3 ms·

> The internet makes it trivial to distribute documents for free While I agree with pretty much everything else you wrote, I have to take some exception to thi

> The internet makes it trivial to distribute documents for free While I agree with pretty much everything else you wrote, I have to take some exception to this. Yes it is trivial to put something online. But library sciences exist for a reason, so if you want a nice collection of things online with some sensible structure it becomes less trivial. Worse yet if you want some way of ranking in importance the things in your collection, it requires a lot of manual intervention. I think your solution is ultimately correct, but the peer review process is harder to solve than the technical one, and there is still a cost of some sort to implement and maintain the technical one.

canjobear 7y ago
Many fields do peer review just fine without help from academic publishers. All academic publishers contribute to the process is an early-2000s web interface.
dredmorbius 7y ago
Oddly enough, there are institutions devoted to the curation, preservation, and circulation of written matter. Not publishers. Libraries.
jdietrich 7y ago
>While I agree with pretty much everything else you wrote, I have to take some exception to this. Yes it is trivial to put something online. But library sciences exist for a reason, so if you want a nice collection of things online with some sensible structure it becomes less trivial. Worse yet if you want some way of ranking in importance the things in your collection, it requires a lot of manual intervention. Specifically, what structure do paid journals have that Arxiv lacks? How much would it cost to provide that structure outside of the current system, bearing in mind that editors and peer reviewers aren't paid a dime by the publishers?
- jasode 7y ago
  >, bearing in mind that editors and peer reviewers aren't paid a dime by the publishers? The peer reviewers may not be paid but the prestigious academic journals (Nature, Cardiology, etc) do have paid editorial staff. E.g. the initial rejections of papers and rounds of back-&-forth copy-editing with the author are handled by the paid editors and not the unpaid peer reviewers. That's not to say there are also journals that are run by 100% unpaid volunteers but I'm unaware of any particular Elsevier journals with that labor structure. (However, this is not an endorsement of Elsevier's high subscription fees.)
jacobolus 7y ago
> nice collection of things online with some sensible structure Publishers do not currently do this. Their websites are a confusing jumble with difficult navigation, poor search features, no useful discovery features, ... The “nice collection” with “sensible structure” is provided by external citation indexes like Google Scholar.

canjobear 7y ago

Many fields do peer review just fine without help from academic publishers. All academic publishers contribute to the process is an early-2000s web interface.

dredmorbius 7y ago

Oddly enough, there are institutions devoted to the curation, preservation, and circulation of written matter. Not publishers. Libraries.

jdietrich 7y ago

>While I agree with pretty much everything else you wrote, I have to take some exception to this. Yes it is trivial to put something online. But library sciences exist for a reason, so if you want a nice collection of things online with some sensible structure it becomes less trivial. Worse yet if you want some way of ranking in importance the things in your collection, it requires a lot of manual intervention. Specifically, what structure do paid journals have that Arxiv lacks? How much would it cost to provide that structure outside of the current system, bearing in mind that editors and peer reviewers aren't paid a dime by the publishers?

jasode 7y ago
>, bearing in mind that editors and peer reviewers aren't paid a dime by the publishers? The peer reviewers may not be paid but the prestigious academic journals (Nature, Cardiology, etc) do have paid editorial staff. E.g. the initial rejections of papers and rounds of back-&-forth copy-editing with the author are handled by the paid editors and not the unpaid peer reviewers. That's not to say there are also journals that are run by 100% unpaid volunteers but I'm unaware of any particular Elsevier journals with that labor structure. (However, this is not an endorsement of Elsevier's high subscription fees.)

jacobolus 7y ago

> nice collection of things online with some sensible structure Publishers do not currently do this. Their websites are a confusing jumble with difficult navigation, poor search features, no useful discovery features, ... The “nice collection” with “sensible structure” is provided by external citation indexes like Google Scholar.