7 ms·

We Can’t Trust the Market with Scientific Knowledge

61 points by beckman466 5y ago

roenxi 5y ago
The article I actually quite like, but the headline is misguided. The market for scientific knowledge is called SciHub. That is precisely where the natural economic equilibrium lives. The scientific publishing industry exists because of either (a) inertia as we move to the new equilibrium or (b) because of government regulations and interference via IP law. And even that isn't enough to stop market forces. The marginal cost to copy knowledge is around 0.
- horsawlarway 5y ago
  This matches my take. The problem is that these companies are serving two distinct roles: 1. Knowledge dissemination and preservation 2. Community consensus and reputation building SciHub is the obvious answer to problem number 1. It costs literally nothing to distribute this knowledge to the community, and I'd call attempts to recreate the distribution channel foolish and misguided (at best). Number 2 is much harder. When I was in academia (and watching my wife go through a Masters and then a PhD in a science related field) SciHub was an excellent way to find and read a paper, but it was not an excellent way to judge the quality or trustworthiness of that paper.
  - rito_ 5y ago
    > but it was not an excellent way to judge the quality or trustworthiness of that paper. How is this a problem? You knew where the paper was originally published, right?
bko 5y ago
> Opposition to the industry is difficult for individuals. While technically anyone can upload their research online without sending it to a publisher, career prospects are dependent on getting published in established journals. Does anything prevent you from publishing your work publicly after its been published in a journal or do you normally transfer all right of the work to the journal? [edit] Reading further into the article, it appears that they don't retain rights after publication > There is an alternative to this model. Plan S stated that researchers should be allowed to make their work freely available via a ‘rights retention strategy’: making it a condition of funding that authors retain their copyright over the peer-reviewed manuscripts accepted for publication.
- unmole 5y ago
  Atleast IEEE allows authors to publish the papers on their personal or their employer's website.
  - ModernMech 5y ago
    There is a distinction between preprints and the papers published by IEEE. Typically IEEE will let you put the preprint up, but the finalized paper accepted and printed by the journal is off limits. Usually this just means the preprint is missing page numbers and has different margins.
- rscho 5y ago
  Depending on the field and journal, it may or may not be the case. In medicine for example, full copyright is systematically transferred to the publisher.
- PeterisP 5y ago
  Some journals require copyright transfer, some don't. However, another issue is that respected scientific journals generally publish only "novel research" - i.e. no matter if copyright allows you to publish it, if you have published it somewhere then it disqualifies you from publishing that work a "good place" afterwards. So the "good journal" has to be the first publication and sometimes even if you retain copyrights they require an "embargo" that you won't publish it elsewhere (e.g. on your institutional site) for a year or two.
UK-Al05 5y ago
This assumes that a decent market is the status quo. It isn't. The price should approach the marginal cost in a real competitive market.
megiddo 5y ago
Title: We Can’t Trust the Market with Scientific Knowledge First claim: The publisher rakes in 100 percent of the subscription fees, and access to what is meant to be a public good is restricted thanks to intellectual property laws. This is the exact same issue with the "right to repair crowd." Step 1. There's something wrong with the market. Step 2: Analysis: because of IP law. Why isn't the argument made against the actual cause? Bad intellectual property law has been a major issue in the US for decades now. Indefinite copyright, extortionate liabilities, patent trolling, and the farce of the DMCA. It seems to me that "the market" isn't even getting a chance here.
- lumost 5y ago
  In this case the two are tied by what some would call “political economy”. The IP laws are broken because IP holders pay for them to be broken. Civil activism in the IP space is inneffective as its both an esoteric topic and one with long duration. The IP holder needs just one bill to pass in their favor while activists need to block hundreds of bills over decades.
- qsort 5y ago
  > Why isn't the argument made against the actual cause? Practicality. Personally, I advocate for the complete abolition of both copyright and patents, but realistically it's not something that's going to happen before I'm six feet underground. Reforming access to scientific papers is still going to improve the situation, and there's a realistic chance of that happening.
- Guthur 5y ago
  And source of bad law is the government. It's appalling how often people scream for the government to come save them from a situation created by said government.
  - inetknght 5y ago
    Source of bad government is certain members of government acting in bad faith. It's appalling how often certain members of government scream for one thing while doing another.
Dumblydorr 5y ago
I worked at a scientific journal as a copy-editor, the CEO was an unaccomplished scientist and scummy businessman who drastically underpaid his scientifically trained employees while he collected as many Teslas as he could. The entire business model was to pitch their suite of video publications to university library systems, not to individual scientists themselves. I also was obligated to legitimately spam professional researchers to get peer reviews so this greedy CEO could get another Tesla or pay capital for his wife to flip another house. Every publication meant thousands in fees, so spam away we did until we got poached or gave up on it and left without another job.
- enriquto 5y ago
  It is a bit sad to see that Teslas have spectacularly replaced BMWs as the go-to car for absolute douchebags.
  - danaris 5y ago
    Frankly, I'm much happier with absolute douchebags not dumping carbon dioxide into the air every time they want to Go Very Fast.
    - hkt 5y ago
      I'd be happier if they were all banned from driving and provided with a bus pass.
  - throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    And Tacomas have replaced Priuses as the go to car for people who obliviously clog the left lane. The only constant in life is change.
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Would it make bad policies better if the CEO was a Nobel Prize winner, paid well, and was a wonderful person? I don't see the value of the personal attack.
tomohawk 5y ago
If you want something that is a social good, there has to be an economic model to support it. That could be a government using taxation to establish an agency to do the work. That could be a business seeing a means to make a profit to provide it. That could mean a volunteer organization getting set up to do it. Each of the above have their pluses and minuses. A government agency in charge of scientific knowledge? What could go wrong? A business charging $$ for access to knowledge? What could go wrong? A volunteer organization beholden to plutocrat and partisan doners? What could go wrong? The best answer is to push for many alternatives and make whatever organizations that are providing the good to compete against one another.
gekk05 5y ago
d
yobbo 5y ago
Build a crypto-based peer-review signature/reputation system. Without peer-review and reputation, the journals contribute nothing.
mrjangles 5y ago
>Scientific publishing is currently a multi-billion dollar industry, forcing scientists to pay huge sums to access or publish publicly-funded research – it's time for a democratic alternative. I'm always amazed at how easily people fall for the extremely naive "those poor academics being manipulated by these horrible publishing companies" narrative. The scientific publishing industry exists specifically because it supplies academics with what they need - a barrier for entry keeping others out. This, of course, is the purpose of peer review; that is, to ensure that the academic asking for the paper to be published has done the required work, read all the literature, and learned all the correct jargon and can therefore enter the prestigious club. The better the journal, the more exclusive the club. The academic must pass many hoops in order to move up in prestige and this protects those who have raised themselves through this imaginary system. (nowhere is the accuracy of the results assessed during peer review by the way, though accordance with current political trends is assessed). The other important trick academics use is esoteric language which the layman has trouble understanding. Together these two devices allow the academic to keep his cushy job, and also helps to ensure the layman doesn't realize 90% of what gets published in academia is absolute nonsense. Of course I could be wrong and tens of thousands of academics around the world are have spent the last 50 years prisoners to the publishing industry for absolutely no reason what so ever. What seems more likely to you guys?
OrvalWintermute 5y ago
> Scientific publishing is currently a multi-billion dollar industry, forcing scientists to pay huge sums to access or publish publicly-funded research – it's time for a democratic alternative. I don't know that I trust a democratic replacement for a for-profit replacement, since both have their flaws. In the for-profit model (plutocracy) we have gatekeepers, and rent collectors. In the democratic model we have an oppressive majority, and the silencing of the minority ~ e.g. Galileo with copernican heliocentrism. Practically though, this can be more Oligarchic than democratic oftentimes. Let us not trade cash driven tyranny for ballot driven tyranny Maybe we do need an alternative governance model, but I think something different from for-profit, and democratic may be best. I don't know what word best fits that definition, Open Source, or something in the Creative Commons, but there must be a better alternative
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  Except we currently have both of those. Publishing in a journal anyone will bother to read, and getting the credentials to work in a lab doing research anyone will publish, are both gated by a tyranny of the scientific majority. Then they're still charged to actually read anything they publish.

61 points by beckman466 5y ago

The article I actually quite like, but the headline is misguided. The market for scientific knowledge is called SciHub. That is precisely where the natural economic equilibrium lives. The scientific publishing industry exists because of either (a) inertia as we move to the new equilibrium or (b) because of government regulations and interference via IP law. And even that isn't enough to stop market forces. The marginal cost to copy knowledge is around 0.

horsawlarway 5y ago
This matches my take. The problem is that these companies are serving two distinct roles: 1. Knowledge dissemination and preservation 2. Community consensus and reputation building SciHub is the obvious answer to problem number 1. It costs literally nothing to distribute this knowledge to the community, and I'd call attempts to recreate the distribution channel foolish and misguided (at best). Number 2 is much harder. When I was in academia (and watching my wife go through a Masters and then a PhD in a science related field) SciHub was an excellent way to find and read a paper, but it was not an excellent way to judge the quality or trustworthiness of that paper.
- rito_ 5y ago
  > but it was not an excellent way to judge the quality or trustworthiness of that paper. How is this a problem? You knew where the paper was originally published, right?

bko 5y ago

> Opposition to the industry is difficult for individuals. While technically anyone can upload their research online without sending it to a publisher, career prospects are dependent on getting published in established journals. Does anything prevent you from publishing your work publicly after its been published in a journal or do you normally transfer all right of the work to the journal? [edit] Reading further into the article, it appears that they don't retain rights after publication > There is an alternative to this model. Plan S stated that researchers should be allowed to make their work freely available via a ‘rights retention strategy’: making it a condition of funding that authors retain their copyright over the peer-reviewed manuscripts accepted for publication.

unmole 5y ago
Atleast IEEE allows authors to publish the papers on their personal or their employer's website.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  There is a distinction between preprints and the papers published by IEEE. Typically IEEE will let you put the preprint up, but the finalized paper accepted and printed by the journal is off limits. Usually this just means the preprint is missing page numbers and has different margins.
rscho 5y ago
Depending on the field and journal, it may or may not be the case. In medicine for example, full copyright is systematically transferred to the publisher.
PeterisP 5y ago
Some journals require copyright transfer, some don't. However, another issue is that respected scientific journals generally publish only "novel research" - i.e. no matter if copyright allows you to publish it, if you have published it somewhere then it disqualifies you from publishing that work a "good place" afterwards. So the "good journal" has to be the first publication and sometimes even if you retain copyrights they require an "embargo" that you won't publish it elsewhere (e.g. on your institutional site) for a year or two.

UK-Al05 5y ago

This assumes that a decent market is the status quo. It isn't. The price should approach the marginal cost in a real competitive market.

megiddo 5y ago

Title: We Can’t Trust the Market with Scientific Knowledge First claim: The publisher rakes in 100 percent of the subscription fees, and access to what is meant to be a public good is restricted thanks to intellectual property laws. This is the exact same issue with the "right to repair crowd." Step 1. There's something wrong with the market. Step 2: Analysis: because of IP law. Why isn't the argument made against the actual cause? Bad intellectual property law has been a major issue in the US for decades now. Indefinite copyright, extortionate liabilities, patent trolling, and the farce of the DMCA. It seems to me that "the market" isn't even getting a chance here.

lumost 5y ago
In this case the two are tied by what some would call “political economy”. The IP laws are broken because IP holders pay for them to be broken. Civil activism in the IP space is inneffective as its both an esoteric topic and one with long duration. The IP holder needs just one bill to pass in their favor while activists need to block hundreds of bills over decades.
qsort 5y ago
> Why isn't the argument made against the actual cause? Practicality. Personally, I advocate for the complete abolition of both copyright and patents, but realistically it's not something that's going to happen before I'm six feet underground. Reforming access to scientific papers is still going to improve the situation, and there's a realistic chance of that happening.
Guthur 5y ago
And source of bad law is the government. It's appalling how often people scream for the government to come save them from a situation created by said government.
- inetknght 5y ago
  Source of bad government is certain members of government acting in bad faith. It's appalling how often certain members of government scream for one thing while doing another.

Dumblydorr 5y ago

I worked at a scientific journal as a copy-editor, the CEO was an unaccomplished scientist and scummy businessman who drastically underpaid his scientifically trained employees while he collected as many Teslas as he could. The entire business model was to pitch their suite of video publications to university library systems, not to individual scientists themselves. I also was obligated to legitimately spam professional researchers to get peer reviews so this greedy CEO could get another Tesla or pay capital for his wife to flip another house. Every publication meant thousands in fees, so spam away we did until we got poached or gave up on it and left without another job.

enriquto 5y ago
It is a bit sad to see that Teslas have spectacularly replaced BMWs as the go-to car for absolute douchebags.
- danaris 5y ago
  Frankly, I'm much happier with absolute douchebags not dumping carbon dioxide into the air every time they want to Go Very Fast.
  - hkt 5y ago
    I'd be happier if they were all banned from driving and provided with a bus pass.
- throwaway0a5e 5y ago
  And Tacomas have replaced Priuses as the go to car for people who obliviously clog the left lane. The only constant in life is change.
wolverine876 5y ago
Would it make bad policies better if the CEO was a Nobel Prize winner, paid well, and was a wonderful person? I don't see the value of the personal attack.

tomohawk 5y ago

If you want something that is a social good, there has to be an economic model to support it. That could be a government using taxation to establish an agency to do the work. That could be a business seeing a means to make a profit to provide it. That could mean a volunteer organization getting set up to do it. Each of the above have their pluses and minuses. A government agency in charge of scientific knowledge? What could go wrong? A business charging $$ for access to knowledge? What could go wrong? A volunteer organization beholden to plutocrat and partisan doners? What could go wrong? The best answer is to push for many alternatives and make whatever organizations that are providing the good to compete against one another.

gekk05 5y ago

yobbo 5y ago

Build a crypto-based peer-review signature/reputation system. Without peer-review and reputation, the journals contribute nothing.

mrjangles 5y ago

>Scientific publishing is currently a multi-billion dollar industry, forcing scientists to pay huge sums to access or publish publicly-funded research – it's time for a democratic alternative. I'm always amazed at how easily people fall for the extremely naive "those poor academics being manipulated by these horrible publishing companies" narrative. The scientific publishing industry exists specifically because it supplies academics with what they need - a barrier for entry keeping others out. This, of course, is the purpose of peer review; that is, to ensure that the academic asking for the paper to be published has done the required work, read all the literature, and learned all the correct jargon and can therefore enter the prestigious club. The better the journal, the more exclusive the club. The academic must pass many hoops in order to move up in prestige and this protects those who have raised themselves through this imaginary system. (nowhere is the accuracy of the results assessed during peer review by the way, though accordance with current political trends is assessed). The other important trick academics use is esoteric language which the layman has trouble understanding. Together these two devices allow the academic to keep his cushy job, and also helps to ensure the layman doesn't realize 90% of what gets published in academia is absolute nonsense. Of course I could be wrong and tens of thousands of academics around the world are have spent the last 50 years prisoners to the publishing industry for absolutely no reason what so ever. What seems more likely to you guys?

OrvalWintermute 5y ago

> Scientific publishing is currently a multi-billion dollar industry, forcing scientists to pay huge sums to access or publish publicly-funded research – it's time for a democratic alternative. I don't know that I trust a democratic replacement for a for-profit replacement, since both have their flaws. In the for-profit model (plutocracy) we have gatekeepers, and rent collectors. In the democratic model we have an oppressive majority, and the silencing of the minority ~ e.g. Galileo with copernican heliocentrism. Practically though, this can be more Oligarchic than democratic oftentimes. Let us not trade cash driven tyranny for ballot driven tyranny Maybe we do need an alternative governance model, but I think something different from for-profit, and democratic may be best. I don't know what word best fits that definition, Open Source, or something in the Creative Commons, but there must be a better alternative

nonameiguess 5y ago
Except we currently have both of those. Publishing in a journal anyone will bother to read, and getting the credentials to work in a lab doing research anyone will publish, are both gated by a tyranny of the scientific majority. Then they're still charged to actually read anything they publish.