9 ms·

I'm not sure I understand the concept of paid access to scientific research, so I'd be grateful if someone with more knowledge of the topic could explain it to

• boomboomsubban 5y ago
  You'd think its because peer review costs money, but they are largely unpaid for that work. So, there's no real answer beyond "capitalism."
  • cyrksoft 5y ago
    What's exactly capitalistic about this? They charge for something they have no property or own. In my experience (and every researcher I know does this) researchers have their own websites where they publish a free pdf version of the research (without the format of the published paper, just a simpler pdf version) or even email it to you if you ask them to (those without a website, for example). I am not sure what exactly is "capitalism" about these journals.
    • rusk 5y ago
      > What's exactly capitalistic about this? Squeezing as much profit as possible for shareholders while externalising costs. It’s a poster child when you think about it!
    • 13415 5y ago
      They charge shitloads of money to universities for accessing their journals, these fees are so high that e.g. our university is very picky about which "packet" they buy and limit them to institutions on a case-by-case basis. The copies on the author's pages and in open repositories are obliged to be pre-publication drafts, so you cannot cite them. In fact, under control of large publishers journals have become fairly inventive about making pre-publication manuscripts unusable. For instance, I recently published in a prestigious journal that had an online editing system so that all final revisions stayed in the system - no author copy of any kind, every proof marked with author name and large watermarks -, and they made lots of small, sometimes unnecessary changes in the very last editing step. They also don't paginate the final versions that are published online first, so you can only know the real final pagination a year or so after the first version has been published online.
    • gkya 5y ago
      > They charge for something they have no property or own. A bearded man calls this "surplus". Scientific journal business is the pinnacle of capitalism, what every company strives to become, including the ones fellow HN people here work at and start up.
    • mindslight 5y ago
      > What's exactly capitalistic about this? The designation that combinations of words are a form of property that can be owned, which then become assets naturally funneled towards those interested in playing the capital meta game and away from those doing the actual work. To a scientist, the ability to copyright their paper is a vulnerability. Get rid of the concept of imaginary property and there is a lot less for Elsevier to demand from them.
• vaylian 5y ago
  You are completely right that the current system is nonsense. It only exists, because back in the day there was no internet. Scientists needed publishers that would print and distribute scientific results. But publishers might deny publication in their journals if they thought the science is not good enough. Thereby the publishers established a reputation system. For example, it is really hard to get a scientific paper accepted to the journal Nature. But if you manage to do it, a lot of people will assume that it is good science. The current system doesn't provide much value in terms of printing and distribution (even though some journals still do printing). The thing that keeps these journals alive is their reputation as filters for bad science. But even that is questionable, as proven by a lot of bad science making it into top journals. And lastly, science needs funding. If you say: My science is published in journal X, then the funding agency will think it is good science/bad science without actually trying to understand what your science is about.
  • cordite 5y ago
    With regard to your last point, that sounds like poor due diligence. But they’re not expecting monetary reward with risk for issuing a grant like a VC.
    • edwardwatson 5y ago
      But there are significant sums invested to fund research. In many ways it's a similar transaction to the VC. An investment into 'bad' research does not help the university or funding council reach their goals e.g. to raise their own funding or contribute impactful research to science. Hopefully, they are diversified enough for the bad eggs not to matter
  • krumbie 5y ago
    And this is why it's hard for newcomers to switch to open access journals. Because they cannot easily afford not to have well known journals in their publication list when applying for positions. Because the people in charge probably don't fully understand the applicant's research, but they think they get a good sense of quality by the names of the journals
• hollerith 5y ago
  The universities aren't the ones collecting the money. In fact, they the main targets of the extortion. Most professors care mostly about prestige (reputation for being smart, wise or innovative) and would prefer to ignore or disdain the economic and legal aspects of life. OK, that is a little unfair: most profs want to focus on their specialty and sometimes don't pay enough attention to how their actions interact with the law and the economy to affect university libraries far away. Academic publishers, e.g., Elsevier, give professors prestige in exchange for the professors' assigning copyright (legal ownership) of the professor's writings to the publishers with the result that a university library (which is typically far away from the publishing professor's own university) must pay the publishers to give its students and faculty access the academic literature without constantly running into the paywalls that people who are not students or faculty run into.
  • danaris 5y ago
    I can't speak for "most" professors, since I haven't done any kind of scientific survey. However, I work in academia, and every professor I personally know hates Elsevier, and wants to get away from them in any reasonable way. But when the journals that literally define their field are monopolized by Elsevier, there's only so much they can do for the time being. To avoid them, they'd have to accept their research being ignored, their careers stagnating, and their ability to continue to do their jobs properly being threatened.
    • kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      SciHub is missing an opportunity by not providing a platform for researchers to self organize and run the peer review process directly on SciHub (or a new sister domain safe from interference). That would give them immediate legitimacy.
    • ravel-bar-foo 5y ago
      Couple funny stories about Elsevier. I published with them, and created an account. They started sending me spam advertising new journals. So I logged in and unsubscribed from all their mailing lists. Reliably, exactly one year after unsubscribing I get spam from them. When I go to unsubscribe I find a new category of mailing list, opted in automatically. One might call it a mistake, but is remarkably suspicious that the spam regularly arrives exactly one year (to the day) after I most recently unsubscribed. There are the financial aspects to their exploitation, but I guess this struck a nerve because it is scummy behavior that affects me more personally.
• 13415 5y ago
  It's how it has evolved. Journals with good reputations have been taken over gradually since the 1970s by a few larger publishing companies such as Springer, Oxford Journals, Wiley, etc. There are only very few independent journals left in my area. I think it's similar to what the record industry did with record labels. Large publishers did this by luring the journal editors in chief with "free" offers of all kind such as access to editorial systems. Now for these publishers journals are basically constant cash-cow. Typesetting is done in India (nothing against that) for the lowest possible rate (lots against that). The rest of the work is done by academic volunteers. The EU has launched a huge open access initiative to the extent that in the future no funding will be available for research published in closed journals, but this doesn't help researchers like me when in their area almost all reputable journals put their articles behind expensive paywall. You can buy yourself out of this extortion by paying 2000 - 3000 USD per article, but only universities from rich countries can afford it. In a sense, the current situation makes it worse because it increases the imbalance between research in rich and poor countries and sometimes even between privileged and disadvantaged researchers in one and the same country. (For example, some of the researchers at our institute get open access fees paid because they know the right people. The system is not based on merits of the researcher or publication.) I live and work in Portugal. We have some paid access to a way to small selection of journals. To be honest, I don't even know how to access them from home during Covid times, our IT department doesn't know how to setup a VPN. Even at work it often fails to work, and the accessible journals change from year to year. Everybody uses Sci-Hub for everything anyway. Without Sci-Hub I could just give up my research - currently on explainable AI, metaethics, nontraditional decision making - and become a waiter.
  • Mediterraneo10 5y ago
    In a way, you are lucky if the journal has outsourced typesetting to some low-quality shop. Some for-profit publishers demand that the unpaid editors do all the copyediting, proofreading, and typesetting, and just provide the publisher with a camera-ready PDF. The for-profit publisher no longer provides any of the added value it once did. (Only distribution is left, and that isn’t a big deal, because even old-school non-profit learned societies manage to distribute their journals to libraries around the world.)
• xhkkffbf 5y ago
  It's not nonsense, but it dates from an earlier era and we may not want to continue in the tradition. In the past, professors who wanted to preserve a report of their work sent drafts off to publishers who reviewed, edited, typeset, printed and distributed. There are still plenty of people in this chain who do the work and aren't paid by the government. They get their paychecks from the subscription revenues to the journals. These are still, usually, paid indirectly by the government from the so-called "overhead" charged on grants. You can think of this system as "reader pays". As more professors developed the ability to typeset their own work with LaTeX and email/ftp/http, the costs of the old system have started to become more difficult to sustain. Some researchers do the typesetting themselves but the richer ones hire their own production team to produce better LaTeX reports. You can think of this model as "writer pays." Either with time or money. I think both sides have strong points. The old system is expensive and slow, but it does produce a very well-curated record of what happened. The new system is generally cheaper, but only because the researchers handle much more of the workload. I also worry that research will disappear when people retire or move on. A professor's web page may be really convenient, but they tend to disappear or die from bitrot after time. I also think the "writer pays" model tends to encourage over-producing some basic research notes that might not be ready to publish yet.
• adamnemecek 5y ago
  Fun fact, the current business model of science publishing is attributed to Robert Maxwell (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell), the father of Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirator 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.... Sounds like Ghislaine wasn’t the worst whoremonger in her family.
  • xNeil 5y ago
    That's an interesting fact, thanks!
• deleted 5y ago
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• majjgepolja 5y ago
  It was that previously these publishers were printing and distributing journals, before the internet. Some of the journals are naturally more prestigious than others. Academics want to publish in these famous journals. The name of journals they publish in carries lot of value for an academic's career. (That's what matters for the big head dudes who manage funds / promotions, they don't understand all these open access stuff.) Thus, the publisher has a monopoly or oligopoly on high value journals, new open access free as in libre journal cannot establish itself. Even if you're a well meaning academic who wishes not to contribute to this oligopoly, when you are young you don't want to risk your career. When you're old there are other young people under you and you don't want to risk their career. The big ~~head~~ belly dudes in positions of power are ones who need to understand this.
• breck 5y ago
  Imagine if the tobacco industry convinced the world to call cigarettes "Cancer Reducers", even though they're literally the exact opposite. Now imagine the tobacco industry also bought every single newspaper, tv network, book publisher and media publisher in the world. That's exactly what has happened with the Copyright/Patent industry. They convinced the world that these should be called "Intellectual Property", even though they are the opposite of property rights. It's rotten to the very core (like slavery, there is no reasonable term limit—the whole idea should be abolished). About 1% of the population understands the truth (like SciHubs), but the rest go along with what they are told. Understandable, the brainwashing begins young and is pervasive (all Disney children's movies, for example, start with an FBI Warning threatening jail time if you go against the system).
• anonuser123456 5y ago
  >and a large portion of the population has student debt because of how expensive tuition is. Student tuition does not fund research (at least in STEM in the US). DARPA, NSF, NIH etc. fund research. Professors at research institutions are to some extent evaluated based on the the size of their research grants.
  • xNeil 5y ago
    I was trying to point out how high tuition for universities is. I'm not sure if this is a US-specific problem, so I won't comment on that, but my point was universities receive so much money to conduct research, and then put that very research behind extremely expensive paywalls. If what you said is correct (which I'm sure it is), it's only reduced my understanding (in a good way - thank you for your explanation). So - the government pays professors for their research, and then this very research is put behind a paywall, from which....publishers (?) make money?. I apologize, but it simply does not make sense to me, it seems extremely counter intuitive.
    • anonuser123456 5y ago
      It's a mess at every level, that is definitely true. I would say that it does not make sense from a public policy perspective. Public money does pay for the research, so the public should benefit from the knowledge. The situation exists because it just evolved into what it currently is, and until recently no one seemed to care. Before the internet for example, it made a lot of sense for publishing to be handled by a private entity. There were real marginal costs to the production and distribution of journals and demand was relatively low. Today this is very much changed. Demand is high and marginal costs are zero. So I imagine we will move towards an open access model.
• refurb 5y ago
  A better question to ask is - when researchers can publish anywhere (including open source journals) they choose to publish in journals with paid access.
  • glogla 5y ago
    That's not really a question. But if you ask why they choose to, they mostly don't have that much choice. Often, rules say "publish in magazine with impact factor at least X" and that's it. The publishers are the gatekeepers of that.
    • refurb 5y ago
      So what the journals provide in exchange for money is impact factor? And what do you mean “gatekeeper”? It’s their journal and they created the impact factor, no?
• amelius 5y ago
  Meanwhile BigPharma uses science developed using funds collected from citizens, and charges insane prices for some drugs to those same citizens. The system is really crazy.
• betterunix2 5y ago
  Historically scientific articles were distributed by printing many copies and sending those copies to university libraries, which acted as repositories of human knowledge. Early on scientists realized that it made sense to collect high-quality articles and publish them as bundles (journals) at regular intervals; the peer review process was developed to determine which articles would make the cut. Printing is an expensive and was historically a labor-intensive process, and someone had to pay for it. The arrangement that was ultimately settled on was that the publishing companies, which were often operated by a particular university library, would charge subscription fees to those who received copies of scientific journals. TLDR: it made sense as recently as 50 years ago.
• fighterpilot 5y ago
  Journals have network effects and prestige. Its moat is a purely social one.
• turtletontine 5y ago
  I'd also like to add that journals are becoming less and less relevant in some ways. Most of the journal clubs I have attended don't discuss the latest e.g. Nature, Science papers, they talk about the new stuff on arXiv that week. Add to that the fact that increasingly often the code used is on GitHub, and the data (if available) is hosted somewhere else, journals look less and less important to the process. Of course the bar is lower for arXiv, and the papers are often a little shoddier. But my point is that journals are no longer central to process of keeping up with science.