3 ms·

While I'm quite close to your opinion and I'm not much of a believer in intellectual property either, I don't think it's incoherent to support the two stances y

While I'm quite close to your opinion and I'm not much of a believer in intellectual property either, I don't think it's incoherent to support the two stances you mention. There is an important difference between the paper publishing market and the others, which is that scientific publishing is 100% extortive. It provides no value at all. Let's leave aside for a moment the argument that so-called piracy not necessarily decreases sales - remember I'm not really advocating for copyright laws, just defending the coherence of the opinions of the people you are mentioning, who probably think that it does. From that standpoint, if everyone stopped paying for movies, Hollywood would close and no movies (except for hobbyist movies) would be made. If everyone stopped paying for music, music would still be made but no one would make a living from it. The same with books, etc. So in those fields, there is a causal relationship between not paying and the field itself being impacted, as well as the income of people that are doing honest work. On the other hand, if everyone stopped paying for papers, nothing relevant would happen - in fact, mainly only good things would happen! The people who actually do the work of publishing and reviewing the papers aren't being paid anyway. We would post them to public repositories and move on. The quality of science wouldn't suffer at all. The accessibility of science would improve (everyone would be able to access papers without paying). The only ones that would suffer would be publishers that are doing largely an evil thing (restricting the access to scientific knowledge - it's hard to actually argue that they are providing access, as publis repositories already do that for free) and if they closed, it would be a net positive for science. Thus, and to sum up, it's really hard to defend paying scientific publishers, even if you generally believe in IP and copyright, because the whole market is a huge net negative for society, which is not true (or at least, not commonly believed to be true) of most other IP markets.

qwerty456127 7y ago
> On the other hand, if everyone stopped paying for papers, nothing relevant would happen - in fact, mainly only good things would happen! The people who actually do the work of publishing and reviewing the papers aren't being paid anyway. We would post them to public repositories and move on. The quality of science wouldn't suffer at all. Why don't people just do this then? The majority of credible papers still gets submitted to Elsevier and alike publishers (and the fact a paper is published there itself boosts a paper perceived credibility even though many papers they publish happen to be bullshit) and papers published on people's personal websites only are not taken serious. It seems like people still need Elsevier for some reason.
- Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
  Because it is required for promotion, tenure, grant requests, etc. For example, why can't I (tenured professor) stop submitting journal papers? In Spain we have a research assessment every six years where basically only indexed journal papers count (even in CS where actually journals are quite irrelevant compared to conferences, but that's a different war of mine...). If you have enough indexed journal papers, you get a pay rise. If you don't, you not only don't get the rise, but you have to teach a punishingly high amount of class hours, basically leaving no time for further research. So for any professor that wants to do research, passing this assessment is pretty much needed. And the overwhelming majority of indexed journal papers are in Elsevier and the like, and it's highly likely that it will be the only thematic fit for a given paper. Similar mechanisms are in place for tenure requirements, recruiting, grant calls, etc. Changing them is difficult. I do try to fight for it as much as I can, but it won't happen in the short or medium term.
  - qwerty456127 7y ago
    So it turns out publishers like Elsevier do provide a value of an "indexed journal" status? Why can't the same be done for free?
    - Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
      It can indeed be done for free, and in fact there are some totally free journals that are indexed (actually I am using "indexed" as shorthand for clarity/simplicity, because it's a bit more complex than that: it needs to be indexed on a certain database -proprietary, by the way- and ranked with a high enough impact factor - a crude metric based on citations per paper). The problem is that they are still a minority, and often if you are working on subject X, it turns out that no indexed journal on that subject is free. Or maybe there is one, but your paper gets rejected from it so you then need to resubmit to a non-free one. And why do publishers like Elsevier hold most of the indexed journals? Pure inertia. We keep sending papers there because we need to for reasons like the ones explained above, then our papers get citations, so those journals keep their impact factor high. And it is extremely difficult for new entrants to break into the rankings, because sending a paper to a new journal that is not indexed yet has a huge opportunity cost (months of work that you aren't going to get recognition out of for tenure, promotion, grants, etc.) so unless they start with really great momentum (support from a powerful scientific society, an open letter by big shots in the field, etc.) they never get the needed papers and citations to climb the rankings. So it's not that publishers do a better job so their journals have higher impact factors, it's that they have a captive market.

qwerty456127 7y ago

> On the other hand, if everyone stopped paying for papers, nothing relevant would happen - in fact, mainly only good things would happen! The people who actually do the work of publishing and reviewing the papers aren't being paid anyway. We would post them to public repositories and move on. The quality of science wouldn't suffer at all. Why don't people just do this then? The majority of credible papers still gets submitted to Elsevier and alike publishers (and the fact a paper is published there itself boosts a paper perceived credibility even though many papers they publish happen to be bullshit) and papers published on people's personal websites only are not taken serious. It seems like people still need Elsevier for some reason.

Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
Because it is required for promotion, tenure, grant requests, etc. For example, why can't I (tenured professor) stop submitting journal papers? In Spain we have a research assessment every six years where basically only indexed journal papers count (even in CS where actually journals are quite irrelevant compared to conferences, but that's a different war of mine...). If you have enough indexed journal papers, you get a pay rise. If you don't, you not only don't get the rise, but you have to teach a punishingly high amount of class hours, basically leaving no time for further research. So for any professor that wants to do research, passing this assessment is pretty much needed. And the overwhelming majority of indexed journal papers are in Elsevier and the like, and it's highly likely that it will be the only thematic fit for a given paper. Similar mechanisms are in place for tenure requirements, recruiting, grant calls, etc. Changing them is difficult. I do try to fight for it as much as I can, but it won't happen in the short or medium term.
- qwerty456127 7y ago
  So it turns out publishers like Elsevier do provide a value of an "indexed journal" status? Why can't the same be done for free?
  - Al-Khwarizmi 7y ago
    It can indeed be done for free, and in fact there are some totally free journals that are indexed (actually I am using "indexed" as shorthand for clarity/simplicity, because it's a bit more complex than that: it needs to be indexed on a certain database -proprietary, by the way- and ranked with a high enough impact factor - a crude metric based on citations per paper). The problem is that they are still a minority, and often if you are working on subject X, it turns out that no indexed journal on that subject is free. Or maybe there is one, but your paper gets rejected from it so you then need to resubmit to a non-free one. And why do publishers like Elsevier hold most of the indexed journals? Pure inertia. We keep sending papers there because we need to for reasons like the ones explained above, then our papers get citations, so those journals keep their impact factor high. And it is extremely difficult for new entrants to break into the rankings, because sending a paper to a new journal that is not indexed yet has a huge opportunity cost (months of work that you aren't going to get recognition out of for tenure, promotion, grants, etc.) so unless they start with really great momentum (support from a powerful scientific society, an open letter by big shots in the field, etc.) they never get the needed papers and citations to climb the rankings. So it's not that publishers do a better job so their journals have higher impact factors, it's that they have a captive market.