21 ms·

How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

321 points by sasvari 15y ago

jgrahamc 15y ago
Reminds me of the time I wanted to read Chadwick's 1932 paper "Possible Existence of a Neutron" in which he mentioned the discovery of the neutron. http://blog.jgc.org/2008/09/dear-nature.html http://blog.jgc.org/2008/09/dear-nature.html
- dcminter 15y ago
  Academic publishing seems to be messed up but I'm not sure this is a good demonstration of that. Of the three links that you cite to online copies two no longer link to the article. So while your $32 doesn't buy you anything you can't already get elsewhere the availability (at a price) from Nature does at least supply a degree of permanence to the article. That may be more important with less prominent items.
  - jordanb 15y ago
    The illegality (or quazi-illegality in the case of the links from the edu sites) of the mirrors is what's keeping them from being hosted permanently on a free site. If the copyrights were clear, there would be repositories like arxiv.org that would ensure high-availability free access. The paper isn't on arxiv.org currently because Nature uses its copyright to ensure that it's not.
jpallen 15y ago
> The reason is that the big publishers have rounded up the journals with the highest academic impact factors, in which publication is essential for researchers trying to secure grants and advance their careers(16). You can start reading open-access journals, but you can’t stop reading the closed ones. This is the only problem standing in the way of open access publishing. While the arXiv doesn't offer peer review and so doesn't negate the need for journals, the ecosystem would quickly adapt to open peer review. Unfortunately the implied reputation of being published in certain journals is still something that's too ingrained in academia. It's getting better slowly but it's going to take at least a generation to go away at the current rate.
- cstross 15y ago
  Unfortunately the implied reputation of being published in certain journals is still something that's too ingrained in academia. It's worse than that: this isn't just a matter of old fogies (who will eventually retire) clinging to out-moded ways. The problem is, academic career progression is dependent on publication. And these days, it's also contingent on citations. Your work is more likely to be cited if it's in a prominent journal. So by gaining a lock on the high academic impact publications, the big publishers have got a stranglehold on the career ladder.
  - deleted 15y ago
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- bedris 15y ago
  ... the ecosystem would quickly adapt to open peer review A reviewer's comments and critiques of a scientific manuscript often say as much, or more, about the reviewer than they do about the work. The current system should definitely be made more transparent and papers should be more freely available, especially those funded by public money, but there are currently plenty of avenues to openly comment on a piece of work (letters to the editor, blogs, journal website forums, opinion pieces, review articles, conference talks, positive or negative references in future publications, etc.) Experiments are easy to propose, which makes finding faults and requesting more work from authors quite easy to do for reviewers. That's why, if a paper passes muster with 2-3 qualified reviewers, it should be allowed to be published, and additional criticisms can go through the existing channels I mentioned above. An open peer-review system, if I am imagining it correctly from the above poster's description, could turn into a three-ring circus, and scientists would waste unimaginable amounts of time defending every comment levied against their work instead of working on new projects. I don't think that the methods of scientific review or discourse are broken. What needs to be fixed are issues of accessibility and transparency.
  - jpallen 15y ago
    I didn't have a specific system in mind for 'open peer review'. I just meant that while peer review only happens through journals at the moment it doesn't depend on them in any fundamental way. The reputation attached to them does.
retube 15y ago
Yes this is a problem. Occasionally I have to to resort to emailing authors directly and asking for a copy of the paper - in most cases they have been obliging. As far as I am concerned publicly funded research papers should (must) be freely available. If the public are funding it then the public has a right to the fruits of this investment. And newspapers must be able to link to or reference a source when they quote or review academic literature (in fact I think it should be law that they have to). A very simple solution would be for authors or institutions to make copies freely available on their websites. I can only assume that they are not allowed to, due to copyright imposed by the journals. It's ironic that the invention of the www was driven by the need for an easy way to freely distribute and share academic literature. P.S. There's also a strong case for privately funded research to be made public too. Companies who make product claims based on privately funded research for example absolutely must make this research ("research") available for the public to review. It is notoriously hard to get pharma firms to cough up the papers which support their claims for the latest wonder drug.
- nagrom 15y ago
  In a lot of cases, you can find the pre-print of the paper on arXiv.org (at least that's the case for my field of nuclear and particle physics.) Copyright imposed by journals is an odd beast, since I think few people subscribe to them directly. Mostly, their money comes from academic institutions and unlike consumer-focused organisations like the RIAA, the journals won't usually go after the little guy. All that being said, the IoP's previously open-access journal JHEP in which my collaboration typically published our papers was bought by Springer last year. I don't know how their open-access policy has been affected by that.
  - retube 15y ago
    ha I'm a particle physicist by training :) I was going to add to my comment that in my (ex-) field I'm pretty sure that papers were/are freely available on the CERN websites, as well as arXiv.org.
  - jpallen 15y ago
    I recently published in JHEP and when I tried to view my paper outside the university I was greeted with a pay wall :(. They wanted the going rate of about £30. All of my research to date and the work in that paper has been funded by the UK taxpayer. There is something very wrong with that.
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dctoedt 15y ago
One possible disrupter is the open-access model used by the Social Science Research Network, http://www.ssrn.com http://www.ssrn.com, which was founded in 1994 and seems to be extensively used in the legal academic community. SSRN makes posted PDFs available for free download. The Wikipedia entry says that "In economics, and to some degree in law (especially in the field of law and economics), almost all papers are now first published as preprints on SSRN and/or on other paper distribution networks such as RePEc before being submitted to an academic journal." Quality and prestige metrics: SSRN ranks posted papers by number of downloads, and it also compiles citation lists---if I successfully find Paper X at SSRN, I can look up which other SSRN-available papers have cited Paper X. (Sounds like a job for Google's PageRank algorithm, no?) According to SSRN's FAQ, it's produced by an independent privately held corporation. I assume that means they're a for-profit company. I don't know how they make their money, other than that they will sell you a printed hard copy of a paper, presumably print-on-demand.
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  From that same SSRN FAQ page, http://www.ssrn.com/update/general/ssrn_faq.html http://www.ssrn.com/update/general/ssrn_faq.html: "We have entered into a variety of relationships with the publishers to provide access to their fee-based research through the SSRN eLibrary. These papers are identified by this icon: Incl. Fee Electronic Paper (a red dog-eared page with a "$"). If you are purchasing a fee-based paper, you will click the 'Add to Cart' link and be linked to your Shopping Cart." So they run as affiliates for paid-for papers. They also run a job listings service. You noted already the ability to get a printed and bound copy of a paper on demand. Edit: without looking in detail it seems those running the service are probably supported by academic institutions [for other work that they do?].
impendia 15y ago
But surely, one might think, that some of the price goes to offset the expensive costs of peer review? The author neglected to mention that peer reviewers work for free, and that the editorial boards are also made up of scholars who work for next to nothing. (edit: see reply below, this was in the article and I missed it) It used to be that it fell to the publishers to typeset the articles, but with the advent of TeX they don't have to do that either. (in my field anyway) Speaking as an academic, these companies do nothing for us. The sooner we agree on an alternative model which doesn't go through them, the better.
- RyanMcGreal 15y ago
  FTA: > Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the academic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free.
- rmc 15y ago
  Speaking as an academic, these companies do nothing for us Start the revolution at home. Put PDFs on your university website. Ask your collegues to do likewise, ask the rest of university to do likewise. Start the ball rolling.
  - impendia 15y ago
    I do. But I also publish them in expensive journals, because senior people have told me this is good for my career. Once I get tenure (knock on wood), I intend to be more selective about which journals I publish in.
  - starwed 15y ago
    That doesn't really fulfill the "quality signal" aspect of journals, though -- the replacement would be some sort of open journal that still had peer review. There was an Elsevier math journal where the entire editorial staff got fed up, quit, and then simply founded a new journal on the same subject. That's the sort of thing most likely to bring the big journals down, not self publication by individuals. (Well, that or direct government intervention.)
rizumu 15y ago
This is in line with the True Cost Economics Manifesto: http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/truecosteconomics/sign http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/truecosteconomics/sign
- rmc 15y ago
  I cannot see how a critique of mainstream economics is relevant to the fact that most scientific journals is very expensive.
RyanMcGreal 15y ago
A professor emeritus recently sent me an article to publish on my web magazine. The turnaround time was around 18 hours and he replied to express his surprise at how quickly his piece was published. In contrast, he has had an article pending at an academic journal for three years now.
- jessriedel 15y ago
  Usually this kind of long turn-around time is because it is held up by the referees, not the actual publishing process. That process is too slow (sometimes as much as a few months, but usually more like a few weeks), but it's not 3-years slow.
- thesteamboat 15y ago
  This varies greatly by field. In theoretical computer science, most conferences have turnaround times on the order of 3 months or so.
rmc 15y ago
University libraries are still mostly money grabbers aswell, but are slowly changing. In the 1830s Ireland was mapped to a great detail (for tax purposes) of 1:6500ish. These maps would still be very helpful for OpenStreetMap, and are obviously outside copyright. A few Irish universities have them (e.g. Trinity Map Library, a copyright deposit library for Ireland & the UK), however they charge €50,000ish for a copy of the digitial scans of the full set. Other libraries are similar. Universities really are not pro-sharing
- pbhjpbhj 15y ago
  Presumably somewhere like the British Library has the scans for the maps on disk. They're a government institution aren't they so would a Freedom of Information Act demand supposedly liberate that data ... just a thought. When I'm Prime Minister I'll instigate a government run academic library as the repository for all data originating from tax paid research with free access for individuals and paid access for profit yielding institutions; something along those lines anyway.
  - rmc 15y ago
    These maps are usually on microfiche. Freedom of Information is a good idea, however the orignals are out of copyright (being 150+ years old). Just scanning a page of a book isn't a creative work, and hence you technically can't claim copyright on it again. Some mapping agencies like the Ordnance Survey of Ireland who have copies, scan and then join images up together, and rectify them so they work on google maps. This 'stitching & rectifiying' is a creative act, and hence they can (and do!) claim copyright on the new item. So this map from 1833 is Copyright 2008 OSi. :( However a lot of libraries claim copyright on just a straight scan, even though they can't really. A FoI would get you the map, but probably something with a copyright symbol on the corner. If you want to use them (for OpenStreetMap tracing) the onus is now on you to prove you can. In short, they don't want to share them out to everyone. :(
    - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
      >This 'stitching & rectifiying' is a creative act, and hence they can (and do!) claim copyright on the new item. // I was trying to find the caselaw on a related point the other day. I remember there being something to do with, I think the British Museum or similar, taking high res scans of old paintings and claiming a renewed copyright term on that then ferreting away the original. Do you have caselaw to cite? AFAIR the act is supposed to be transformative to create a new work, stitching doesn't appear to be tranformative to me. However I also seem to recall the the "sweat of the brow" argument was made to support a new copyright in high res scans, that a large amount of work had been done and that this somehow earned them a new right. It seems this sort of manoeuvring is within the letter of the law but not at all within the spirit of it. Very underhand for those who are supposed to be managing works owned by the country for the country itself using public money. If one can get a copy of the original then it could be leaked to wikileaks ... the onus is not on the copier to prove they have a right but on those suing to show that tortuous infringement has occurred. The demands of OpenStreetMap may be different however.
impendia 15y ago
I heard an interesting argument from my advisor (a very famous mathematician). I strongly disagree with it, but it is the only argument I have heard for keeping this system in place. His argument was the following: In many fields such as laboratory science, research is expensive; one has to apply for grants and then spend the money, and these departments have large budgets, and this all looks good to deans. If a department is going through a lot of money, then it must be prestigious, important, and doing good work. I heard a joke once that mathematicians are the second-cheapest academics to hire because all we require is a pencil, paper, and a wastebasket. But, in fact, we require online access to all these journals, for which we have to spend a ton of money. Spending all this money makes us look good to our deans, and lends prestige and the look of importance to our department, and allows us to compete with other departments for resources. I think it's a bunch of BS, frankly, but it's the one time I heard the existing system defended, so perhaps it's worth bringing up.
- arethuza 15y ago
  So who are the cheapest?
  - ldite 15y ago
    Philosophy - they don't need the wastebasket [JOKE]
    - arethuza 15y ago
      I had to restrain myself from saying that about economists.
      - forensic 15y ago
        The economists have an incinerator where everything left-wing goes.
- electrichead 15y ago
  I'm not sure about that. If you pump out a tonne of great research, but use relatively less money, wouldn't that make you look better? Or is the academic world that far removed from the rest of the economy?
roadnottaken 15y ago
This is not quite right. The NIH does, in fact, maintain a Public Access Policy: http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm which states that all NIH-funded research must be placed in this database ("PubMed Central") within 12 months of publication. I do not know how widely it is obeyed, but I know that the several labs I've been in regularly deposited their papers there.
- decode 15y ago
  Since the article mentions this, in what way is it not quite right? "The National Institutes of Health in the US oblige anyone taking their grants to put their papers in an open-access archive(17)."
  - roadnottaken 15y ago
    You're right, I mis-read this line. Still, it deserves more than a sentence. The NIH does require all NIH-funded research to be made publicly available. What more should/could they do?
omouse 15y ago
The military-industrial complex! Done, next question? Why would a government want to remove the middle-man when the middle-man is making enough money to lobby the government to protect them? -_-'
Estragon 15y ago
This is simply a consequence of the fiscalization of academic values, and doesn't just apply to libraries. Professors need "high-impact" papers to justify their grants so they can get more grants. The fiscal imperative to acquire grants is very strong, because grant overhead is a major revenue stream for the host institution (probably THE major stream.) It's much easier to have a high-impact paper if you publish in a famous journal, so everyone shoots for Science, then Nature, and on down the hierarchy as their field sees it. And they will eat just about any kind of shit to get published there, including having their papers locked behind a paywall. Because they are plugged into a system where getting grant money takes priority over advancing knowledge. Don't get me started on how this skews research priorities and experimental designs...
PaulHoule 15y ago
A lot of it is that academics are the most atomized and individualistic group of people that you'll find. If there's any part of society where "Aproi Moi Le Deluge" is the slogan, it's academia. Cornell has about 18 libraries and is slowly implementing a "Fahrenheit 451" plan to eliminate them. First they eliminated the Physical Sciences Library, next the Engineering Library, and they'll eliminate most of the others, one at a time, until there's nothing left but a remote storage unit, lots of computers, and a few pretty library buildings for show. Since it's happening slowly and only affecting one community at a time, they'll avoid a general uproar. If I blame anything, I blame the institution of tenure, which can be seen more clearly as a cause of moral decay than ever. Workers and capitalists alike will fight to the death to protect the interests of groups they are a part of because shifts in the rules can cause their personal destruction. A man with tenure knows he can't be ruined, so he's got no reason to ever take a stand.
merraksh 15y ago
See also discussion in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2373030 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2373030
merraksh 15y ago
Interesting article. In 2011 there is no practical hurdle to web-based publishing portals. Given that papers are already peer reviewed on a volunteer basis, the middle man and its administrative staff has a high cost and a low benefit. The system could keep volunteer-based peer review, and establish a (perhaps private) forum-like interaction for the authors to improve their article. Google Scholar has solved many of my article search problems and often gives me directly a link to the PDF of (sometimes just a preprint of) the article. However the problem remains for the libraries, which might well be the largest contributors to publishers, and which may find it hard to cut a subscription and suggest its users to use Google scholar.
DanielBMarkham 15y ago
I'm buying into his thesis, but heck, I really expected to see some causality explained. The title began, after all, with "how did...." It would be great if somebody could provided an insider's account of why the academic publishing industry maintained those margins from 2000 to 2010. Did nobody propose legislation to stop them? Were there no criminal investigations? Who are these people connected with politically? What sorts of causes to they contribute to? Just how is the status quo maintained? The guy made a point I was already predisposed to agree with, then kind of went on a rant about how bad it all was. Hey, I'm with you. I'm just not sure my useful knowledge of the issue has increased any.
Cyranix 15y ago
Articles like this make me sympathize with Aaron Swartz a little more. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813870 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813870
tylerneylon 15y ago
The obvious negative this has on folks outside of research-level academia is a significant contribution to tuition prices, which seem to be rising at about 5% per year. But a less obvious - and personally very painful - consequence of greedy publishers is the inability to do serious academic research outside of academia/industry. I have the ability (math PhD) and the will (have published a few papers post grad school, though it's hard to find time), but I have all but given up due to lacking access to books and articles behind these paywalls. Yes, you can find a decent chunk of articles online -- but very often there are one or two (or more!) key papers you _need_ to read to be at the front of a field, and one of those will be behind a paywall. The worst part is that I never know how truly useful an article will be before reading it, so in the few cases where I've payed I find that only a small percentage of the time was it worthwhile. In short, this system essentially kills research outside of academia / industry.
- shasta 15y ago
  I guess you don't live near a decently sized university?
  - tylerneylon 15y ago
    I do, and they require $500/year for library use by non-students/staff. Even if some people are lucky enough to have university library access, the problems caused by a broken publishing system still pose a barrier to many independent people.
rflrob 15y ago
Given that PLoS is only 8 years old, I think it's too soon to draw any meaningful conclusions from the fact that the open access movement "has failed to displace the monopolists". I think more important is that the trends are moving in the right direction: some high profile journals (like PNAS) have an open access publishing option, and it's unusual for new journals (at least in biology) not to be open access [1][2]. We aren't where we could be 20 years into the World Wide Web, but we're getting there. [1] http://www.hhmi.org/news/20110627.html http://www.hhmi.org/news/20110627.html [2] http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-06/gsoa-gln062111.php http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-06/gsoa-gln06211...
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DMalloy 15y ago
So, who would be interested in brainstorming about an open scientific portal with peer-reviewed OpenAccess papers? One could integrate all the well-known crowd sourcing mechanisms, e.g. accumulating papers around a specific topic or even certain question, and make things more lucid than they are now. I have been very interested in discussing this possibility for a while. If others are interested (leave a comment), I will set up a mailing list. Or leave a comment with a link to the portal I have missed in case one exists.
mathattack 15y ago
I agree with All the points about hiw government sponsored research (including all public school research) Should be free or near free. The unanswered question is "Why is the market failing?" A couple unmentioned ideas: - Until recently, tuition hikes went unchallenged. - Faculty have a vested interest in maintaining the system. (If my publishing in Journal X marks my competence, what happens if it goes away?) - An alternate system for rating a very hard to measure topic would be needed. Counting scarce publishing, and references in scarce journals is imperfect but nothing else has beaten it. I don't have an answer but perhaps a couple bright entrepreneurs could figure out a better equilibrium, and find a way to cross the chasm to get there. Geoffrey Moore would say pick one vertical or academic discipline.
- blahedo 15y ago
  > "Why is the market failing?" There's an easier answer to this question: because it's not a "market". There is no part of this whose pieces are fungible. Not the researchers, not the ideas, not the papers, not the journals. For "the market" to do its thing (to the extent that we can even say that), it requires the goods for sale or the people providing the services to be substitutable and commodified. That isn't (and pretty much can't) be true of academic publishing.
  - mathattack 15y ago
    Thank you for the comments. I appreciate your insights as an academic living through this. Even still, I have to respectfully disagree. I'll grant that the economics in most textbooks starts with the assumption of homogenous buyers and sellers. Economists have found ways of breaking down this assumption without giving up the concept of a market. Granted you lose "Perfect competition" but that's ok. Let's look at an analogy... Rather than academics, let's talk about programmers. There is as much variety in programmer performance as senior faculty performance. The firms that hire these programmers have not been able to create a monopoly. Yes - Google, Microsoft and Facebook have some high margins, but all of them are looking over their shoulders for the next competitor. The technology firm graveyard is filled with former near monopolists. (Excite? Altavista? Compuserve?) I'm sure that there are reasons for the market failing, but I think it's more than a lack of homogenous products and vendors.
blahedo 15y ago
It doesn't have to be this way, and individual fields can break away (to a greater or lesser extent). For instance: In Natural Language Processing / Computational Linguistics, the professional society (Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL) was its own publisher, with no profit motive, and so authors for its conferences and journal never signed over copyright (merely granted permission to ACL to publish the work). For years, it was quite standard for nearly all of the authors to post PS or PDF versions of their papers on their own websites. Then ACL started accepting PDF instead of camera-ready, and just posted the PDFs themselves; and then they started scanning the back-catalogue. The result of this is that the vast majority of all NLP/CL papers ever written (excluding only those published elsewhere, e.g. in AAAI, and a very few missing proceedings from fifty years ago) are available online, for free, in PDF, at http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/ http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/ . This is how science should be.
jtwb 15y ago
We forget the value of curation. Why can a boutique shop sell a $50 dress for $200? Taste. One could simply walk into that boutique, confident that 20 minutes later a cute, fashionable and well-fitting dress would be acquired. Why can top universities charge so much for tuition? Every year, %s University generates a curated list of individuals, and many hiring processes (not to mention ad-hoc interpersonal filtering processes) emphasize individuals in that list. Like boutique shopping, this is an expensive strategy that often excludes superior talent, but is fast. Is it worth $200,000 to have one's name on that list? Apparently. Is it worth application fees and an iron publishing agreement to have one's paper published in Nature. Apparently.
forkandwait 15y ago
Academic journals are gatekeepers of academic promotion, the prestigious old journals are the only ones that count today, and they are owned by Wiley and friends. To make matters worse, academics are among the most tradition bound creatures in the universe, especially when there is no clear criteria for truth (which is like all of the social sciences and humanities). The only thing they have to calibrate against is consensus, and consensus favors institutions already in place.

321 points by sasvari 15y ago

Reminds me of the time I wanted to read Chadwick's 1932 paper "Possible Existence of a Neutron" in which he mentioned the discovery of the neutron. http://blog.jgc.org/2008/09/dear-nature.html http://blog.jgc.org/2008/09/dear-nature.html

dcminter 15y ago
Academic publishing seems to be messed up but I'm not sure this is a good demonstration of that. Of the three links that you cite to online copies two no longer link to the article. So while your $32 doesn't buy you anything you can't already get elsewhere the availability (at a price) from Nature does at least supply a degree of permanence to the article. That may be more important with less prominent items.
- jordanb 15y ago
  The illegality (or quazi-illegality in the case of the links from the edu sites) of the mirrors is what's keeping them from being hosted permanently on a free site. If the copyrights were clear, there would be repositories like arxiv.org that would ensure high-availability free access. The paper isn't on arxiv.org currently because Nature uses its copyright to ensure that it's not.

jpallen 15y ago

> The reason is that the big publishers have rounded up the journals with the highest academic impact factors, in which publication is essential for researchers trying to secure grants and advance their careers(16). You can start reading open-access journals, but you can’t stop reading the closed ones. This is the only problem standing in the way of open access publishing. While the arXiv doesn't offer peer review and so doesn't negate the need for journals, the ecosystem would quickly adapt to open peer review. Unfortunately the implied reputation of being published in certain journals is still something that's too ingrained in academia. It's getting better slowly but it's going to take at least a generation to go away at the current rate.

cstross 15y ago
Unfortunately the implied reputation of being published in certain journals is still something that's too ingrained in academia. It's worse than that: this isn't just a matter of old fogies (who will eventually retire) clinging to out-moded ways. The problem is, academic career progression is dependent on publication. And these days, it's also contingent on citations. Your work is more likely to be cited if it's in a prominent journal. So by gaining a lock on the high academic impact publications, the big publishers have got a stranglehold on the career ladder.
- deleted 15y ago
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bedris 15y ago
... the ecosystem would quickly adapt to open peer review A reviewer's comments and critiques of a scientific manuscript often say as much, or more, about the reviewer than they do about the work. The current system should definitely be made more transparent and papers should be more freely available, especially those funded by public money, but there are currently plenty of avenues to openly comment on a piece of work (letters to the editor, blogs, journal website forums, opinion pieces, review articles, conference talks, positive or negative references in future publications, etc.) Experiments are easy to propose, which makes finding faults and requesting more work from authors quite easy to do for reviewers. That's why, if a paper passes muster with 2-3 qualified reviewers, it should be allowed to be published, and additional criticisms can go through the existing channels I mentioned above. An open peer-review system, if I am imagining it correctly from the above poster's description, could turn into a three-ring circus, and scientists would waste unimaginable amounts of time defending every comment levied against their work instead of working on new projects. I don't think that the methods of scientific review or discourse are broken. What needs to be fixed are issues of accessibility and transparency.
- jpallen 15y ago
  I didn't have a specific system in mind for 'open peer review'. I just meant that while peer review only happens through journals at the moment it doesn't depend on them in any fundamental way. The reputation attached to them does.

retube 15y ago

Yes this is a problem. Occasionally I have to to resort to emailing authors directly and asking for a copy of the paper - in most cases they have been obliging. As far as I am concerned publicly funded research papers should (must) be freely available. If the public are funding it then the public has a right to the fruits of this investment. And newspapers must be able to link to or reference a source when they quote or review academic literature (in fact I think it should be law that they have to). A very simple solution would be for authors or institutions to make copies freely available on their websites. I can only assume that they are not allowed to, due to copyright imposed by the journals. It's ironic that the invention of the www was driven by the need for an easy way to freely distribute and share academic literature. P.S. There's also a strong case for privately funded research to be made public too. Companies who make product claims based on privately funded research for example absolutely must make this research ("research") available for the public to review. It is notoriously hard to get pharma firms to cough up the papers which support their claims for the latest wonder drug.

nagrom 15y ago
In a lot of cases, you can find the pre-print of the paper on arXiv.org (at least that's the case for my field of nuclear and particle physics.) Copyright imposed by journals is an odd beast, since I think few people subscribe to them directly. Mostly, their money comes from academic institutions and unlike consumer-focused organisations like the RIAA, the journals won't usually go after the little guy. All that being said, the IoP's previously open-access journal JHEP in which my collaboration typically published our papers was bought by Springer last year. I don't know how their open-access policy has been affected by that.
- retube 15y ago
  ha I'm a particle physicist by training :) I was going to add to my comment that in my (ex-) field I'm pretty sure that papers were/are freely available on the CERN websites, as well as arXiv.org.
- jpallen 15y ago
  I recently published in JHEP and when I tried to view my paper outside the university I was greeted with a pay wall :(. They wanted the going rate of about £30. All of my research to date and the work in that paper has been funded by the UK taxpayer. There is something very wrong with that.

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dctoedt 15y ago

One possible disrupter is the open-access model used by the Social Science Research Network, http://www.ssrn.com http://www.ssrn.com, which was founded in 1994 and seems to be extensively used in the legal academic community. SSRN makes posted PDFs available for free download. The Wikipedia entry says that "In economics, and to some degree in law (especially in the field of law and economics), almost all papers are now first published as preprints on SSRN and/or on other paper distribution networks such as RePEc before being submitted to an academic journal." Quality and prestige metrics: SSRN ranks posted papers by number of downloads, and it also compiles citation lists---if I successfully find Paper X at SSRN, I can look up which other SSRN-available papers have cited Paper X. (Sounds like a job for Google's PageRank algorithm, no?) According to SSRN's FAQ, it's produced by an independent privately held corporation. I assume that means they're a for-profit company. I don't know how they make their money, other than that they will sell you a printed hard copy of a paper, presumably print-on-demand.

pbhjpbhj 15y ago
From that same SSRN FAQ page, http://www.ssrn.com/update/general/ssrn_faq.html http://www.ssrn.com/update/general/ssrn_faq.html: "We have entered into a variety of relationships with the publishers to provide access to their fee-based research through the SSRN eLibrary. These papers are identified by this icon: Incl. Fee Electronic Paper (a red dog-eared page with a "$"). If you are purchasing a fee-based paper, you will click the 'Add to Cart' link and be linked to your Shopping Cart." So they run as affiliates for paid-for papers. They also run a job listings service. You noted already the ability to get a printed and bound copy of a paper on demand. Edit: without looking in detail it seems those running the service are probably supported by academic institutions [for other work that they do?].

impendia 15y ago

But surely, one might think, that some of the price goes to offset the expensive costs of peer review? The author neglected to mention that peer reviewers work for free, and that the editorial boards are also made up of scholars who work for next to nothing. (edit: see reply below, this was in the article and I missed it) It used to be that it fell to the publishers to typeset the articles, but with the advent of TeX they don't have to do that either. (in my field anyway) Speaking as an academic, these companies do nothing for us. The sooner we agree on an alternative model which doesn't go through them, the better.

RyanMcGreal 15y ago
FTA: > Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the academic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free.
rmc 15y ago
Speaking as an academic, these companies do nothing for us Start the revolution at home. Put PDFs on your university website. Ask your collegues to do likewise, ask the rest of university to do likewise. Start the ball rolling.
- impendia 15y ago
  I do. But I also publish them in expensive journals, because senior people have told me this is good for my career. Once I get tenure (knock on wood), I intend to be more selective about which journals I publish in.
- starwed 15y ago
  That doesn't really fulfill the "quality signal" aspect of journals, though -- the replacement would be some sort of open journal that still had peer review. There was an Elsevier math journal where the entire editorial staff got fed up, quit, and then simply founded a new journal on the same subject. That's the sort of thing most likely to bring the big journals down, not self publication by individuals. (Well, that or direct government intervention.)

rizumu 15y ago

This is in line with the True Cost Economics Manifesto: http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/truecosteconomics/sign http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/truecosteconomics/sign

rmc 15y ago
I cannot see how a critique of mainstream economics is relevant to the fact that most scientific journals is very expensive.

RyanMcGreal 15y ago

A professor emeritus recently sent me an article to publish on my web magazine. The turnaround time was around 18 hours and he replied to express his surprise at how quickly his piece was published. In contrast, he has had an article pending at an academic journal for three years now.

jessriedel 15y ago
Usually this kind of long turn-around time is because it is held up by the referees, not the actual publishing process. That process is too slow (sometimes as much as a few months, but usually more like a few weeks), but it's not 3-years slow.
thesteamboat 15y ago
This varies greatly by field. In theoretical computer science, most conferences have turnaround times on the order of 3 months or so.

rmc 15y ago

University libraries are still mostly money grabbers aswell, but are slowly changing. In the 1830s Ireland was mapped to a great detail (for tax purposes) of 1:6500ish. These maps would still be very helpful for OpenStreetMap, and are obviously outside copyright. A few Irish universities have them (e.g. Trinity Map Library, a copyright deposit library for Ireland & the UK), however they charge €50,000ish for a copy of the digitial scans of the full set. Other libraries are similar. Universities really are not pro-sharing

pbhjpbhj 15y ago
Presumably somewhere like the British Library has the scans for the maps on disk. They're a government institution aren't they so would a Freedom of Information Act demand supposedly liberate that data ... just a thought. When I'm Prime Minister I'll instigate a government run academic library as the repository for all data originating from tax paid research with free access for individuals and paid access for profit yielding institutions; something along those lines anyway.
- rmc 15y ago
  These maps are usually on microfiche. Freedom of Information is a good idea, however the orignals are out of copyright (being 150+ years old). Just scanning a page of a book isn't a creative work, and hence you technically can't claim copyright on it again. Some mapping agencies like the Ordnance Survey of Ireland who have copies, scan and then join images up together, and rectify them so they work on google maps. This 'stitching & rectifiying' is a creative act, and hence they can (and do!) claim copyright on the new item. So this map from 1833 is Copyright 2008 OSi. :( However a lot of libraries claim copyright on just a straight scan, even though they can't really. A FoI would get you the map, but probably something with a copyright symbol on the corner. If you want to use them (for OpenStreetMap tracing) the onus is now on you to prove you can. In short, they don't want to share them out to everyone. :(
  - pbhjpbhj 15y ago
    >This 'stitching & rectifiying' is a creative act, and hence they can (and do!) claim copyright on the new item. // I was trying to find the caselaw on a related point the other day. I remember there being something to do with, I think the British Museum or similar, taking high res scans of old paintings and claiming a renewed copyright term on that then ferreting away the original. Do you have caselaw to cite? AFAIR the act is supposed to be transformative to create a new work, stitching doesn't appear to be tranformative to me. However I also seem to recall the the "sweat of the brow" argument was made to support a new copyright in high res scans, that a large amount of work had been done and that this somehow earned them a new right. It seems this sort of manoeuvring is within the letter of the law but not at all within the spirit of it. Very underhand for those who are supposed to be managing works owned by the country for the country itself using public money. If one can get a copy of the original then it could be leaked to wikileaks ... the onus is not on the copier to prove they have a right but on those suing to show that tortuous infringement has occurred. The demands of OpenStreetMap may be different however.

impendia 15y ago

I heard an interesting argument from my advisor (a very famous mathematician). I strongly disagree with it, but it is the only argument I have heard for keeping this system in place. His argument was the following: In many fields such as laboratory science, research is expensive; one has to apply for grants and then spend the money, and these departments have large budgets, and this all looks good to deans. If a department is going through a lot of money, then it must be prestigious, important, and doing good work. I heard a joke once that mathematicians are the second-cheapest academics to hire because all we require is a pencil, paper, and a wastebasket. But, in fact, we require online access to all these journals, for which we have to spend a ton of money. Spending all this money makes us look good to our deans, and lends prestige and the look of importance to our department, and allows us to compete with other departments for resources. I think it's a bunch of BS, frankly, but it's the one time I heard the existing system defended, so perhaps it's worth bringing up.

arethuza 15y ago
So who are the cheapest?
- ldite 15y ago
  Philosophy - they don't need the wastebasket [JOKE]
  - arethuza 15y ago
    I had to restrain myself from saying that about economists.
    - forensic 15y ago
      The economists have an incinerator where everything left-wing goes.
electrichead 15y ago
I'm not sure about that. If you pump out a tonne of great research, but use relatively less money, wouldn't that make you look better? Or is the academic world that far removed from the rest of the economy?

roadnottaken 15y ago

This is not quite right. The NIH does, in fact, maintain a Public Access Policy: http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm which states that all NIH-funded research must be placed in this database ("PubMed Central") within 12 months of publication. I do not know how widely it is obeyed, but I know that the several labs I've been in regularly deposited their papers there.

decode 15y ago
Since the article mentions this, in what way is it not quite right? "The National Institutes of Health in the US oblige anyone taking their grants to put their papers in an open-access archive(17)."
- roadnottaken 15y ago
  You're right, I mis-read this line. Still, it deserves more than a sentence. The NIH does require all NIH-funded research to be made publicly available. What more should/could they do?

omouse 15y ago

The military-industrial complex! Done, next question? Why would a government want to remove the middle-man when the middle-man is making enough money to lobby the government to protect them? -_-'

Estragon 15y ago

This is simply a consequence of the fiscalization of academic values, and doesn't just apply to libraries. Professors need "high-impact" papers to justify their grants so they can get more grants. The fiscal imperative to acquire grants is very strong, because grant overhead is a major revenue stream for the host institution (probably THE major stream.) It's much easier to have a high-impact paper if you publish in a famous journal, so everyone shoots for Science, then Nature, and on down the hierarchy as their field sees it. And they will eat just about any kind of shit to get published there, including having their papers locked behind a paywall. Because they are plugged into a system where getting grant money takes priority over advancing knowledge. Don't get me started on how this skews research priorities and experimental designs...

PaulHoule 15y ago

A lot of it is that academics are the most atomized and individualistic group of people that you'll find. If there's any part of society where "Aproi Moi Le Deluge" is the slogan, it's academia. Cornell has about 18 libraries and is slowly implementing a "Fahrenheit 451" plan to eliminate them. First they eliminated the Physical Sciences Library, next the Engineering Library, and they'll eliminate most of the others, one at a time, until there's nothing left but a remote storage unit, lots of computers, and a few pretty library buildings for show. Since it's happening slowly and only affecting one community at a time, they'll avoid a general uproar. If I blame anything, I blame the institution of tenure, which can be seen more clearly as a cause of moral decay than ever. Workers and capitalists alike will fight to the death to protect the interests of groups they are a part of because shifts in the rules can cause their personal destruction. A man with tenure knows he can't be ruined, so he's got no reason to ever take a stand.

merraksh 15y ago

See also discussion in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2373030 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2373030

merraksh 15y ago

Interesting article. In 2011 there is no practical hurdle to web-based publishing portals. Given that papers are already peer reviewed on a volunteer basis, the middle man and its administrative staff has a high cost and a low benefit. The system could keep volunteer-based peer review, and establish a (perhaps private) forum-like interaction for the authors to improve their article. Google Scholar has solved many of my article search problems and often gives me directly a link to the PDF of (sometimes just a preprint of) the article. However the problem remains for the libraries, which might well be the largest contributors to publishers, and which may find it hard to cut a subscription and suggest its users to use Google scholar.

DanielBMarkham 15y ago

I'm buying into his thesis, but heck, I really expected to see some causality explained. The title began, after all, with "how did...." It would be great if somebody could provided an insider's account of why the academic publishing industry maintained those margins from 2000 to 2010. Did nobody propose legislation to stop them? Were there no criminal investigations? Who are these people connected with politically? What sorts of causes to they contribute to? Just how is the status quo maintained? The guy made a point I was already predisposed to agree with, then kind of went on a rant about how bad it all was. Hey, I'm with you. I'm just not sure my useful knowledge of the issue has increased any.

Cyranix 15y ago

Articles like this make me sympathize with Aaron Swartz a little more. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813870 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813870

tylerneylon 15y ago

The obvious negative this has on folks outside of research-level academia is a significant contribution to tuition prices, which seem to be rising at about 5% per year. But a less obvious - and personally very painful - consequence of greedy publishers is the inability to do serious academic research outside of academia/industry. I have the ability (math PhD) and the will (have published a few papers post grad school, though it's hard to find time), but I have all but given up due to lacking access to books and articles behind these paywalls. Yes, you can find a decent chunk of articles online -- but very often there are one or two (or more!) key papers you _need_ to read to be at the front of a field, and one of those will be behind a paywall. The worst part is that I never know how truly useful an article will be before reading it, so in the few cases where I've payed I find that only a small percentage of the time was it worthwhile. In short, this system essentially kills research outside of academia / industry.

shasta 15y ago
I guess you don't live near a decently sized university?
- tylerneylon 15y ago
  I do, and they require $500/year for library use by non-students/staff. Even if some people are lucky enough to have university library access, the problems caused by a broken publishing system still pose a barrier to many independent people.

rflrob 15y ago

Given that PLoS is only 8 years old, I think it's too soon to draw any meaningful conclusions from the fact that the open access movement "has failed to displace the monopolists". I think more important is that the trends are moving in the right direction: some high profile journals (like PNAS) have an open access publishing option, and it's unusual for new journals (at least in biology) not to be open access [1][2]. We aren't where we could be 20 years into the World Wide Web, but we're getting there. [1] http://www.hhmi.org/news/20110627.html http://www.hhmi.org/news/20110627.html [2] http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-06/gsoa-gln062111.php http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-06/gsoa-gln06211...

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

DMalloy 15y ago

So, who would be interested in brainstorming about an open scientific portal with peer-reviewed OpenAccess papers? One could integrate all the well-known crowd sourcing mechanisms, e.g. accumulating papers around a specific topic or even certain question, and make things more lucid than they are now. I have been very interested in discussing this possibility for a while. If others are interested (leave a comment), I will set up a mailing list. Or leave a comment with a link to the portal I have missed in case one exists.

mathattack 15y ago

I agree with All the points about hiw government sponsored research (including all public school research) Should be free or near free. The unanswered question is "Why is the market failing?" A couple unmentioned ideas: - Until recently, tuition hikes went unchallenged. - Faculty have a vested interest in maintaining the system. (If my publishing in Journal X marks my competence, what happens if it goes away?) - An alternate system for rating a very hard to measure topic would be needed. Counting scarce publishing, and references in scarce journals is imperfect but nothing else has beaten it. I don't have an answer but perhaps a couple bright entrepreneurs could figure out a better equilibrium, and find a way to cross the chasm to get there. Geoffrey Moore would say pick one vertical or academic discipline.

blahedo 15y ago
> "Why is the market failing?" There's an easier answer to this question: because it's not a "market". There is no part of this whose pieces are fungible. Not the researchers, not the ideas, not the papers, not the journals. For "the market" to do its thing (to the extent that we can even say that), it requires the goods for sale or the people providing the services to be substitutable and commodified. That isn't (and pretty much can't) be true of academic publishing.
- mathattack 15y ago
  Thank you for the comments. I appreciate your insights as an academic living through this. Even still, I have to respectfully disagree. I'll grant that the economics in most textbooks starts with the assumption of homogenous buyers and sellers. Economists have found ways of breaking down this assumption without giving up the concept of a market. Granted you lose "Perfect competition" but that's ok. Let's look at an analogy... Rather than academics, let's talk about programmers. There is as much variety in programmer performance as senior faculty performance. The firms that hire these programmers have not been able to create a monopoly. Yes - Google, Microsoft and Facebook have some high margins, but all of them are looking over their shoulders for the next competitor. The technology firm graveyard is filled with former near monopolists. (Excite? Altavista? Compuserve?) I'm sure that there are reasons for the market failing, but I think it's more than a lack of homogenous products and vendors.

blahedo 15y ago

It doesn't have to be this way, and individual fields can break away (to a greater or lesser extent). For instance: In Natural Language Processing / Computational Linguistics, the professional society (Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL) was its own publisher, with no profit motive, and so authors for its conferences and journal never signed over copyright (merely granted permission to ACL to publish the work). For years, it was quite standard for nearly all of the authors to post PS or PDF versions of their papers on their own websites. Then ACL started accepting PDF instead of camera-ready, and just posted the PDFs themselves; and then they started scanning the back-catalogue. The result of this is that the vast majority of all NLP/CL papers ever written (excluding only those published elsewhere, e.g. in AAAI, and a very few missing proceedings from fifty years ago) are available online, for free, in PDF, at http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/ http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/ . This is how science should be.

jtwb 15y ago

We forget the value of curation. Why can a boutique shop sell a $50 dress for $200? Taste. One could simply walk into that boutique, confident that 20 minutes later a cute, fashionable and well-fitting dress would be acquired. Why can top universities charge so much for tuition? Every year, %s University generates a curated list of individuals, and many hiring processes (not to mention ad-hoc interpersonal filtering processes) emphasize individuals in that list. Like boutique shopping, this is an expensive strategy that often excludes superior talent, but is fast. Is it worth $200,000 to have one's name on that list? Apparently. Is it worth application fees and an iron publishing agreement to have one's paper published in Nature. Apparently.

forkandwait 15y ago

Academic journals are gatekeepers of academic promotion, the prestigious old journals are the only ones that count today, and they are owned by Wiley and friends. To make matters worse, academics are among the most tradition bound creatures in the universe, especially when there is no clear criteria for truth (which is like all of the social sciences and humanities). The only thing they have to calibrate against is consensus, and consensus favors institutions already in place.