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It's hard to overstate what a scam academic and scientific publishing is
- benrapscallion 5y agoI am surprised no one has the most important factor at work here: prestige. Yes, editors can resign en masse but they can’t recreate a 100-year old institution. Think Harvard or New York Times. Big name scientific journals have the same level of prestige. Not saying this is right or how it should be, but we must recognize that this is the most important factor. -someone who has published a paper in one of these journals
- richardatlarge 5y agoIt's hard to overstate how annoying is this kind of Twitter blogging. This notwithstanding, as an academic, I can say that most never question this absurd system, too focused on the publish or perish treadmill.
- sergiomattei 5y agoWhat's so wrong about it?
- richardatlarge 5y agoOn HN, I would think that would be obvious- not fit for purpose. It comes down to the old adage: what if everyone did this?
- Igelau 5y agoHere's the thing 1/
- tiborsaas 5y agoIt's full of distractions. Did you know that chocolate is a crystal? So when I see a thread on twitter, I can't decide if the next tweet is directly related or is it a reply. It would take less than 6 months to get to the moon by car at 60mph. Then there are stats like retweets and likes for every tweet that's totally meaningless, why can't people just push the top tweet? #furries are trending in Hungary btw. Then there's the conceptual problem about how authors interact with the platform. They must fit a paragraph into 280 characters, they can't edit a previous tweet so it's less coherent and they certainly can't give it a proper read through. Pierre-François Bouchard discovered the Rosetta stone in Egypt in case you wondered. Unfortunately this makes Twitter threads more like a rant rather than a regular blog post. Basically, twitter.
- SquibblesRedux 5y agoNow I know that chocolate is a crystal. And when looked into it further, I found out chocolate can be tempered. [1] While I am glad to know a little more about the chemistry of chocolate, I must say I am also glad I was not the one to wade through Twitter. I can say I learned it on Hacker News, instead. [1] https://www.chocolatetemperingmachines.com/pages/chemistry-behind-tempering-chocolates https://www.chocolatetemperingmachines.com/pages/chemistry-b...
- 1cvmask 5y agoHere is the blog version of the tweet storm: https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#cornucopia-concordance https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#cornucopi...
- greenyoda 5y agoThanks! I've e-mailed the moderators to ask them to replace the article's URL with this one.
- amelius 5y ago> It's hard to overstate how annoying is this kind of Twitter blogging. It's like buying a book with one sentence. For the next sentence, buy volume II of the book!
- 4ad 5y agoTwitter blogging is fine, albeit annoying. Twitter discussions, on the other hand, are impossible to follow.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- version_five 5y agoI don't completely disagree (although I feel like there have been a lot of naive and overly simplistic CD "thoughts" posted on HN recently that rubbed me the wrong way). But consider on one hand the "fake news" / misinformation problem or whatever people want to call it, and the legacy academic publishing industry on the other. I'm looking at this from the perspective of an academic, the target audience of the publications, not a layperson for whom they are not designed. Like it or not, big concentrated power in academic publishing largely addresses trust in the quality of the publications. Good faculty want to review or serve as editor for good publications, and researchers will follow and rely on the quality of reputable, high impact factor publications. I know it's not always as simple as that, but I liked opening a new issue of my go-to journal and knowing that what I was reading had gone through a good review and was curated to be stuff that was relevant to me. I'm glad my university paid for it. Not saying there are not other ways, but that these "scams" are providing a valuable service. (And I'm aware of examples of bad research, retracted papers, etc, these are mostly issues for laypeople and the media, they have almost no impact on researchers and occur with insignificant frequency) (And there are lots of real scams and rent seeking in the industry, but not what is covered in the twitter posts)
- richardatlarge 5y agoYes, some of the most important moments in my life were getting a paper accepted in a prestigious publication. Standing has such importance. Still some (medical) journals have nevertheless lost reputation by publishing work by shill authors
- malloryerik 5y agoWhy is a thoughtful and good-willed comment like this being downvoted?
- hoppyhoppy2 5y agoFYI the Hacker News Guidelines page addresses this kind of comment thusly: >Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 1cvmask 5y agoI always thought a simple solution to this would be to have the knowledge made open source if it was government funded in any way at all. That would be the big game changer.
- heavyset_go 5y agoThe same should apply to medications. A lot of medication R&D is funded by the NIH at public universities, but private corporations get to patent the fruit of that research and charge Americans exorbitant amounts of money for them while enjoying government-enforced monopolies.
- barry-cotter 5y agoGood luck turning academic research into a mass manufactured product that is known to be both safe and effective without the billions of dollars of investment pharmaceutical companies put into doing that.
- heavyset_go 5y agoI'd rather fund that with my tax dollars than rely on the whims of corporations to bring drugs to market.
- ufmace 5y agoIf you want to go into what the money does, you have to look at the drug approval requirements. The public demands, through regulatory agencies, very thorough, elaborate, and expensive clinical trials to prove safety and efficacy of all drugs. Somebody has to pay for that - both for the drugs that do succeed and make it to market, and also for all of the trials for drugs that people thought would work but turned out not to. This is basically high-stakes gambling, and the pharma companies need to make the money back somehow on the drugs that do get approved to make the whole system work. Gambling like this is risky, and any sane investor would want a pretty impressive return when they win in exchange for taking the risk of the loss. If you don't have a solution for that, it rings rather hollow to complain about how evil the pharma companies supposedly are when they are only responding to the incentives that we created for them.
- civilized 5y agoIt would be a scam, except academics could easily disrupt it and they (mostly) choose not to. It's more that the taxpayer is fleeced by academia in general (the whole research-funding-publishing complex) for many billions because there's no incentive for academics to save the taxpayer money by handling publishing themselves. (As Doctorow notes, they already review the manuscripts, so all that's left for an existing journal's editorial team to do is vote for a chief editor and switch to any one of many open, free research publication services.) Public domain publishing should be a condition of government funding for research.
- chakkepolja 5y agoWhen you're young, you have to publish in big name journals to survive. You can't risk your career. When you're old, you can't risk the career of students working under you. This is a vicious cycle. To break it, the number-game evaluation for research grants and promotions should stop. Bean counters with fat bellies who manage grants and promotions won't probably understand all these.
- raverbashing 5y agoNah. The system is worse than that. The true disruption would be to get rid of the "journal" format. Of maybe even the article format. Academic reviews seem to be a bad joke most of the time. Either you have "Reviewer 2" picking at straws to try and find issues with the paper, at the same time some reviewers let complete crap through. There are improvements here and there but mostly punctual.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jhrmnn 5y agoIn fact academics often put their work online freely. But funding sources press them to also publish in journals in order to satisfy their selection criteria
- digislave 5y ago"Funding sources" are usually the government.
- digislave 5y ago[dead]
- dbcooper 5y agoI reviewed a submission (review paper) to a top journal recently. It took a lot of time, and I responded with seven pages of recommendations, comments, and corrections. My recommendation was to transfer it to a more specialist journal from the same publisher. Afterwards I was wondering "why the hell am I doing this for free when my friends are getting rich?"
- barry-cotter 5y agoyou weren't doing it for free. Service is part of the job of an academic, along with research and teaching.
- chrisseaton 5y ago> "why the hell am I doing this for free when my friends are getting rich?" If you're employed as a researcher, then it's (implicitly) a paid part of your job to review papers. We all contribute to the community so that we give and taken equally. Someone who is taking peer-review but not giving any is being very selfish.
- borroka 5y agoWhich (taking the peer-review but not giving it) is what is done by most established scientists. Thoughtful reviews are much more likely to be delivered by early-career scientists (post-doc, mostly, since Assistant Professors are very time-constrained). Being selfish in academia is an evolutionarily stable strategy.
- Jensson 5y ago> Someone who is taking peer-review but not giving any is being very selfish. You mean like the publisher that makes you work for free and then comes back selling your work to you for a ton of money?
- chrisseaton 5y ago> the publisher that makes you work for free They don't make you do anything. I don't even understand under what mechanism you think publishers are making people do things? And you aren't working for the publisher - you're working for the community, paid by your employer. > selling your work to you They don't sell my reviews or my papers to me.
- Aeolun 5y agoHmm, I used to work for Nature Publishing Group (now Springer Nature) and we absolutely did a bunch of work to print and get everyone their Nature subscriptions. While the actual research and review is done by others, there’s some work left in putting it in the right journals/issues, formatting it and distributing it. Is that worth assigning the copyright for? Probably not, but the fact that publishers are paid for their role doesn’t seem too bad. It’s just the payment model is messed up. There was some movement towards open access though, where all the cost of distribution is just carried by an up-front lump sum (that can come from the researchers grant, I assume). On top of that there’s a bunch of initiatives inside Nature at least that were funded by the income from other sources, and those are publicly available (I was working on the natureindex).
- jrochkind1 5y ago> Springer Nature Group is the single largest publisher of scholarly journals, with about 3,000 titles. In terms of revenues, however, Springer is second to Elsevier with estimated journal revenues of €1.150/$1.333 billion (30% of Springer’s reported 2017 revenues of €1.64/$1.9 billion, in fact, derive from the sale of books). Its operating profit margin of 22.8% is also well below Elsevier’s 36.8%. —https://infrastructure.sparcopen.org/landscape-analysis/springer-nature-group https://infrastructure.sparcopen.org/landscape-analysis/spri... That is to say, after they pay all the staff, including well-paid executives, and other expenses of putting out a journal, plus pay for other initiatives that are, as you say, funded by charging universities for access to the research created by their own employees, on top of all that there's around $300 million in profit (directly or indirectly benefiting shareholders). (Btw, average profit margin for popular press publishing is around 12%, vs 22% for Springer or 36% for Elsevier). It's not a charity, or a non-profit.
- ncmncm 5y agoTo get a more accurate picture, you should be adding executive salaries to the profit figure. They don't contribute anything more than stockholders do, so amount to parasites feeding off profits.
- canjobear 5y ago
- vladislav 5y agoTo play devil's advocate, the value these prestigious journals provide is providing an objective function to optimize allocation of resources in academia. To advance one's career in academia, one needs to publish in prestigious journals, there isn't really a way around it (and if the entire system were to change, resources would need to be invested to create a different hierarchy of publication quality). To whatever extent publishing in prestigious journals captures scientific quality (and/or political astuteness), it serves the purpose of funneling more resources to those that optimize that objective. So it's not really a scam when everyone has run their individual game theory and chosen to continue with this particular system, and these journals can extract their cut because there is still value in publishing in Nature/Science/Annals or whatever. There is a push to change some of this but typically only the most successful academics can afford to boycott these journals, after already having dozens of publications vetted by the existing system.
- TeeMassive 5y agoNow apply that to a certain medical procedure backed up by governments for hundred of billions of dollars. "Game theory is a bitch".
- kuraudo 5y agoThe cognitive dissonance your comment created reaped undeserved downvotes. It's a legitimate concern: massive amounts of money fund these ventures and massive amounts of money in turn get guaranteed to the concerns which funded the ventures. The efficacy of the procedure is irrelevant: this is clearly corruption at a massive scale with perverse incentives which guarantee it repeats itself.
- bubblethink 5y agoLeaving aside for-profit publishers, I dont' get what the point of ACM and IEEE is. Those are non-profit bodies and dominate the majority of publishing in CS/EE. Aside from a handful of big venues like NIPS, VLDB, Usenix, almost everything is tied to ACM/IEEE. Why do we need them and what value do they add ? Also, what is a non-profit ? You can keep pumping all the money you make into salaries and other assets that you own. Is that all it takes to be a non-profit?
- shrewduser 5y agoi've often wondered this myself... non profits with ludicrous executive salaries...
- anon946 5y agoI can't say whether or not they are worth it, but they provide some degree of branding, mainly to "adjacent" communities. If I see a paper in IEEE something, I have some degree of assurance that there is a minimum quality level, even if I'm not that familiar with the area. Also, at least for IEEE, they provide some help with running the conference, publishing the proceedings, etc. Whether or not they provide value commensurate with their cost is a separate question.
- bubblethink 5y agoThis is a bit like the app store scenario. Sure, if you are a lesser known conference, having ACM/IEEE probably helps you. It really doesn't help any established conference similar to how the Apple store doesn't help Netflix.
- lazyjeff 5y agoThese societies are run and composed of by academics themselves. In fact, the executive salaries are $0 as far as I know, so it's a volunteer organization. It's basically how publishing would work if academics take control away from commercial publishers, i.e. the post-disruption publishing arrangement that people in this thread are cheering for. Authors generally have the option to keep the copyright of the papers when publishing for ACM, and at least host the papers on their homepages. This is a good thing that they dominate CS/EE as they have more reasonable access costs, and many academics no longer have to publish at commercial publishers. It's not completely free because there are real costs to publishing, but it's the best option I can think of for now.
- k2enemy 5y agoAnd he left out the part where you have to pay hundreds of dollars to submit a paper (in some fields anyway).
- xipho 5y agoIt is commonly thousands. And this is the norm in many fields.
- Gatsky 5y agoYes, this is driving the massive proliferation of journals that keep spamming me to publish with them. Never heard of the journal, but there is a USD$2400 fee for 'processing'. It's a good business model, particularly if all your staff are in countries with cheap labour. The people funding science should cap publication related payments to some nominal sum. Whole swarms of predatory journals would instantly die.
- sgc 5y agoI wonder if there would be a credible way to crowdsource editorial work. Have a journal that anybody can submit to as long as it is reviewed by 5 verifiable peers, or 3 who themselves reach a certain level of credibility (or some other better, similar system). Reviewers would need to accept to basic communications with the journal for verification both of their review and their credentials. Reviewers who continuously approved poorly received articles would need to be dealt with, but it seems like it could maybe work more generally, and would be relatively easy (although less desirable) for more restricted groups (like limiting participants to a certain group of universities, etc). It would make for a certain amount of relatively fringe opinions being published, but it might help break the bottleneck, which after the elephant of prestige, is mainly about money to pay for the time of editorial staff.
- krastanov 5y agoGood journals already have some of these features, private or community driven. E.g. "Quantum Journal" is community driven, and while it lacks polish, it has a fairly functional editorial board. APS journals, which are much more polished (but also require submission and/or subscription fees), have pretty serious internal reviewer database (including editors evaluating the quality of the reviews).
- xipho 5y agoPeer review really not crowd-sourcable IMO. There is a general argument that an appeal to "free" labour is not sustainable, but it goes beyond that. At the highest levels of research in your area of specialty there are very few people who can provide useful feedback. These people tend to review each-other's work for the most pertinent facts (yes, somewhat circular but in my experience generally done well with good intention), other reviewers can chime in, but this might only address some of the more general things, like the stats in the method. Peer review is time-consuming, and you can easily burn-out on it if you accept. A recent journal had the model of "publish for free, just review 2 papers a year". It struggles to make it work. The only peer review that's relatively easy is when a paper is so terrible you out-right reject it, otherwise it's a lot of work. Making a stand as a PEER reviewer (I will only review for open-access journals) is not trivial either. At mid-level in your career you have many collaborators, and you're interested in their work, and the work of others in your field, and you want to make contributions. Almost certainly important work will come to you from Elsevier style journals. Almost certainly you'll want to say no, but you'll say yes.
- readingnews 5y agoI know it has been said before, but I think reading that (and I had to stop) as a series of tweets was akin to "Welcome to Hell. Please keep your arms and legs in the Hell vehicle at all times... unless you know, you want more Hell". Honestly, I thought Doctorow would do a blog or something. It is just too broken up.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cdoctorow 5y agoAll of my Twitter threads also appear as blog posts: Here's this one: https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#cornucopia-concordance https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#cornucopi... It's also available as a Mastodon thread: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/107179959514393968 https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/107179959514393968 And an ad-free, tracker-free, libre newsletter: https://mail.flarn.com/pipermail/plura-list/2021-October/000499.html https://mail.flarn.com/pipermail/plura-list/2021-October/000... It's also mirrored to Medium: https://doctorow.medium.com/all-of-science-gets-a-general-index-7bd53990fee1 https://doctorow.medium.com/all-of-science-gets-a-general-in... And Tumblr: https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/666303506776489984/all-of-science-gets-a-general-index https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/666303506776... There's also fulltext RSS: https://pluralistic.net/feed/ https://pluralistic.net/feed/ The text itself is licensed CC BY, so if none of those formats suit your taste, you can reformat it and republish it, and even charge money for it. ETA: Here's the methodology behind this: https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd and here's the rubric for it: https://doctorow.medium.com/dead-letters-73924aa19f9d https://doctorow.medium.com/dead-letters-73924aa19f9d (also available as a podcast:) https://ia601408.us.archive.org/16/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_405/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_405_-_Dead_Letters.mp3 https://ia601408.us.archive.org/16/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podca...
- jvanderbot 5y agoTrue, but one nitpick. In my field you can post the paper on your website and send copies to anyone who asks. Publication provides vetting. And posting on Arxiv is generally acceptable. (robotics, space, computer science)
- wly_cdgr 5y agoHuzzah. Anything that fucks these journals up the ass even a lil is A+
- xibalba 5y agoSci-Hub is accepting crypto donations.
- john_moscow 5y agoAs much as I hate the copyright model used by the scientific journals, they do have a valid raison-d-etre. It's about prioritization due to limited capacity. If you artificially limit the number of published articles to X per month, you are forced to pick X best ones (according to whichever metric you choose). If you just publish anything that gets a decent peer review score, you'll get voting rings, generated articles, and all sorts of junk. Has anybody noticed how the quality of journalism plummeted with the transition from physical copies (that had an implied limit on the number of articles) to the online "portals" (that are incentivized to churn out as much clickbait as possible)? That said, the financial streams should go the other way. Pay a non-refundable fee to get considered for publishing, but otherwise if it's a tax-funded research, it must be public domain.
- senderista 5y agoThat’s not how it really works in many fields. Most of CS doesn’t care about journals, just conferences, and physics and other hard sciences rely primarily on the arXiv. Meritocracy survives just fine without journals.
- davidgay 5y agoAnd conferences also have limited capacity - arguably more son than journals, that could just choose to add more pages.
- armoredkitten 5y agoI would love to see journal editors transition into more of a "curatorial" role. Journals as publishing outlets don't need to exist anymore. The arXiv and other preprint services (e.g., Open Science Framework) have solved the online publishing part of the equation. But you're right -- when anyone can publish anything, the bar gets really low, really fast. Journals could still play a valuable role as curators, by (a) providing peer review, and (b) creating curated lists of arXiv/OSF papers that meet their standards and interests. I really feel like what's missing are the second-layer solutions on top of arXiv that help to sift through the massive amounts of information -- that can include recommendation algorithms, but it could also include the experts that currently serve as editors for major journals. We don't need to cut out journals, we need to cut out the for-profit publishers.
- ncmncm 5y agoIt is not, in fact, required to sign over copyright to even the most "prestigious" journals. All they need is a non-exclusive license to publish. But they will never, ever tell you so. Universities could help by openly forbidding professors and students from signing over copyright to journals. But they don't.
- rscho 5y ago"software devs could easily correct the privacy problem by not working at Facebook or Google, only they choose not to because they don't care." This pov is ridiculous. The same goes for the academic equivalent.
- gidorah 5y agoIn what respect is it ridiculous? That devs have no choice but working there, or that it would correct the privacy problem?
- austinjp 5y agoI find it ridiculous because it simplifies the problem, thereby making constructive conversation about realistic solutions more difficult.
- gidorah 5y agoI suppose you have to start somewhere with simplifying the problem, otherwise it's too huge. I would assume that most devs would have a choice about where not to work. If one doesn't care about privacy, it's a lot easier to work for big tech.
- mumblemumble 5y agoThis meme of simplifying it down to a problem of individual personal responsibility, though, strikes me as being a lot like the "rational agent" simplification in economics. It's commonsense, easy to understand, elegant, and completely fails to line up with how things actually work in the real world.
- gidorah 5y agoI totally get it. It's kind of like climate change, there's only so far that individual responsibility goes. If you want to make a proper difference there would need to be a huge amount of legislation, and regulation. That doesn't stop people making choices about what fuel powers their car, or whether or not to recycle.
- amcoastal 5y agoJust got some peer reviews back on a paper I submitted today --- 2 of the 3 were nonsense and clearly barely read the paper. My faith in peer review falls year over year every time I go through this process. Hard to blame the anti-intellectual crowd after seeing how bullshit the process is 1st hand.
- cromulent 5y agoSlightly off topic, but known scammer Robert Maxwell (father of Ghislaine Maxwell) had a major hand in building up the international operations of Springer after WW2 into Pergamon Press (now part of Elsevier). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/02/13/the-rise-and-falls-of-robert-maxwell https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2021/02/13/the-rise...
- ketzu 5y agoIn my opinion, scientific publishing sells prestige. Every "you could simply..." distruption that assumes it is only about getting people to have access to the paper won't work.
- dwheeler 5y agoOne partial solution: if the paper is academic research primarily funded by the government, it must be posted to the internet and available at no charge to the public. The nih already does something like this. A variant would be to eliminate copyright on such works. That would take longer to do, but it would allow people to read the results of past work they indirectly paid for. There is no reason that companies like Elsevier, who do not pay for the research, should have exclusive rights to their results.
- civilized 5y agoI love the NIH. Whenever I want a medical paper, I find the NIH version. No need to go to some paywalled version with absolutely no value added.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- cblconfederate 5y agoI think people should draw parallels between sci.publishing and social media. They also ask unpaid individuals to publish their writings, then ask other unpaid individuals to review and rank them, then use their algorithms to editorialize and pick the ones they like and then make exorbitant profits. Some of then like youtube will subsidize that with increasingly dwindling payouts , but overall it is a scam based on monetizing content created for free by clueless individuals. Participating in unpaid social media should be considered an equally extortionate thing to do.
- dynm 5y agoLots of posts here from academics saying they need to publish in non open-access journals. I appreciate that. But, a modest proposal: Don't review for non open-access journals. That's really all it would take.
- Robotbeat 5y agoI’ve decided to do that right now. My voluntary time is very scarce. I will not voluntarily give it to someone putting a toll on work done almost entirely without compensation (or to be precise, the toll goes to pay the wage of almost no one but the toll taker… the researchers—who also are reviewers—are paid to do the science and disseminate it to the public, a purpose which is compromised by the toll).
- danaris 5y agoUnfortunately, being a reviewer is also an expected—which is to say, required—part of an academic's career. And depending on the particular field or subfield they're in, there may not be sufficient opportunity to review for open-access journals. The solution is to mandate open access.
- ncmncm 5y ago> being a reviewer is also [... a] required—part of an academic's career. Everyone says this. But does reviewing actually count toward your evaluation? Everyone says not.
- m12k 5y agoIt's mind-boggling to me that something as nebulous and tradition-over-proof-oriented as the concept of a "prestigious journal" still gets to be the centerpiece of the functioning of the entire scientific community. I get that we need some way to measure "scientific success" when awarding grants and tenure, and published articles fit that bill. Which means we need a way to validate "real" journals to avoid abuse. But the fact that it's something as vague as "prestige" or "respect" that is the defining characteristic of those journals, I don't get that at all, not in this day and age. It's not "has process X, Y and Z in place to make sure their articles are up to snuff" (e.g. "original data is available for independent review"). It's not "has their processes audited by independent agency A". No, it's just "brand value", it's "they've been doing this for a while, and a lot of people believe in them, so we'll just take on faith that whatever they're doing is good enough". How very scientific...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- lambdatronics 5y agoPreach! I really like the idea of post-publication peer review - we need a way to unbundle the different functions that publishers are serving (basic quality checking, filtering based on someone's guess at the ultimate merit/value of the research, archiving, standardized formatting...).
- evancoop 5y agoTL/DR. Taxpayers fund research that they cannot access without additional payment. Same thing almost occurred with weather data (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-14/trump-s-pick-to-lead-weather-agency-spent-30-years-fighting-it https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-14/trump-s-p...) Simply a system with broken incentives (publish in these longstanding journals or perish), a system designed to exploit those incentives (pay us to publish in the aforementioned journals), and a group of humans who have little personal incentive to stick their necks out (e.g. grad students and professors).