5 ms·

The main issue is that currently there's no way around publishing at the established journals and conferences, because of the reputation they've built up. Fundi

The main issue is that currently there's no way around publishing at the established journals and conferences, because of the reputation they've built up. Funding and career advancement hinge on publications in these venues. If we accept that publishers don't offer much at all in return for the publication fees/library subscription costs (barely any editing, reviewers work pro bono, hosting PDFs is very cheap nowadays), the main issue is one of "reputation transfer". One way to cut out the middle man would be to convince journal editors to run sibling journals alongside the existing journals, so for each "Transactions on XYZ" there would be an "Open Transactions on XYZ" (as close in title as is legal). Importantly, each sibling journal would be run by the exact same academics (who are doing the real work on tax money anyway), and according to the same process as the original journal, just without involvement from a traditional publisher. PDFs would be hosted on a site like arXiv. The goal would be that submitting to the open "sibling" would be the obvious rational choice (same people, same decision-making, no fees, open access), which in time even the funding agencies and tenure committees would have to acknowledge.

eecc 5y ago
I guess that’s why the journals insist on copyright transfer. At best you get a ”copy” you can share via email when asked personally; the equivalent of a musician paid a couple drink coupons to share with their friends that came to see the gig…
- frankling_ 5y ago
  I'm not suggesting to publish every paper twice. The author submits only to one of the two journals. If it's the original journal, the article appears exactly as is common now, behind a paywall, and that's it. If it's the new sibling journal, the publisher of the original journal has nothing to do with it, no copyright transfer occurs, and the paper appears only on a free and open platform.
einpoklum 5y ago
Sure there is a way around it. You publish in an established venue, but also put the paper on a public website. This is possible legally using the "standard trick": https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/119002/7319 https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/119002/7319 ... and is in relatively wide practice.
- frankling_ 5y ago
  That's not a way around publishing at the established venues, it's done in addition to it. Everyone still submits to the established journals and conferences because this is what is being evaluated for career advancement and funding.
  - mdp2021 5y ago
    Is not the chief practical problem that access to knowledge gets barred in a pay-to-read system. The trick is one patch against that chief practical issue, which can be for these purposes separated by the systemic issue.
    - frankling_ 5y ago
      I agree: it helps a lot with the practical issue of access to knowledge. But from a taxpayer's or academic's perspective it wouldn't hurt to also eliminate the exorbitant publishing/licensing fees.
- Someone 5y ago
  You often don’t need any trick. Major publishers nowadays allow you to put something nearly identical to the published paper online. See for example https://www.elsevier.com/authors/submit-your-paper/sharing-and-promoting-your-article https://www.elsevier.com/authors/submit-your-paper/sharing-a...: You can always post your preprint on a preprint server. Additionally, for ArXiv and RePEC you can also immediately update this version with your accepted manuscript. Please note that Cell Press, The Lancet, and some society-owned titles have different preprint policies. Information on these is available on the journal homepage. […] You can post your accepted author manuscript immediately to an institutional repository and make this publicly available after an embargo period has expired. Remember that for gold open access articles, you can post your published journal article and immediately make it publicly available.”
  - einpoklum 5y ago
    Well, that partial change is the result of people just posting their papers and ignoring more draconian previous copyright transfers. Still, not remotely sufficient. The point is that with this text, you only have the specific rights defined by Elsevier, and those are kind of limited. It's not at all clear what rights people who copy the paper have. So, for example: * There's an "embargo period" during which you're censored, you need to shut up, can't post your article. Preposterous. * In many venues, you need to use custom links to Elsevier's "Science blocked and obfuscated". I mean "ScienceDirect"... yeah, right... * You seem not to have rights to post new versions, or other derivative works. * Stuff I haven't thought of because I'm not an IP lawyer.
nine_k 5y ago
I thought that the point of journals is review and filtering, their selectively, I thought, is their value proposition over arxiv.org. Am I mistaken?
- frankling_ 5y ago
  What I'm proposing is to convince the same people that currently take care of the reviewing and selection process for an established journal to do the same thing for an open and independent variant of the same journal, which is run alongside the original journal.
  - adminscoffee 5y ago
    good idea
  - mach1ne 5y ago
    Sadly these people are replaceable, and to my understanding the rights to the journals themselves are owned by the academic publishing industry. People don't really care who runs Nature; it is the reputation of the name that counts.
    - frankling_ 5y ago
      That's a good point, editors and reviewers come and go. Ideally, the newcomers would by default also be attached to "Independent Open Nature", until it becomes irrational to submit to Nature itself.
stuartbman 5y ago
Most journals are hybrid now, and offer a choice when publishing- either it's free for the author but kept behind a paywall, or the author pays up front. The article processing charges are really expensive- BMJ is £3,500, Lancet $5000, Cell $5,200 etc, although some major funders have arranged 'site licenses' with publishers so that all their funded research can be published open access without charge to the scientist.
- frankling_ 5y ago
  That's true, and I'm not sure how these fees can be justified.
unnah 5y ago
There are a few cases in which the editorial board of a journal has seen the light, resigned from a traditional publisher, and restarted an essentially equivalent open access journal. It's however hard to see 1) why they would simultaneously continue doing the same job for the for-profit publisher, and 2) why the for-profit publisher would accept it.
- frankling_ 5y ago
  1) For the status of being, e.g., editor-in-chief of a well-known journal. 2) I'd expect that they would be opposed, but firing their editors for it would make for interesting headlines.
Vinnl 5y ago
I volunteer for a project [1] where the idea of "cutting out the middle man" is taken even further: removing the journal from the reputation transfer. So rather than a reviewer lending their reputation to a journal, and that journal then conferring a stamp of trustworthiness onto an academic work, reviewers lend their reputation directly to the works they review. The works themselves can still be shared far and wide, e.g. via ArXiv. Of course, inertia is still a massive force to work against. [1] https://plaudit.pub https://plaudit.pub
- jonathanstrange 5y ago
  This is looks like a horrible idea. The system violates anonymous peer reviewing standards. These are sometimes even mandated by law, e.g. our funding institution would not allow us to count such a publication as "peer reviewed." There are many good reasons why peer review needs to be anonymous on both ends (the reviewer is anonymous and the manuscript is anonymized). Many reputable journals have even switched to triple blind peer review, i.e., the editor in chief does not know which two peer reviewers are selected. The biggest problem I see with the proposed system is that it's unfortunately often easy to recognize who wrote a paper (which is bad for ordinary peer review already) and in a personal endorsement system this would lead to collusion among researchers with low integrity. You wink through my papers, I wink through your papers. Also, imagine you don't endorse the paper of the senior researcher in charge of your postdoc funding...
  - hoseja 5y ago
    I'm sure if you applied blockchain and crypto enough times, this could be solved in some byzantine and massively inefficient way.
    - jonathanstrange 5y ago
      Don't forget to make scientists constantly mine for cryptocoins on their GPUs if they want to keep their crappy postdoc job, that way it's profit for everyone. :P
  - 5y ago
jasode 5y ago
>One way to cut out the middle man would be to convince journal editors to run sibling journals alongside the existing journals, [...] , each sibling journal would be run by the exact same academics (who are doing the real work on tax money anyway), Your proposed solution will not work because the sibling journal doesn't have the same paid support staff to do the unpleasant work that academics do not want to do. The unpleasant work includes administrative, first pass screening, copy-editing, typesetting, etc. I wrote a previous comment about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16738497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16738497 Therefore, the zero cost sibling journal wouldn't even get started by (most) academic editors because it imposes more labor they don't want to do. Yes, publishers like Elsevier and Springer are vilified ... but they also have paid staff and infrastructure to support the papers editors. Because internet discussions have the constant repetition of "the reviewers are unpaid" (which is true), it creates a distorted mental model that the prestigious journals have "no paid staff" (which is not true). The publishers' paid support employees helps the unpaid reviewers. An interesting journal that might seem like a counterexample to the support staff labor puzzle above is JMLR. But in an essay that explains how JMLR is able to function (e.g. offload typesetting and out-of-pocket expense of copy-editing to the submitter instead of the publisher) ... that same essay also explains why other journals haven't copied JMLR's model. (Analogous to your "sibling journal" proposal.) Excerpt from https://blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-journal/ https://blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-j... : >Does JMLR’s success and efficiency mean that all journals could run this way? Of course not. First, computer science journals are in a particularly good situation for being operated at low cost. Computer scientists possess all of the technological expertise required to efficiently manage and operate an online journal. Journal publishing is an information industry and computer scientists are specialists in information processing. Second, the level of volunteerism that JMLR relies on is atypical for the entire spectrum of journals. Thus, the academics and editors at non-compsci journals such as Nature and The Lancet do not have comparable culture of information systems platform management, computer software skills of typesetting, volunteerism, etc that JMLR has. And the key is that they have no incentive to do so since the publishers already give them infrastructure support without imposing extra labor on the editors.
- frankling_ 5y ago

eecc 5y ago

I guess that’s why the journals insist on copyright transfer. At best you get a ”copy” you can share via email when asked personally; the equivalent of a musician paid a couple drink coupons to share with their friends that came to see the gig…

frankling_ 5y ago
I'm not suggesting to publish every paper twice. The author submits only to one of the two journals. If it's the original journal, the article appears exactly as is common now, behind a paywall, and that's it. If it's the new sibling journal, the publisher of the original journal has nothing to do with it, no copyright transfer occurs, and the paper appears only on a free and open platform.

einpoklum 5y ago

Sure there is a way around it. You publish in an established venue, but also put the paper on a public website. This is possible legally using the "standard trick": https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/119002/7319 https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/119002/7319 ... and is in relatively wide practice.

frankling_ 5y ago
That's not a way around publishing at the established venues, it's done in addition to it. Everyone still submits to the established journals and conferences because this is what is being evaluated for career advancement and funding.
- mdp2021 5y ago
  Is not the chief practical problem that access to knowledge gets barred in a pay-to-read system. The trick is one patch against that chief practical issue, which can be for these purposes separated by the systemic issue.
  - frankling_ 5y ago
    I agree: it helps a lot with the practical issue of access to knowledge. But from a taxpayer's or academic's perspective it wouldn't hurt to also eliminate the exorbitant publishing/licensing fees.
Someone 5y ago
You often don’t need any trick. Major publishers nowadays allow you to put something nearly identical to the published paper online. See for example https://www.elsevier.com/authors/submit-your-paper/sharing-and-promoting-your-article https://www.elsevier.com/authors/submit-your-paper/sharing-a...: You can always post your preprint on a preprint server. Additionally, for ArXiv and RePEC you can also immediately update this version with your accepted manuscript. Please note that Cell Press, The Lancet, and some society-owned titles have different preprint policies. Information on these is available on the journal homepage. […] You can post your accepted author manuscript immediately to an institutional repository and make this publicly available after an embargo period has expired. Remember that for gold open access articles, you can post your published journal article and immediately make it publicly available.”
- einpoklum 5y ago
  Well, that partial change is the result of people just posting their papers and ignoring more draconian previous copyright transfers. Still, not remotely sufficient. The point is that with this text, you only have the specific rights defined by Elsevier, and those are kind of limited. It's not at all clear what rights people who copy the paper have. So, for example: * There's an "embargo period" during which you're censored, you need to shut up, can't post your article. Preposterous. * In many venues, you need to use custom links to Elsevier's "Science blocked and obfuscated". I mean "ScienceDirect"... yeah, right... * You seem not to have rights to post new versions, or other derivative works. * Stuff I haven't thought of because I'm not an IP lawyer.

nine_k 5y ago

I thought that the point of journals is review and filtering, their selectively, I thought, is their value proposition over arxiv.org. Am I mistaken?

frankling_ 5y ago
What I'm proposing is to convince the same people that currently take care of the reviewing and selection process for an established journal to do the same thing for an open and independent variant of the same journal, which is run alongside the original journal.
- adminscoffee 5y ago
  good idea
- mach1ne 5y ago
  Sadly these people are replaceable, and to my understanding the rights to the journals themselves are owned by the academic publishing industry. People don't really care who runs Nature; it is the reputation of the name that counts.
  - frankling_ 5y ago
    That's a good point, editors and reviewers come and go. Ideally, the newcomers would by default also be attached to "Independent Open Nature", until it becomes irrational to submit to Nature itself.

stuartbman 5y ago

Most journals are hybrid now, and offer a choice when publishing- either it's free for the author but kept behind a paywall, or the author pays up front. The article processing charges are really expensive- BMJ is £3,500, Lancet $5000, Cell $5,200 etc, although some major funders have arranged 'site licenses' with publishers so that all their funded research can be published open access without charge to the scientist.

frankling_ 5y ago
That's true, and I'm not sure how these fees can be justified.

unnah 5y ago

There are a few cases in which the editorial board of a journal has seen the light, resigned from a traditional publisher, and restarted an essentially equivalent open access journal. It's however hard to see 1) why they would simultaneously continue doing the same job for the for-profit publisher, and 2) why the for-profit publisher would accept it.

frankling_ 5y ago
1) For the status of being, e.g., editor-in-chief of a well-known journal. 2) I'd expect that they would be opposed, but firing their editors for it would make for interesting headlines.

Vinnl 5y ago

I volunteer for a project [1] where the idea of "cutting out the middle man" is taken even further: removing the journal from the reputation transfer. So rather than a reviewer lending their reputation to a journal, and that journal then conferring a stamp of trustworthiness onto an academic work, reviewers lend their reputation directly to the works they review. The works themselves can still be shared far and wide, e.g. via ArXiv. Of course, inertia is still a massive force to work against. [1] https://plaudit.pub https://plaudit.pub

jonathanstrange 5y ago
This is looks like a horrible idea. The system violates anonymous peer reviewing standards. These are sometimes even mandated by law, e.g. our funding institution would not allow us to count such a publication as "peer reviewed." There are many good reasons why peer review needs to be anonymous on both ends (the reviewer is anonymous and the manuscript is anonymized). Many reputable journals have even switched to triple blind peer review, i.e., the editor in chief does not know which two peer reviewers are selected. The biggest problem I see with the proposed system is that it's unfortunately often easy to recognize who wrote a paper (which is bad for ordinary peer review already) and in a personal endorsement system this would lead to collusion among researchers with low integrity. You wink through my papers, I wink through your papers. Also, imagine you don't endorse the paper of the senior researcher in charge of your postdoc funding...
- hoseja 5y ago
  I'm sure if you applied blockchain and crypto enough times, this could be solved in some byzantine and massively inefficient way.
  - jonathanstrange 5y ago
    Don't forget to make scientists constantly mine for cryptocoins on their GPUs if they want to keep their crappy postdoc job, that way it's profit for everyone. :P
- 5y ago

jasode 5y ago

>One way to cut out the middle man would be to convince journal editors to run sibling journals alongside the existing journals, [...] , each sibling journal would be run by the exact same academics (who are doing the real work on tax money anyway), Your proposed solution will not work because the sibling journal doesn't have the same paid support staff to do the unpleasant work that academics do not want to do. The unpleasant work includes administrative, first pass screening, copy-editing, typesetting, etc. I wrote a previous comment about this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16738497 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16738497 Therefore, the zero cost sibling journal wouldn't even get started by (most) academic editors because it imposes more labor they don't want to do. Yes, publishers like Elsevier and Springer are vilified ... but they also have paid staff and infrastructure to support the papers editors. Because internet discussions have the constant repetition of "the reviewers are unpaid" (which is true), it creates a distorted mental model that the prestigious journals have "no paid staff" (which is not true). The publishers' paid support employees helps the unpaid reviewers. An interesting journal that might seem like a counterexample to the support staff labor puzzle above is JMLR. But in an essay that explains how JMLR is able to function (e.g. offload typesetting and out-of-pocket expense of copy-editing to the submitter instead of the publisher) ... that same essay also explains why other journals haven't copied JMLR's model. (Analogous to your "sibling journal" proposal.) Excerpt from https://blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-journal/ https://blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-j... : >Does JMLR’s success and efficiency mean that all journals could run this way? Of course not. First, computer science journals are in a particularly good situation for being operated at low cost. Computer scientists possess all of the technological expertise required to efficiently manage and operate an online journal. Journal publishing is an information industry and computer scientists are specialists in information processing. Second, the level of volunteerism that JMLR relies on is atypical for the entire spectrum of journals. Thus, the academics and editors at non-compsci journals such as Nature and The Lancet do not have comparable culture of information systems platform management, computer software skills of typesetting, volunteerism, etc that JMLR has. And the key is that they have no incentive to do so since the publishers already give them infrastructure support without imposing extra labor on the editors.

frankling_ 5y ago