9 ms·

It 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 (th

It 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 ago
When 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 ago
Nah. 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 ago
In 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.
- xtracto 5y ago
  One of the last papers I "published" when I was in academia I just uploaded to Arxiv. I was so disenfranchised with research/academia that I didn't make the effort to polish the manuscript to submit ot to a peer reviewed journal. This paper had 9 citations the last time I checked. Which I found pleasant.
  - civilized 5y ago
    The fact that publishing on the arXiv works so well, even with minimal institutional support or prestige, just goes to show how very possible it is to do all publishing free and open-access. There's just no incentive for anyone in this system to stop fleecing the taxpayer.
refurb 5y ago
This. The academics could easily solve this by publishing elsewhere. Of course that would require researchers to be judged by something other that impact factor. At an extreme it’s like saying the Nobel Prize committee is a scam - they offer nothing of value beyond prestige yet scientists are beholden to try and impress them. To me this is just people trying to have their cake and eat it too - they want prestigious journals to publish in, but they also want them to be free (for author and public) and easier to publish in.
- civilized 5y ago
  In some areas of math the editorial team has defected for precisely the reasons Doctorow states and founded their own journal. The old journal just recruits a new team and keeps on trucking on the strength of its name. Some academics start submitting to the new journal out of agreement with the mission of freeing publishing, but a lot keep submitting to the old journal because they don't care or even know if the public is being fleeced. The end result is two journals.
- anon946 5y ago
  Yes, the problem is one of collective action. A single, pre-tenure faculty member would be taking a significant risk to publish only in open-access venues. Thus, they don't, and the cycle continues.
  - lazyjeff 5y ago
    I don't think the choice is between a commercial publisher and open access venues. In fact, open access options are typically my least favorite, because they charge the authors to publish. Maybe the initial idea was good, but the term seems to be co-opted by publishers to basically mean "pay thousands of dollars to publish." Since I was a student, I've decided as a matter of principle never to submit to either, and been able to follow that principle all the way through tenure. Though I don't discourage external collaborators from submitting papers to those places, as this principle is more about my or my group's papers. Luckily, there's a couple other options that are very satisfying (and actually most common) in my subfield and most of CS: non-profit society publishers (e.g. ACM/IEEE), or self-publishing (arXiv or your own homepage). I've done both for each of my papers, and haven't felt like I missed anything. I've also declined reviewing for commercial publishers for a while now, and it makes me very happy to have a great excuse to decline.
kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
All it takes is some influential university systems to put together an open access system or adopt an existing one and mandate their staff use it. Corporate U unfortunately has more pressing concerns than the academic process.
DC-3 5y ago
It's a difficult coordination problem. I wouldn't be so quick to ascribe malice.
- anon946 5y ago
  Definitely no malice. You could start an open-access journal and claim that it will be as selective and prestigious as Nature. But where are your initial papers going to come from? Can you get enough people to submit their Nature-level paper to your journal?
  - pvaldes 5y ago
    Acta Vertebrata closed exactly for this
- civilized 5y ago
  It's not malice. Academics just lack interest in improving a system when that improvement doesn't immediately benefit them. There are much more difficult coordination problems that people are at least making some progress on, like fighting climate change. This is because a lot of people care about not letting the planet overheat, including the powerful. But academics largely don't care if their research is easily accessible to anyone who isn't citing them or on their tenure committee.
  - ethanbond 5y ago
    There’s a burgeoning open access movement. Arguably successful, but let’s not act like people aren’t trying. Not to mention preprint servers and various other “nod and wink” mechanisms scientists use to free their own work.
    - civilized 5y ago
      There are some academics who are passionate about this and make a real contribution, no question.
- jimmar 5y ago
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"there's no incentive for academics to save the taxpayer money by handling publishing themselves." They could also build the labs themselves, grow their food themselves, where does this end? The taxpayer's representatives couldn't spend two days thinking through where and how they are going to store and sort data coming out of the research they are funding. Well, someone did it for them (not even particularly well) and is now laughing on the way to the bank. Mind you, it's not like the researchers get a share of the profits, so your critique is very unfair. None of these journals even bother storing the actual data that came out of the research, so that you could check it statistically.
- civilized 5y ago
  > They could also build the labs themselves, grow their food themselves, where does this end? Professors can't build labs but they already run journals. They just don't care to take control from companies like Elsevier because they don't care who can access their research beyond other academics who might cite them or their tenure committee. Even though the barrier is very small, and the benefit to the public large, there is a lack of incentive to go over it. > Mind you, it's not like the researchers get a share of the profits, so your critique is very unfair. Of course they don't profit. They just don't care if the public is being overcharged for access to research the public paid for. They don't care that they could change that by putting forth a modest effort. I don't see how that's an unfair assessment.
  - swsieber 5y ago
    As I understand the barrier is quite large requiring coordinated action or the death of many careers.
    - civilized 5y ago
      Nah. The editorial board of Nature could start their own open-access journal tomorrow, hosted on the arXiv or ResearchOne, and tell everyone that this is the real Nature they should submit to. And if most academics cared about the public having affordable access to research, they'd treat that new journal as the real Nature, impact factor and all. They just don't care. Not their wallets being squeezed. It's like, could Google change their domain name? Sure, it'd be a bit of a thing, but if they wanted to, they could and most people would follow them to the new domain. We know this is possible because some math journals where the board is passionate about open access have already done it.
nikitaga 5y ago
> academics could easily disrupt it I get it, this is Hacker News and we all disrupt five industries before breakfast, but this so out of touch it's not even funny. Old journals aren't going away just because a few academics decide to start a new unknown journal. Have you ever outcompeted a cartel that has 100 years and billions of dollars on you? Me neither. Maybe it's possible, but it's certainly neither easy nor as simple as you suggest. Academics are playing with their own and their students' careers by defying established journals. That's infinitely higher stakes than software devs taking VC money and failing only to use this experience as a piece on their resume for the next job. It shouldn't be that way, but fixing that is hard.
- avs733 5y ago
  I share the sentiment of your post but as an academic, I think you are wrong and the OP is right. The older academic generations have literally built this system and then no point to it as inherent and unable to be changed. They point to socially constructed parts of our faculty experience and claim that it 'is'. It is the truest example of stupid smart people I have ever experienced. it is fundamentally, laziness and self-interest. They complain about the system that they built - they complain about administrators, who are all either faculty or people brought in to do things faculty complained about doing or turned out to be wildly bad at. I'll give a couple specific examples: 1) Faculty development offices - faculty complain ENDLESSLY about faculty development offices and programs and staff. They feel they are interfering with The reality is they were created for a bunch of reasons - largely because the many faculty had stopped investing time in mentoring their peers, and when that did happen it was often wildly sexist and racist. So it got replaced with people trained to do the job well, overseen by faculty. Much of there work is on teaching faculty to teach - because faculty doing the hiring don't bother to evaluate candidates on that core competency. Now the faculty complain about 'bloat' and about the documentation that is generated. 2) IT - I worked at an institution where the faculty senate basically called a meeting to lambast the head of IT because the laptop specification suggested for students couldn't do [thing]. The head of IT shared the history of his office...it had been a faculty member's job (they had a teaching release to do the work) and no one wanted to do it, so they hired someone and setup a faculty oversight board, then they couldn't get any faculty to participate, so then they stopped the oversight board and just sent a survey of needs to all the faculty, they got almost no responses. So the IT person did their best. Faculty had control, complained about the work, and then complained that they weren't consulted. In prior generations, tenure and academic freedom were tools that enabled faculty to work collaboratively and collegially to run a good university. Several generations of faculty have transformed tenure into a reward for doing lots of research. Unsurprisingly, once it became a reward rather than a tool it gets abused...and faculty fight so hard for things that serve themselves at the expense of the university that they find themselves standing on the outside, in the cold, with their trophy, and presume someone is out to get them.
Hermitian909 5y ago
> academics could easily disrupt it and they (mostly) choose not to They could do it easily if they acted collectively. Individuals attempting to break free simply hurt themselves. Unfortunately, in the history of humanity collective action across a group containing tens of thousands of people, most complete strangers, has never been easy. I do agree the government should get involved as that's one of the main benefits of government: having a way to enforce collective action.
kergonath 5y ago
It’s easy: not publishing in recognised journals with a decent editorial board and good referees leads to my papers not being read. You say that I choose to publish there and you are partially right, in the same way that I choose to have a job and to eat. I do my part and put all the accepted manuscript for my articles that are not in an open access journal on a public repository (and ResearchGate). This is already a condition to get public funding, as it should be. I still cannot not publish in some subscription-based journals.
- civilized 5y ago
  I agree that individual academics can't change the system. But any given editorial board has it within its power to cut the publisher out of the deal and go open access. When they do, they are often successful. But mostly they choose not to try.
  - native_samples 5y ago
    That's not even the only alternative. There are lots, even if universities simply stopped publishing in journals entirely. 1. Academic promotions could be decided internally based on their own evaluation of the research quality, instead of by reference to external decisions. 2. Papers could be sold via the universities own website. 3. University departments could produce their own "journals" that consist only of their own papers and ask people who believe in the universities brand to subscribe to that. 4. Universities could instead patent everything they come up with and allocate promotions based on accrued patent revenue, with the papers being essentially readable adverts for the patent licensing programme, etc. There are lots of ways to incentivize good research that don't involve journals at all.
oefrha 5y ago
This is almost a textbook case of prisoner's dilemma, a psychology/game theory 101 student would know it isn't easy. Pretty shocking such a comically naive argument is upvoted to the top.
- canjobear 5y ago
  It's worse than a prisoner's dilemma. In a prisoner's dilemma, if both parties cooperate, then they get a higher joint reward. But when some academics cooperate to do something like make a new journal, they don't get any reward in terms of tenure/promotions, which depend 99% on publications in high quality venues as assessed by university-level entities and external reviewers.
bongoman37 5y ago
Having been in academia for longer than I should have stayed, I can say a few things about it. Academics aren't a monolith, and not all academics have the power to disrupt it, let alone easily. Moreover, the academics with the most power to disrupt it have the least incentive to and have been fully co-opted by the publishing industry, and are paid massive fees to keep the system going. It is not going to go down that easily.
franciscop 5y ago
Downvoted, as others noted, for the naivety of "could easily disrupt it". Upvoted for "Public domain publishing should be a condition of government funding for research", which I agree (and kinda contradicts the previous point, if the gvmt should intervene it means it's not so "easy")
austinjp 5y ago
While I take the point, and support dismantling the power structures within academic publishing, it's not helpful to dismiss the effort required as "easy". The pressures that are brought to bear within academia are extreme, including financial, reputational, professional, and more. This produces major incentives to work within the system. I'm not defending this, just pointing out the reality of the situation.
harry8 5y ago
>It would be a scam, except academics could easily disrupt it and they (mostly) choose not to. This is such bullshit. It's a scam. There is not qualification. If you think there are academics involved (make your case, provide evidence) they are in on the scam. It is still a scam. It remains a scam if your dog could stop it and chose not to. It remains a scam if Donald Trump. It remains a scam if Joe Biden. Go apportion blame for it all you like and it's a scam. The publishers perpetrating the scam are going to hell. Hopefully here on earth. Hopefully soon.
nuerow 5y ago
> It would be a scam, except academics could easily disrupt it and they (mostly) choose not to. Not only is your personal assertion wrong, its complete lack of understanding and awareness, coupled with the degree of arrogance and presumption, shows its patently and shockingly wrong. Without going into details, keep in mind that in academia there's this thing dubbed "publish or perish", and the only publishing that counts is the one being done in established publications with a history of high impact factor. The journals that count are specified by rules and regulations, which are often defined in legislation and comprised of a whitelist of established, often historical, and well-regarded journals. So unless your journal is already in the list and has a high impact factor, the whole world is pressured to not publish their A-game work in them. This leads to a feedback loop where incumbents are kept at the top of these metrics due to the fact that they are the only one that can receive works that count, and conversely no one who seeks to finish a PhD or secure tenure or get funding will waste their hard work on publications that do not count. Then there are other factors, like prestige. Everyone wishes to be invited to be a reviewer of, say, Nature, but no one wants wo waste their time reviewing publications to Bob's journal. It takes far more to put together a journal than a 5$/month instance in the cloud and an afternoon hacking WordPress.
- Mengkudulangsat 5y ago
  OK, so you guys are stuck. We get it. There is no need for this issue to be "solved" per se. Academia can keep up the charade with journals if it needs to, as long as the rest of us can obtain papers via SciHub, this grey status quo serves all parties just fine.
aragilar 5y ago
Apparently you haven't seen this (short summary: you cite a pre-print (anyone's, not just your own), no funding for you): https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/24/australian-research-council-under-pressure-after-funding-rule-angers-academic-community https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/24/australian... Funding agencies (which are generally controlled by government, not academia) could easily set the standard to be e.g. no subscription and $500 publishing fee (feel free to replace $500 with a reasonable amount, I think $500 is excessive, but it's much lower than current rates), as shown by the slow switch to Open Access, which has been driven by them.
- krull10 5y ago
  This indeed! In the US the fed government wastes massive amounts of grant money covering excessive publishing and open access fees. This could easily be restricted to a small max per article that must be accepted by any journal grant funded results will be published in. The journals would adapt.
chromatin 5y ago
> It would be a scam, except academics could easily disrupt it and they (mostly) choose not to. Oh really? Tell me more about how I can publish in journals with low or nonexistanet (conventional) impact factors and still meet my department’s promotion criteria, or convince an NIH review panel that my publication has high impact, visibility, and citation metrics. Your post presupposes that the solution is so simple when in fact the whole system is perversely incentivized, tragedy of the commons style, and that there isn’t some game theory all locking us in to place.
burntoutfire 5y ago
> 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. The scam goes further. Most of published papers are basically of no interest to nobody, or nobody except the few uberspecialists in a given field, which intend to use them as input for producing more papers of the same kind. We're paying billions to produce literally useless knowledge. In the past, there was always hope that the scientists can stumble upon breakthorughs in their work, but in today's environment, everybody has to derisk their research to stay in the game - so that's not going to happen. It's hard to tell why we do continue with a lot of research exactly. One of the arguments I heard was that the knowledge is mostly in the heads of practitioners (i.e. it's impossible to recreate state of the art based on just papers and textbooks alone), so we always want to have a few experts around in case the knowledge is needed in the future. In this model, the scientists are predominantly custodians of existing knowledge and not creators of new one.

chakkepolja 5y ago

When 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 ago

Nah. 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 ago

In 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.
xtracto 5y ago
One of the last papers I "published" when I was in academia I just uploaded to Arxiv. I was so disenfranchised with research/academia that I didn't make the effort to polish the manuscript to submit ot to a peer reviewed journal. This paper had 9 citations the last time I checked. Which I found pleasant.
- civilized 5y ago
  The fact that publishing on the arXiv works so well, even with minimal institutional support or prestige, just goes to show how very possible it is to do all publishing free and open-access. There's just no incentive for anyone in this system to stop fleecing the taxpayer.

refurb 5y ago

This. The academics could easily solve this by publishing elsewhere. Of course that would require researchers to be judged by something other that impact factor. At an extreme it’s like saying the Nobel Prize committee is a scam - they offer nothing of value beyond prestige yet scientists are beholden to try and impress them. To me this is just people trying to have their cake and eat it too - they want prestigious journals to publish in, but they also want them to be free (for author and public) and easier to publish in.

civilized 5y ago
In some areas of math the editorial team has defected for precisely the reasons Doctorow states and founded their own journal. The old journal just recruits a new team and keeps on trucking on the strength of its name. Some academics start submitting to the new journal out of agreement with the mission of freeing publishing, but a lot keep submitting to the old journal because they don't care or even know if the public is being fleeced. The end result is two journals.
anon946 5y ago
Yes, the problem is one of collective action. A single, pre-tenure faculty member would be taking a significant risk to publish only in open-access venues. Thus, they don't, and the cycle continues.
- lazyjeff 5y ago
  I don't think the choice is between a commercial publisher and open access venues. In fact, open access options are typically my least favorite, because they charge the authors to publish. Maybe the initial idea was good, but the term seems to be co-opted by publishers to basically mean "pay thousands of dollars to publish." Since I was a student, I've decided as a matter of principle never to submit to either, and been able to follow that principle all the way through tenure. Though I don't discourage external collaborators from submitting papers to those places, as this principle is more about my or my group's papers. Luckily, there's a couple other options that are very satisfying (and actually most common) in my subfield and most of CS: non-profit society publishers (e.g. ACM/IEEE), or self-publishing (arXiv or your own homepage). I've done both for each of my papers, and haven't felt like I missed anything. I've also declined reviewing for commercial publishers for a while now, and it makes me very happy to have a great excuse to decline.

kevin_thibedeau 5y ago

All it takes is some influential university systems to put together an open access system or adopt an existing one and mandate their staff use it. Corporate U unfortunately has more pressing concerns than the academic process.

DC-3 5y ago

It's a difficult coordination problem. I wouldn't be so quick to ascribe malice.

anon946 5y ago
Definitely no malice. You could start an open-access journal and claim that it will be as selective and prestigious as Nature. But where are your initial papers going to come from? Can you get enough people to submit their Nature-level paper to your journal?
- pvaldes 5y ago
  Acta Vertebrata closed exactly for this
civilized 5y ago
It's not malice. Academics just lack interest in improving a system when that improvement doesn't immediately benefit them. There are much more difficult coordination problems that people are at least making some progress on, like fighting climate change. This is because a lot of people care about not letting the planet overheat, including the powerful. But academics largely don't care if their research is easily accessible to anyone who isn't citing them or on their tenure committee.
- ethanbond 5y ago
  There’s a burgeoning open access movement. Arguably successful, but let’s not act like people aren’t trying. Not to mention preprint servers and various other “nod and wink” mechanisms scientists use to free their own work.
  - civilized 5y ago
    There are some academics who are passionate about this and make a real contribution, no question.
jimmar 5y ago

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

"there's no incentive for academics to save the taxpayer money by handling publishing themselves." They could also build the labs themselves, grow their food themselves, where does this end? The taxpayer's representatives couldn't spend two days thinking through where and how they are going to store and sort data coming out of the research they are funding. Well, someone did it for them (not even particularly well) and is now laughing on the way to the bank. Mind you, it's not like the researchers get a share of the profits, so your critique is very unfair. None of these journals even bother storing the actual data that came out of the research, so that you could check it statistically.

civilized 5y ago
> They could also build the labs themselves, grow their food themselves, where does this end? Professors can't build labs but they already run journals. They just don't care to take control from companies like Elsevier because they don't care who can access their research beyond other academics who might cite them or their tenure committee. Even though the barrier is very small, and the benefit to the public large, there is a lack of incentive to go over it. > Mind you, it's not like the researchers get a share of the profits, so your critique is very unfair. Of course they don't profit. They just don't care if the public is being overcharged for access to research the public paid for. They don't care that they could change that by putting forth a modest effort. I don't see how that's an unfair assessment.
- swsieber 5y ago
  As I understand the barrier is quite large requiring coordinated action or the death of many careers.
  - civilized 5y ago
    Nah. The editorial board of Nature could start their own open-access journal tomorrow, hosted on the arXiv or ResearchOne, and tell everyone that this is the real Nature they should submit to. And if most academics cared about the public having affordable access to research, they'd treat that new journal as the real Nature, impact factor and all. They just don't care. Not their wallets being squeezed. It's like, could Google change their domain name? Sure, it'd be a bit of a thing, but if they wanted to, they could and most people would follow them to the new domain. We know this is possible because some math journals where the board is passionate about open access have already done it.

nikitaga 5y ago

> academics could easily disrupt it I get it, this is Hacker News and we all disrupt five industries before breakfast, but this so out of touch it's not even funny. Old journals aren't going away just because a few academics decide to start a new unknown journal. Have you ever outcompeted a cartel that has 100 years and billions of dollars on you? Me neither. Maybe it's possible, but it's certainly neither easy nor as simple as you suggest. Academics are playing with their own and their students' careers by defying established journals. That's infinitely higher stakes than software devs taking VC money and failing only to use this experience as a piece on their resume for the next job. It shouldn't be that way, but fixing that is hard.

avs733 5y ago
I share the sentiment of your post but as an academic, I think you are wrong and the OP is right. The older academic generations have literally built this system and then no point to it as inherent and unable to be changed. They point to socially constructed parts of our faculty experience and claim that it 'is'. It is the truest example of stupid smart people I have ever experienced. it is fundamentally, laziness and self-interest. They complain about the system that they built - they complain about administrators, who are all either faculty or people brought in to do things faculty complained about doing or turned out to be wildly bad at. I'll give a couple specific examples: 1) Faculty development offices - faculty complain ENDLESSLY about faculty development offices and programs and staff. They feel they are interfering with The reality is they were created for a bunch of reasons - largely because the many faculty had stopped investing time in mentoring their peers, and when that did happen it was often wildly sexist and racist. So it got replaced with people trained to do the job well, overseen by faculty. Much of there work is on teaching faculty to teach - because faculty doing the hiring don't bother to evaluate candidates on that core competency. Now the faculty complain about 'bloat' and about the documentation that is generated. 2) IT - I worked at an institution where the faculty senate basically called a meeting to lambast the head of IT because the laptop specification suggested for students couldn't do [thing]. The head of IT shared the history of his office...it had been a faculty member's job (they had a teaching release to do the work) and no one wanted to do it, so they hired someone and setup a faculty oversight board, then they couldn't get any faculty to participate, so then they stopped the oversight board and just sent a survey of needs to all the faculty, they got almost no responses. So the IT person did their best. Faculty had control, complained about the work, and then complained that they weren't consulted. In prior generations, tenure and academic freedom were tools that enabled faculty to work collaboratively and collegially to run a good university. Several generations of faculty have transformed tenure into a reward for doing lots of research. Unsurprisingly, once it became a reward rather than a tool it gets abused...and faculty fight so hard for things that serve themselves at the expense of the university that they find themselves standing on the outside, in the cold, with their trophy, and presume someone is out to get them.

Hermitian909 5y ago

> academics could easily disrupt it and they (mostly) choose not to They could do it easily if they acted collectively. Individuals attempting to break free simply hurt themselves. Unfortunately, in the history of humanity collective action across a group containing tens of thousands of people, most complete strangers, has never been easy. I do agree the government should get involved as that's one of the main benefits of government: having a way to enforce collective action.

kergonath 5y ago

It’s easy: not publishing in recognised journals with a decent editorial board and good referees leads to my papers not being read. You say that I choose to publish there and you are partially right, in the same way that I choose to have a job and to eat. I do my part and put all the accepted manuscript for my articles that are not in an open access journal on a public repository (and ResearchGate). This is already a condition to get public funding, as it should be. I still cannot not publish in some subscription-based journals.

civilized 5y ago
I agree that individual academics can't change the system. But any given editorial board has it within its power to cut the publisher out of the deal and go open access. When they do, they are often successful. But mostly they choose not to try.
- native_samples 5y ago
  That's not even the only alternative. There are lots, even if universities simply stopped publishing in journals entirely. 1. Academic promotions could be decided internally based on their own evaluation of the research quality, instead of by reference to external decisions. 2. Papers could be sold via the universities own website. 3. University departments could produce their own "journals" that consist only of their own papers and ask people who believe in the universities brand to subscribe to that. 4. Universities could instead patent everything they come up with and allocate promotions based on accrued patent revenue, with the papers being essentially readable adverts for the patent licensing programme, etc. There are lots of ways to incentivize good research that don't involve journals at all.

oefrha 5y ago

This is almost a textbook case of prisoner's dilemma, a psychology/game theory 101 student would know it isn't easy. Pretty shocking such a comically naive argument is upvoted to the top.

canjobear 5y ago
It's worse than a prisoner's dilemma. In a prisoner's dilemma, if both parties cooperate, then they get a higher joint reward. But when some academics cooperate to do something like make a new journal, they don't get any reward in terms of tenure/promotions, which depend 99% on publications in high quality venues as assessed by university-level entities and external reviewers.

bongoman37 5y ago

Having been in academia for longer than I should have stayed, I can say a few things about it. Academics aren't a monolith, and not all academics have the power to disrupt it, let alone easily. Moreover, the academics with the most power to disrupt it have the least incentive to and have been fully co-opted by the publishing industry, and are paid massive fees to keep the system going. It is not going to go down that easily.

franciscop 5y ago

Downvoted, as others noted, for the naivety of "could easily disrupt it". Upvoted for "Public domain publishing should be a condition of government funding for research", which I agree (and kinda contradicts the previous point, if the gvmt should intervene it means it's not so "easy")

austinjp 5y ago

While I take the point, and support dismantling the power structures within academic publishing, it's not helpful to dismiss the effort required as "easy". The pressures that are brought to bear within academia are extreme, including financial, reputational, professional, and more. This produces major incentives to work within the system. I'm not defending this, just pointing out the reality of the situation.

harry8 5y ago

>It would be a scam, except academics could easily disrupt it and they (mostly) choose not to. This is such bullshit. It's a scam. There is not qualification. If you think there are academics involved (make your case, provide evidence) they are in on the scam. It is still a scam. It remains a scam if your dog could stop it and chose not to. It remains a scam if Donald Trump. It remains a scam if Joe Biden. Go apportion blame for it all you like and it's a scam. The publishers perpetrating the scam are going to hell. Hopefully here on earth. Hopefully soon.

nuerow 5y ago

> It would be a scam, except academics could easily disrupt it and they (mostly) choose not to. Not only is your personal assertion wrong, its complete lack of understanding and awareness, coupled with the degree of arrogance and presumption, shows its patently and shockingly wrong. Without going into details, keep in mind that in academia there's this thing dubbed "publish or perish", and the only publishing that counts is the one being done in established publications with a history of high impact factor. The journals that count are specified by rules and regulations, which are often defined in legislation and comprised of a whitelist of established, often historical, and well-regarded journals. So unless your journal is already in the list and has a high impact factor, the whole world is pressured to not publish their A-game work in them. This leads to a feedback loop where incumbents are kept at the top of these metrics due to the fact that they are the only one that can receive works that count, and conversely no one who seeks to finish a PhD or secure tenure or get funding will waste their hard work on publications that do not count. Then there are other factors, like prestige. Everyone wishes to be invited to be a reviewer of, say, Nature, but no one wants wo waste their time reviewing publications to Bob's journal. It takes far more to put together a journal than a 5$/month instance in the cloud and an afternoon hacking WordPress.

Mengkudulangsat 5y ago
OK, so you guys are stuck. We get it. There is no need for this issue to be "solved" per se. Academia can keep up the charade with journals if it needs to, as long as the rest of us can obtain papers via SciHub, this grey status quo serves all parties just fine.

aragilar 5y ago

Apparently you haven't seen this (short summary: you cite a pre-print (anyone's, not just your own), no funding for you): https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/24/australian-research-council-under-pressure-after-funding-rule-angers-academic-community https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/aug/24/australian... Funding agencies (which are generally controlled by government, not academia) could easily set the standard to be e.g. no subscription and $500 publishing fee (feel free to replace $500 with a reasonable amount, I think $500 is excessive, but it's much lower than current rates), as shown by the slow switch to Open Access, which has been driven by them.

krull10 5y ago
This indeed! In the US the fed government wastes massive amounts of grant money covering excessive publishing and open access fees. This could easily be restricted to a small max per article that must be accepted by any journal grant funded results will be published in. The journals would adapt.

chromatin 5y ago

> It would be a scam, except academics could easily disrupt it and they (mostly) choose not to. Oh really? Tell me more about how I can publish in journals with low or nonexistanet (conventional) impact factors and still meet my department’s promotion criteria, or convince an NIH review panel that my publication has high impact, visibility, and citation metrics. Your post presupposes that the solution is so simple when in fact the whole system is perversely incentivized, tragedy of the commons style, and that there isn’t some game theory all locking us in to place.

burntoutfire 5y ago

> 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. The scam goes further. Most of published papers are basically of no interest to nobody, or nobody except the few uberspecialists in a given field, which intend to use them as input for producing more papers of the same kind. We're paying billions to produce literally useless knowledge. In the past, there was always hope that the scientists can stumble upon breakthorughs in their work, but in today's environment, everybody has to derisk their research to stay in the game - so that's not going to happen. It's hard to tell why we do continue with a lot of research exactly. One of the arguments I heard was that the knowledge is mostly in the heads of practitioners (i.e. it's impossible to recreate state of the art based on just papers and textbooks alone), so we always want to have a few experts around in case the knowledge is needed in the future. In this model, the scientists are predominantly custodians of existing knowledge and not creators of new one.