pain, but it will be solved. (I am an early career professor who has to worry about promotion - and am happy to bear the pain of such a transition.)
- dougmccune 8y ago
  One thing to think about is what happens to academic fields that are not well funded? Plan S makes sense for funded research in STM disciplines. If we accept that publishing does cost some amount of money then it seems reasonable to have the funding of the research also cover that cost. Obviously we can argue about what a reasonable cost is ($100? $500? $5,000?), but it's certainly non-zero (even though yes, you can find specific examples of zero-cost publishing, but not on a scale that works for the system as a whole). But what about the humanities and social sciences, which are typically not funded by government or foundation grants? We currently have a system in which the expectation of the academics is that they can publish for free because the universities pay for that cost via subscriptions. Changing to an author-pays model, which Plan S seems to push the industry toward, doesn't work for a lot of academic fields. There are certainly alternatives, like university libraries converting some of the funding they currently use for subscriptions to cover publication costs, or entire governments covering all publication costs for every academic within their borders. But it's not as easy to see exactly how the non-zero cost of publishing is covered outside well-funded disciplines.
jamesrcole 8y ago
> 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). That's not at all my impression of these discussions. If people thought it was just a technical problem, then they'd think it would be easy to change the current setup. If people thought it was just a technical problem they wouldn't have such a strong dislike for the publishers.
- dougmccune 8y ago
  I certainly made a broad generalization, but in this HN discussion you can find people asking why we can't just have a simple HN or Stack Overflow-like site for upvotes and downvotes instead of the existing peer review system (implying that it would be trivial to apply the tech used for social discourse online to academic publishing) and another comment about spinning up a peer-to-peer BitTorrent approach to distributing digitally signed data. And in every discussion of the topic on HN that I've read someone always asks the same type of question about why this is still a problem when it should be trivial to apply software tech toward a solution. My intent wasn't to discourage folks brainstorming technical improvements for the system, it was only to point out for anyone who isn't entrenched in the intricacies that there's a lot of reasons for the dysfunctional system to both exist and persist.
BurnGpuBurn 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. Well I think we should all be grateful then that your Highness has come down to us 99% one-sided thinkers void of nuance or reason. Way to start a discussion, asshole. > I'm a shareholder and board member of a large privately-held, family-owned academic publishing company. So obviously you can enlighten us with your completely unbiased view on this, since you have no stake in the matter at all, right?
- mrunkel 8y ago
  This is an unnecessarily rude response and if you look around, you're pretty much the only person striking such a tone.
- dang 8y ago
  If you attack anyone like this on Hacker News again, we will ban you. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
mfukar 8y ago
> the root of the problems (of which there are many) are all cultural Yes, thank you for restating the obvious. Research should be open, that is what we want. Off to do useful things now.
iicc 8y ago
It's frustrating because it isn't a technology problem, it's a tragedy of the commons.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago
If I peel back the onion further, I find the root of the problem is how to measure someone who is good at science. How should we measure scientific output to determine compensation (not just monetary or tenure, reputation itself can be considered a form of compensation)? That the way we reward scientist means that few are pushing to reform academic publishing is barely a footnote compared to some of the problems produced by our current model. Look at the lack of replication that occurs because replication is far less rewarded than new research even when the new research fails replication (once someone does eventually get around to it). The way to fix this is to find a method to measure good science that works better than the current method, but given that us tech people can't even figure out a decent way to measure proficiency in our own field, the outlook isn't hopeful for our ability to disrupt science.
- dougmccune 8y ago
  Yes, at the core of the problem is how we measure good science. If you want to try to crack that nut I absolutely salute you. Improvements here could pay massive positive dividends for society as a whole. Meta[1], which was bought by Chan Zuckerberg[2], is sort of trying to do this (in addition to trying to tackle better discovery of the literature) by using an AI model to try to identify important research trends earlier in the process. [1] https://meta.org/ https://meta.org/ [2] https://www.chanzuckerberg.com/science https://www.chanzuckerberg.com/science
WhompingWindows 8y ago
Can you write a more full-length post with more details and put it on here? I find your post intriguing but you left most of the problems in the background, vague and undefined. Let's hear what they are, please!
specialist 8y ago
"I'm a shareholder and board member of a large privately-held, family-owned academic publishing company. ... You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business." Prove it. Get out ahead of these issues. Add value. Progress marches on. Lead the way. Let's assume (for scope of this comment) the replication crisis is the biggest threat to everyone's reputation. What would a solution look like? More access & transparency & accountability. Imagine a scholarly clearing house that facilitated the existing processes and workflows. Something like github.com for warehousing all the data. Something like a collaborative editor. Something like scholar.google.com to better find & forage for stuff. Something like linkedin.com for researchers to connect and share their thoughts. Maybe even a brokerage for grants, connecting funders with applicants, help administrate the administrivia. Publishers would still publish journals. The cream rises to the top. aka curation. As Scott Galloway likes to say "Information wants to be expensive." TL;DR: Innovate to add value in a changing world, instead using the status quo to continue rent seeking. -- "It's like discussing politics online." For policy work (vs electoral politics), I very much agree. Policy work has it's own replication crisis.
bargl 8y ago
This is similar to what I've seen from numerous Non-Govt orgs that try to help in other countries. A very specific example. In the US, there was a research team building a (post earthquake) hut that could be built with only plywood and also was built to be "tightened down" to resist earthquakes and hurricane force winds. It had anchors and was a really cool technology. I went to Haiti and the people there would rather live in tents temporarily and move into a concrete house because that's how you build a house. Compare this to Paul Farmer, who was on the ground and built a network of medical facilities by including the people he wanted to help. He's been (by my standards) wildly successful. It's easy to see a change that seems obvious from the outside, but if you don't get in and work on the ground floor to disrupt with people and change culture you're making your job way harder. Get in and talk to people, figure out why, and remember that people are just that people. Politics / Culture are unavoidable. Sometimes the easy part is the technology and that a'int easy.

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.
- colordrops 8y ago
  Fair enough, makes sense.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  I think HN has chewed all of the above to death. If you read previous comment threads it's obvious that the community actually does understand all of these things, and also understands why they're a problem. Personally I've lost count of the number of threads and posts where at least one person says "Publishers are in the reputation business." The fact that you seem unaware of this is curious. If you genuinely think that plans to disrupt the industry are going to be based on distributing PDFs, it's possible you may not be as familiar with the discussions here as perhaps you could be.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
ibuildthings 8y ago
While agreeing to the general principle, incentive structures are wired quiet differently in academia vs end consumer oriented gig/service industries. Publications ( number, when, where, citations) is the primary currency/value in which one is judged within the peers in academia, and reputation outside the immediate academic community has a much lower weight. Whereas for online market places solid revune is the first priority and then comes reputation ( which is a means for the higher reveune). In academia it is the reverse, with reputation ( in a small clique) being the primary motivator, and funding being the means to gather it.
dunk010 8y ago
Just FYI although the music industry has changed (much lower profit margins now), it's still a cartel of companies who actually own the vast majority of the content, and extract a pound of flesh. Perhaps you think that Spotify "disrupted" the industry (and Last.fm / others before it), but everyone still pays the piper - the majors (and given that they own the content, they can choose how much to charge for it whenever their contracts renew, which they make sure is frequently).
mmcwilliams 8y ago
“Disruption” in those three industries you listed meant that large global monopolies or duopolies were created which captured the majority of the market. Do you think it’s easier or harder today vs. 10 years ago for an outsider or upstart to create a cab or ride sharing company? How about starting a book selling company? I’m not sure how those industries are better off except for the deeply-entrenched players that took over their respective markets.

garmaine 8y ago

Could you summarize, in 50 words or less, what tangible benefit your family’s business provides to justify the intermediation? I’ll wait.

noobiemcfoob 8y ago
Not OP, but maybe credibility through established published history and network effects? Facebook sucks and yet...
dougmccune 8y ago
Not sure if you're asking about the role that academic journals play in general, or about what specific actions publishers do. Journals in general serve to curate an ever-increasing body of research and provide a crude method of gauging scientific quality, relevance to your field, and importance. They provide a crude method of judging the impact of scholars without having to read every single paper ever published. Publishers specifically put in grunt work to make the curation process function. That means hiring people to coordinate the peer review process, identifying new fields that are in need of new journals to help disciplines form and mature, ensuring standards of the scientific method are being followed, and of course there's the commodity service of hosting digital content. I think a more interesting question is how much the role of a publisher is worth (as opposed to whether it should not exist), and whether there are ways to fill the same role with a cheaper alternative.
- mirimir 8y ago
  What you say about journals is correct. But what you say about commercial academic publishers is a relatively recent development. Traditionally, universities and professional societies ran journals. As you say, publishers did the grunt work. However, they did it on a work-for-hire basis. It wasn't until the 50s or so that profiteers took over the academic publishing industry.
  - dougmccune 8y ago
    This is true. Someone else in this thread posted the long-form article about the history of Robert Maxwell, which is absolutely worth the read. I'm definitely not of the opinion that the existing publishing system is the only way (or the best way) for science to be conducted.

esfandia 8y ago

> You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business. That's right, and that's also why the prestigious researchers and universities, those with an already established reputation, have a responsibility: collectively leave the editorial boards of for-profit publishers, set up alternative venues with the help of university libraries. Share the archival, indexing and discovery effort among universities via peer-to-peer digital library federation. All the tools are there. The same way that places like Stanford, Berkeley and MIT made MOOCs a thing, they can revolutionize scientific publishing. There's already such venues such as JAIR for AI research (and that was set up looong ago without all the tech we have today), so it's certainly possible. It just needs to become the norm rather than the exception.

a3_nm 8y ago
The problem is that the vast majority of established researchers do not care that the system is broken. Why work against the system once you're at the top? Most of them haven't ever thought about it, and the ones who know usually don't do much, because, hey, that's the way it was always done, they are used to the current journals and conferences being prestigious, and they don't want to bother with the unglamorous work of setting up HotCRP or coordinating reviews. Plus they usually want to push their career further and they know perfectly well that fighting against established venues isn't the right way to do that. As a young tenured academic I have been systematically refusing to do reviews for non-open-access journals. (I'm certainly not senior enough to create a new journal and be taken seriously.) I hoped that this might give some ideas to my peers but it's seen at best as a weird quirk, at worst as a selfish move (because "the community" needs my help to review papers). Usually the answer is some variation of "yeah the system is not perfect". The only argument I have seen which motivates researchers to care about open access is when it's mandated by funding agencies (e.g., in Europe, the ERC). Researchers really want to get these grants, so when these agencies talk about open access, they listen very carefully. It both makes me somewhat optimistic and quite cynical that the only way to move towards open-access seems to be via funding agencies (as opposed to researchers caring about the problem). Plus, for many agencies, "open access" here means "gold open access", i.e., continuing to work with the usual publishers, who make the articles available online, but move the "costs" (and huge margin) to the authors, with "article processing charges" of $1000-$2000.

panic 8y ago

> You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business. Everyone realizes this. The problem is that you're abusing your position in this reputation system for profit. Do you think $40 is a fair price to read a paper from 1987? https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/109434208700100406 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/109434208700100...

dougmccune 8y ago
Nope. I'd be in favor of shorter copyright terms in general. The truth about $40 prices are that they aren't intended really to be the fair price of a good. They're there simply to allow the subscription business model to work. So no, I don't like the fact that we charge $40 for a 31 year-old paper. And I'm a huge proponent of shifting to a non-subscription business model. And the publishers are shifting, albeit slowly and only because they're being forced to. But they are shifting, at least in STM fields, and I'd guess that this $40 byproduct of the subscription model will indeed die out when the subscription model shifts to the open access author pays model (which, of course, we can also debate for a long time).
- reacweb 8y ago
  When I was young, I have bought the standard C++ in pdf because it was less than $10. I think it was the maximum I was agreeing to pay for it. Sometimes I find a reference to research articles I would like to read. I have no access to university to get them freely. If article were accessible at a decent price (less than $2), I think I would buy a lot more of them. IMHO, academic publishing would still be profitable if prices were low.
  - dougmccune 8y ago
    I assume the price is probably too high, but for $50/month you can essentially get access to a Netflix for articles, called DeepDyve[1]. It's certainly not complete in that they don't have agreements with every publisher on the planet, but there's a lot of content on there. [1] https://www.deepdyve.com/ https://www.deepdyve.com/
- 8y ago

pjc50 8y ago

I'm not sure people are trying to fix academic publishing so much as burn Elsevier to the ground. Whether or how they are replaced is a separate question. https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2016/12/12/why-i-still-wont-review-for-or-publish-with-elsevier-and-think-you-shouldnt-either/ https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2016/12/12/why-i-still-wont-...

Topolomancer 8y ago
Well, Elsevier is maybe for some people the worst of the bunch (cannot speak from experience, though). Springer, for example, has very relaxed and open copyright transfers. You basically retain the right to have copies on your website, on archives, etc., provided that they contain a link to the 'definitive version' of your paper. Elsevier does that to some extent as well, but Springer _also_ invests money to 'cross-fund' (if that is a word) books in fields that do not attract so many readers and that otherwise could not be published. So in that sense, Springer is giving back to the community and people are appreciating that more. I agree, however, that there seems to be generic and unspecified hatred against Elsevier; having not reviewed for them or published with them, I do not have a properly-formed opinion here.
C1sc0cat 8y ago
When I worked for RELEX (reed elsiveer) New Scientist was one of their "vanity" publications.
dougmccune 8y ago
Totally fair. You can definitely take the stance that without knowing what a substitute is for publishers it's still worth trying to destroy them, and have faith that something will rise up to fill the void. My argument would be that you need to be careful to not underestimate the publishers, particularly Elsevier. The shift to OA hasn't yet harmed the publishers. In fact, all the major publishers are among the largest publishers of OA articles. Elsevier is full of incredibly smart people who can adapt. So if your goal is to put them out of business, you need more than just a strategy to burn their business model (although if you could figure out how to remove money entirely from the process you'd succeed I suppose).

em-bee 8y ago

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. there is no doubt about that. but maybe it's time to question how science is done in general. in the end the goal is to advance our knowledge and bring humanity forward. but instead of everyone cooperating to do just that, they are competing with each other, and try to outdo each other. a lot of energy is wasted in preventing others from stealing your research ideas and being the first to publish on a particular topic. instead of looking at the benefits of the research published in a paper, and whether the results can be reproduced, instead what matters more is how many citations the paper can get. reputation has become more important than producing actual results. academics and academic institutions are measured not in the quality of their research, but in the amount of papers and citations they can produce, to the point that researchers who can't dedicate their life to their work, because they have family, or worse, are a single parent, can't get a job, let alone tenure, because they can't put in the time required even though they may well put in more effort than others into the time they do have. so yes, i acknowledge that changing this is going to be extremely hard. but it looks to me like changing the way papers are published will be the easiest step, because the components that actually matter are distribution, which is technology, and reviewers, which are academics. the only thing that i see publishers doing is to edit the journals and decide what to publish. but shouldn't exactly that, also be done by academics? how about a model like stackoverflow? papers are published like questions, and reviews are the answers. readers upvote good papers and good reviews, so that the most upvoted and most reviewed papers float to the top. the citation count can be included in the score too. greetings, eMBee.

im3w1l 8y ago
> which is technology, and reviewers, which are academics. There is another factor to consider - the outsiders. They need to know which research is good and which isn't and independent journals giving a stamp of approval to create "branded" science helps.
- em-bee 8y ago
  the same can be done by independent reviewers. i would not trust a commercial entity whose goal is profit, to be able to decide for me what research is good, the same way that i don't trust movie distributors. i'll look for outside reviewers who earned my trust because they understand the subject matter.

randomsearch 8y ago

Allow me to turn the tables a little: - why don’t publishers pay reviewers for the extensive time they spend reviewing the paper? - why don’t publishers pay academics who edit journals, another time consuming task? - why don’t publishers pay academics or institutions for a product they sell? I can’t comment on your company, but the above is the status quo for most of academia. Do you think this business model is ethical?

chrisseaton 8y ago
Because those people are already being paid anyway - their full time jobs, whether that’s PhD student, lecturer, professor, or industrial researcher, includes the job of reviewing and editing for publications. It’s a society. You publish papers which get reviews, and you also work to review other people’s papers. Everyone contributes to make it work.
- AsyncAwait 8y ago
  > Because those people are already being paid anyway What about when the tax payers fund the research and then they have to pay to access it? Didn't they "already pay for it"?
  - chrisseaton 8y ago
    You're asking a totally separate question - you're asking 'since tax payers funded the research shouldn't they be able to see the output?' That's a great question. But the question I was replying to was 'who is paying the reviewers'. The answer is that their employers are.
    - FabHK 8y ago
      The question wasn't "who is paying them?", the question was "why aren't the publishers paying them?". And that is a crucial question, and not answered by the observation that they are already paid by others.

dunk010 8y ago

I did a research masters and got VERY frustrated by how publishing worked. But I came to your conclusion, too. I'd put it like this: an academic's career prospects are controlled entirely by the journals and the journals' impact factors, so breaking the cycle a chicken-and-egg problem. There are some great strides towards something better though; like PLOS ONE, or university-specific ventures such as https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2018/jan/ucl-launches-open-access-megajournal-help-solve-worlds-biggest-challenges https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2018/jan/ucl-launches-open-access....

FabHK 8y ago
> so breaking the cycle a chicken-and-egg problem. Absolutely, huge coordination problem (prisoner's dilemma). Let's see what this cOAlition S can do about it.

Vinnl 8y ago

> You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business. Exactly. The name "publishers" makes people think that their primary business is publishing, but the main source of income is seeking rent on the use of their brand names.

YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago

One upvote is not from agreement, but from interest to see replies to your comment (which upvoting it makes more likely). Personally, I do think the matter is complex. However, if you're trying to protect the current model by arguing that building a reputation costs money, you will not convince those who, quite reasonably, believe it should be earned by contributions to knowledge, instead.

simonh 8y ago
Do you think the current legacy model of journals and the peer review of articles isn't contributing to knowledge?
- YeGoblynQueenne 8y ago
  I'm sorry, I don't know what the legacy model is. If you mean the way academic publishing works right now, I don't think anyone disputes the fact that publishing to a journal, free or not, constitutes a contribution to knowledge. I mean, I sure do not. The way I understand the debate about reforming academic publishing, it's about the morality of profiting from resources set aside for public benefit, rather than private (or corporate) profit.

idiot900 8y ago

I agree, the solution is not a technical one, it's about money. If funding agencies require, as they should, day one free and open access, the problem will solve itself. Not without a good deal of temporary pain, but it will be solved. (I am an early career professor who has to worry about promotion - and am happy to bear the pain of such a transition.)

dougmccune 8y ago
One thing to think about is what happens to academic fields that are not well funded? Plan S makes sense for funded research in STM disciplines. If we accept that publishing does cost some amount of money then it seems reasonable to have the funding of the research also cover that cost. Obviously we can argue about what a reasonable cost is ($100? $500? $5,000?), but it's certainly non-zero (even though yes, you can find specific examples of zero-cost publishing, but not on a scale that works for the system as a whole). But what about the humanities and social sciences, which are typically not funded by government or foundation grants? We currently have a system in which the expectation of the academics is that they can publish for free because the universities pay for that cost via subscriptions. Changing to an author-pays model, which Plan S seems to push the industry toward, doesn't work for a lot of academic fields. There are certainly alternatives, like university libraries converting some of the funding they currently use for subscriptions to cover publication costs, or entire governments covering all publication costs for every academic within their borders. But it's not as easy to see exactly how the non-zero cost of publishing is covered outside well-funded disciplines.

jamesrcole 8y ago

> 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). That's not at all my impression of these discussions. If people thought it was just a technical problem, then they'd think it would be easy to change the current setup. If people thought it was just a technical problem they wouldn't have such a strong dislike for the publishers.

dougmccune 8y ago
I certainly made a broad generalization, but in this HN discussion you can find people asking why we can't just have a simple HN or Stack Overflow-like site for upvotes and downvotes instead of the existing peer review system (implying that it would be trivial to apply the tech used for social discourse online to academic publishing) and another comment about spinning up a peer-to-peer BitTorrent approach to distributing digitally signed data. And in every discussion of the topic on HN that I've read someone always asks the same type of question about why this is still a problem when it should be trivial to apply software tech toward a solution. My intent wasn't to discourage folks brainstorming technical improvements for the system, it was only to point out for anyone who isn't entrenched in the intricacies that there's a lot of reasons for the dysfunctional system to both exist and persist.

BurnGpuBurn 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. Well I think we should all be grateful then that your Highness has come down to us 99% one-sided thinkers void of nuance or reason. Way to start a discussion, asshole. > I'm a shareholder and board member of a large privately-held, family-owned academic publishing company. So obviously you can enlighten us with your completely unbiased view on this, since you have no stake in the matter at all, right?

mrunkel 8y ago
This is an unnecessarily rude response and if you look around, you're pretty much the only person striking such a tone.
dang 8y ago
If you attack anyone like this on Hacker News again, we will ban you. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post civilly and substantively, or not at all.

mfukar 8y ago

> the root of the problems (of which there are many) are all cultural Yes, thank you for restating the obvious. Research should be open, that is what we want. Off to do useful things now.

iicc 8y ago

It's frustrating because it isn't a technology problem, it's a tragedy of the commons.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

PurpleBoxDragon 8y ago

If I peel back the onion further, I find the root of the problem is how to measure someone who is good at science. How should we measure scientific output to determine compensation (not just monetary or tenure, reputation itself can be considered a form of compensation)? That the way we reward scientist means that few are pushing to reform academic publishing is barely a footnote compared to some of the problems produced by our current model. Look at the lack of replication that occurs because replication is far less rewarded than new research even when the new research fails replication (once someone does eventually get around to it). The way to fix this is to find a method to measure good science that works better than the current method, but given that us tech people can't even figure out a decent way to measure proficiency in our own field, the outlook isn't hopeful for our ability to disrupt science.

dougmccune 8y ago
Yes, at the core of the problem is how we measure good science. If you want to try to crack that nut I absolutely salute you. Improvements here could pay massive positive dividends for society as a whole. Meta[1], which was bought by Chan Zuckerberg[2], is sort of trying to do this (in addition to trying to tackle better discovery of the literature) by using an AI model to try to identify important research trends earlier in the process. [1] https://meta.org/ https://meta.org/ [2] https://www.chanzuckerberg.com/science https://www.chanzuckerberg.com/science

WhompingWindows 8y ago

Can you write a more full-length post with more details and put it on here? I find your post intriguing but you left most of the problems in the background, vague and undefined. Let's hear what they are, please!

specialist 8y ago

"I'm a shareholder and board member of a large privately-held, family-owned academic publishing company. ... You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business." Prove it. Get out ahead of these issues. Add value. Progress marches on. Lead the way. Let's assume (for scope of this comment) the replication crisis is the biggest threat to everyone's reputation. What would a solution look like? More access & transparency & accountability. Imagine a scholarly clearing house that facilitated the existing processes and workflows. Something like github.com for warehousing all the data. Something like a collaborative editor. Something like scholar.google.com to better find & forage for stuff. Something like linkedin.com for researchers to connect and share their thoughts. Maybe even a brokerage for grants, connecting funders with applicants, help administrate the administrivia. Publishers would still publish journals. The cream rises to the top. aka curation. As Scott Galloway likes to say "Information wants to be expensive." TL;DR: Innovate to add value in a changing world, instead using the status quo to continue rent seeking. -- "It's like discussing politics online." For policy work (vs electoral politics), I very much agree. Policy work has it's own replication crisis.

bargl 8y ago

This is similar to what I've seen from numerous Non-Govt orgs that try to help in other countries. A very specific example. In the US, there was a research team building a (post earthquake) hut that could be built with only plywood and also was built to be "tightened down" to resist earthquakes and hurricane force winds. It had anchors and was a really cool technology. I went to Haiti and the people there would rather live in tents temporarily and move into a concrete house because that's how you build a house. Compare this to Paul Farmer, who was on the ground and built a network of medical facilities by including the people he wanted to help. He's been (by my standards) wildly successful. It's easy to see a change that seems obvious from the outside, but if you don't get in and work on the ground floor to disrupt with people and change culture you're making your job way harder. Get in and talk to people, figure out why, and remember that people are just that people. Politics / Culture are unavoidable. Sometimes the easy part is the technology and that a'int easy.