29 ms·

Walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees

529 points by mindracer 3y ago

readthenotes1 3y ago
The always entertaining question of do you pay for value or cost
- drno123 3y ago
  And another question - did you already pay for value through your taxes?
- uniqueuid 3y ago
  That's not really the interesting part. The interesting question is: Is there a quasi-monopolistic predatory exploitation of a historically captive market? And what are the mechanisms to destroy it? From my perspective, it's clear that we have a multi-billion dollar/year heist by corporations whose value proposition (logistics, layout, quality assurance) are quickly eroding. They need to die yesterday.
- mjburgess 3y ago
  The "value" here is a racket though, right? The publishing companies do not create anything of value, they hold a resource (prestige) that they do nothing to improve, transform or grow. Academies do all that labour for free, and the publishers rent-seek on that free labour and run a racket ("publish here or else"). It's a feudal setup: a king controls the land but does nothing with it. The serfs do all the labour and then pay the king for "access" to the land.
  - seydor 3y ago
    > It's a feudal setup: Yes it is, but why hasnt it changed in the past 30 years? Because the serfs (academics) cannot agree on a replacement ruler. It's not like there arent many good open access publishers. But there aren't many open 'prestige givers'
    - nicoburns 3y ago
      I'd argue that it has changed quite dramatically in the last 30 years. As you say, there are now many great open access publishers. That wasn't nearly so established 30 years ago. Paid access journals haven't died yet, but they're well on their way.
    - signaru 3y ago
      > why it changed in the past 30 years? In my former university, the people in power hasn't changed in the past 30 years. So worshiping the big publishers is still the norm and it takes a while for new students to detach themselves from their supervisors' delusions and realize the whole scam.
  - refurb 3y ago
    they hold a resource (prestige) that they do nothing to improve, transform or grow That's absolutely untrue. A journals prestige is not a given. It has to be maintained and I know of at a couple journals that have fallen out of favor. The editorial board makes decisions on which papers to publish, and it's that track record that maintains the level of prestige. They also have to get peer reviewers (nobody will waste their time reviewing for a no-name journal) of a certain caliber to review. it better to think of the journals as more similar to a luxury good - the value is not in the work done or how much it costs, but the perceived value of other people. That has real value, and it's clearly apparent people are willing to pay for it.
    - mjburgess 3y ago
      > willing to pay for it Willing? Or required? eg. https://www.ref.ac.uk https://www.ref.ac.uk
- Grimblewald 3y ago
  Unfortunately, in this regard what you pay for isn't what it seems. There's a reason that machine learning is moving fast as a field, and that is because for this field academic discourse happens primarily through pre-prints and conferences. This would stop if discourse moved to publishing via journals. This is because the publishing system is cripplingly slow, exploitative, and a perverse shadow of what it was supposed to grow to become.
IMSAI8080 3y ago
Good. I hope their alternative journal takes off. Scientists want to be published in these journals for the prestige that it brings. Hopefully a cost recovery priced journal with high standards of peer review can be successful in attracting papers.
noisy_boy 3y ago
Curious what is the leading open source system being used for publication of journals where academics are trying to get out of such exploitative practices? Or is it a collection of bespoke setups with no clear leader?
- AraceliHarker 3y ago
  They say they are working with MTI Press to launch a new journal. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35654783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35654783
- tsbischof 3y ago
  There are several open access solutions but few (if any?) open source solutions. Arxiv is free but lacks reputation outside a small number of fields. PLOS One has a decent reputation in some fields and probably comes closest in being good value. I know a couple of people working in this space, and ultimately it ends up being a networking issue: in order to get peer reviewers at a scale which is acceptable, you basically have to buy editors with networks of contacts. Since good or even mediocre reviewers are scarce, this ends up leading to significant competition for reviews. But reviewers are not compensated so there is no market pressure for reviewers to actually exist. Publishing is now a profit-driven system built on top of an informal network created by enthusiasts who were originally doing the work because it was important to them. There have been a couple of attempts at matchmaking systems and rewards systems. https://www.reviewcommons.org/ https://www.reviewcommons.org/ is the most visible in my field, but they only get 1-2 preprint reviews out per day so far. This is still quite new and there are a couple of other platforms in development.
- a_bonobo 3y ago
  The problem is that academics are evaluated based on the impact factor of the journal they publish in. If I submit a grant application and I have five papers in Nature, I will get the job. If I submit the application with five preprints on biorxiv, I might as well not have published those. It's like that all the way down - my last academic employer required me to publish a certain amount of papers per year in my niche's top 10% impact factor journals. it's due to laziness - I'm an expert, my employer is not, so my employer cannot evaluate my work quality. So the evaluation is outsourced to journal editors, with a paper acceptance in a prestigious journal being a stamp of approval of my skills. The reason why people do not build their own journals is that they will work, for a long time, outside this impact factor system. You could chuck all of your papers into alternative journals, but you will fast jeopardise your career. It's not a technological problem, it's a political problem.
apples_oranges 3y ago
By watching the vintage TV show Miami Vice I learned that many people make a living out of selling an image (one of the cornerstones of Sonny Crockett's policing philosophy). TED comes to mind. Or WEF in Davos. They are all basically just marketing operations. (TED sells the hip/green young futurists and WEF plays the conspiracy angle.) Same with this science stuff here. Of course the professional scientists love the prestige that comes from such a publication, but that's the reason why they are gamed by these publishers in the first place.
- ramraj07 3y ago
  This is one case where it’s not just being hip though. Publishing in Nature Science Cell is pretty much a minimum requirement if you want to get tenure track in any top university. I’m out of academia by a few years so not sure if eLife/PLOS Biology is starting to make inroads as acceptable top tier or not. You’re also betting your long term reputation on the reputability of the journal. The best bet is that more of the top scientists commit to only publishing in fully open journals and bury NSC.
- itronitron 3y ago
  'measuring influence' was established in the science community long, long before it ever became a social media thing.
  - psychomugs 3y ago
    SEO, a precursor to social media influence as a metric, is itself precursed by the academic citation metric.
- mjklin 3y ago
  It has been well said that academia is “show business for ugly people”.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    I thought that was politics.
auggierose 3y ago
You cannot really blame Elsevier here. They are just taking advantage of a dysfunctional academic system. The cost of reviewing a paper properly is high, but academia is not paying that cost by simply not doing a proper review. If the money saved by cutting Elsevier out (in this case £2700 per accepted paper) would actually be added to a pool out of which reviews are financed, I would see the point. But as it is, they will just continue to pretend that reviews are free, and the quality continues to go down the drain. Elsevier itself obviously adds very little to no value, but it is laughable that reviews are supposed to be free. If reviews were priced properly, the £2700 would probably appear to be a minor cost not worth worrying about.
- AraceliHarker 3y ago
  The article states that peer review is done on a volunteer basis, right? All Elsevier does, at best, is put PDFs of the papers on their servers.
  - auggierose 3y ago
    My comment is not about the value that Elsevier adds. You are reading my comment as reviewers review papers these days.
    - quickthrower2 3y ago
      I think your point is the GBP2700 gatekeep is better than no gatekeep as you’d get worse junk if it were free?
  - tsbischof 3y ago
    They also manage the review process (screen papers, find reviewers, communicate with authors and reviewers), make sure that papers are accessible long-term (decades to centuries), typeset manuscripts, print paper issues, and several other tasks. But yes, reviewers are not paid. A half-decent review can easily take 3-4 hours, and a typical paper gets 2-3 reviews, so something like 8-12 hours of PhD-level labor which are not currently compensated.
denton-scratch 3y ago
I wonder whether the walkout is connected with this? https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-europe-infrastructure-2023-5-eu-ready-to-back-immediate-open-access-without-author-fees/ https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-europe-infr... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35845085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35845085
- dan-robertson 3y ago
  There are a lot of journals with their own editorial boards and these mass-resignations happen somewhat regularly. My guess is that usually some people on the board will first want to decide to get away and then figure out where to move to (eg find some other publisher that is more preferable / get some funding from somewhere for a cheaper to run journal[1]) and then maybe also figure out a plan for the new journal to have a good start (eg with some good papers ready from people who are less constrained by journal impact metrics). So these things tend to take a long time to happen and aren’t really precipitated by EU rule changes. [1] In mathematics there is the concept of an ‘arxiv overlay journal’ which is an example of something cheap to run: you have a website and editors and forewords and suchlike but each issue is, in some sense, a list of links to specific versions of papers on the arxiv.
data_maan 3y ago
I wonder who still pays for this, if all you need is a single playment - then it's online on www.sci-hub.se and free forever. So I'm not sure why people don't vote with their feet (well, mouse clicks) regarding Elsevier. Of course, copying and stealing is very bad.
- ftxbro 3y ago
  I don't know for sure, but I think that some of their customers are universities, and possibly governments and large enterprises, who subscribe to large swaths of their offerings as bundles.
- signaru 3y ago
  It's not just readers who pay. Scientists also have to pay some journals to get their work published (assuming the submission went through) which is totally backwards. Scientists do not get anything monetary from what the readers pay. Now look at other publishing industries. It's the publishers that pay the creators (even if the rates may seem unfair at times, it is still far far better than negative gain for scientific research content creators). Been there multiple times back when I was a PhD student. So I have absolutely nothing against those who use the free sites.
- currymj 3y ago
  first, sometimes there are publication fees on the author end. on the buyer end, university libraries buy huge bundles of journal subscriptions for millions per year to give access to everyone at their institution. this is essentially enterprise sales and the publishers are really good at it using all the typical tactics for winning lucrative contracts. and the universities don't want to just tell their researchers to use sci-hub, although I think e.g. UC Berkeley essentially did this with a nudge and a wink a few years ago during negotiations.
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? First off, if the only publisher you have a problem with is Elsevier, you have already shown your hand. A half dozen other publishers are more expensive, but you can only name Elsevier. That means you're just repeating a meme that started on forums like this one. So take a moment and ask yourself why any of these publishers shouldn't take the same flak? The "value" expensive publishers provide is clearly real, as customers are willing to pay for it. And there is clearly no monopoly; dozens of other publishers could make a similar journal at a lower price. Large publishers like Elsevier have thousands of journals, which isn't easy to replicate. But their profit is still in gold toilet territory. So why isn't a competitor able to take their business at lower profit? Answer: Prestige. Louis Vouitton sells a handbag for $2k. Is it worth $2k? You could say no, that any other bag would be just as useful. But value isn't utility alone. People find that the bag is worth the price because of the prestige that the brand imbues the owner with. Expensive publishers are still getting business because their customers still find value. Can you do it cheaper? Of course. Can you charge less profit? Of course. But will customers pay for it anyway? Of course. Because they're not paying for utility. They're paying for prestige. Academic research is addicted to publishing in prestigious journals. Their entire system of grants and research positions is completely dependent on it. They simply have no alternative system. It's the industry dirty secret: prestigious journals are like coca cola with real coca leaf extract. You pay for it largely because you're dependent on it. Of course, the customers complain about the price, so the question is, why not just buy something cheaper? Because that would defeat the whole point, which is to buy prestige. You can't just pay a kid in high school to run a web server for PDFs and say you have a prestigious journal. You have to have a brand that carries prestige, like that Louis Vouitton bag. Until academic research no longer depends on prestige, no amount of walk-out stunts or individual universities walking out of deals will change anything. People still buy Louis Vouitton even though there are knockoffs. Because prestige is what they're buying, not a handbag.
- gtsop 3y ago
  I like your point but let's dive another layer down the rabbithole. Why do researchers need to buy prestige in the first place? Academic research should be done for the sake of advancement of knowledge and of course the people doing it should make a good living out of it. How does buying prestige come into play here? (just asking)
amelius 3y ago
These scientists have more balls than app store developers.
softgrow 3y ago
Half of the article is about the disparity between pricing of print and e-books. Universities have been moving to ebooks for ease of access, and also to avoid building structurally expensive libraries that cope with the weight of the books. Looks like the publishers are raising the prices of e-books to match the value to institutions. Another case of excessive profits for little effort on the part of publishers.
bombcar 3y ago
The only reason the status quo works is that 90% of scientific research output is worthless; unreviewed, unreproducible, and unvalued.
- maximus-decimus 3y ago
  90% of EVERYTHING is shit -- sturgeon's law
FabHK 3y ago
Excellent. Don Knuth instigated a similar walkout 20 years ago at the Journal of Algorithms. Wikipedia has its own section on these walkouts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Control_of_journals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Control_of_journals
- mistrial9 3y ago
  I was told onsite at a major pharm research house in California, that "science publishing in Japan is controlled by their mafia" .. with "Reed-Elsevier" as the Dutch version of that. historical note: the Dutch worked with Japan before many other Western nations, long ago.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  It's weird that "choosing not to give away your IP to a 3rd party" is called a "walkout".
gigatexal 3y ago
Lol fees, Aaron Swartz was killed for freedom of knowledge let alone high fees. I hope to see all paid for journals be a thing of the past in my lifetime.
- pengaru 3y ago
  Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._Aaron_Swartz_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._...
nologic01 3y ago
They have 25% of the market. Just split them in five, mandate that no entity can have more than five percent of the market and watch their margins shrink. Maybe there is a less brutal way to do it, e.g., raise corporate tax in proportion to market share. The point is that the market system we currently have does not prevent oligopoly power and that is creating all sorts of problems.
- Consultant32452 3y ago
  The product they are selling isn't science/articles, it's exclusivity. Despite the rhetoric, most people don't want inclusivity. They want their stuff to be in the best/exclusive/fancy group, and only want to consume the best, most exclusive stuff. Obviously, my statement is not universal so providing some counter-examples is irrelevant.
  - nologic01 3y ago
    That behavior definitely applicable here, but 25% of the market doesn't sound too exclusive even if they managed to pick in each and every domain the top journals. I mean, the sector is definitely very peculiar with a lot of baggage. The publish-or-perish environment was not inflicted by publishers, its something that emerged in the science communities. The obsessive impact ranking, citations etc reflects ultimately the difficulty of judging academic worth (on which careers and funding rely) at such industrial scales. But when you see fat margins (and if it bothers you, as it seems to be the case with those walkouts) always look for the reasons nobody can undercut them. Most of the time the "moat" (as they like to say here on HN) is some cozy arrangement.
fast_neutron 3y ago
Elsevier is far from the only offender in the academic publishing space. This price gouging is rampant, and it affects everyone you could call a "customer." The only variable is who gets stuck with the bill. When I was in grad school, I easily went through 1000+ articles via my institution's library, most of which were dead ends. My school even had to drop the subscription of a journal I was actively using because the price was unaffordable. For unaffiliated readers, such as those doing industry R&D or individuals researching a medical condition, there are no circumstances under which $30-$50 price per article is affordable, let alone justifiable. This is more expensive than many books, and it's just to read a 10-page PDF which may or may not even provide sufficient context to answer the reader's question. Sci-hub is a literal life-saver for this audience. "Open access" alleviates the price problem for the reader, but just pushes another unaffordable burden onto the researcher. My group could not afford the multi-thousand dollar "processing charge," and those that could were paying for it with taxpayer money anyway. So no matter what, someone is getting gouged, be it the reader, the University, the PI, or the public. Prices need to come down by at least an order of magnitude before I would even consider the for-profit academic publishing industry to be anything other than a predatory anachronism.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  I wonder how much of the journal bureaucracy, such as peer-review, actually adds value. Do we really need vetted journals? Are pre-print upload sites with the ability to comment good enough?
  - gavinsyancey 3y ago
    Peer reviewers are fellow academics who are not paid. Peer review does not add any cost to publishing. The cost all goes to for-profit companies making record profits.
    - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      Someone is getting paid to loop in the peer-reviewers in the first place. Probably not a lot for any given article, but it's something. I guess peer-reviewers may save money by doing some editing that the paid editor would have to do instead. I don't know how this balances out.
garbagecoder 3y ago
Bravo. This doesn’t get enough airtime for its contribution to the student loan issue too.
esalman 3y ago
I have nothing against the Dutch but these two Dutch companies, Shell and Elsevier, are scourge of humanity.
AlbertCory 3y ago
For a while, I was (sometimes) busting patents at Google. That meant searching through literally 1000's of articles to see if one or more provided prior art to invalidate some patent being asserted against us. Quite often, an article would be behind a paywall (and btw, @throwawaaarrgh, it was often Springer or Taylor, not Elsevier). We'd gladly pay $30 for it if it did the job, but nothing to just find out IF it did. And 99% of the time, it didn't. So I never paid. Nearly always, the professor published something else on the same topic that was open access.
lapama 3y ago
Those fees seem well below where I publish.
baidifnaoxi 3y ago
Honestly if even $1 of public money goes toward research, the work, data, journal, etc should all be public domain. End of story. That should be a basic requirement of taking public funds.
- neuronerdgirl 3y ago
  The NIH indeed requires all work published under their grants to be made available open-access. Problem is publishers figured out that meant they could charge EVEN MORE for submissions to be made open access than they charged for standard closed publishing. Wiley charged me $2,975 last year for an accepted submission to Human Brain Mapping.
  - lapinot 3y ago
    And why did you pay if i may ask? I would guess it's because if you don't your career will be in trouble because that's what employers value. The current state of affair isn't a random thing. It's because the global policy of employment in public research and the definition of success is completely stupid and based on metrics (i don't care which metrics, the sole fact that we try to quantify everything just makes this kind of situations possible).
    - PeterisP 3y ago
      They probably paid because, as the grandparent post suggested, taking public funds from NIH imposes a requirement to publish the research results in this manner, so for the research team it's an unavoidable part of the expenses related to the grant - and so it's not the researchers' money nor their decision; NIH defined what they want and so they're paying publishers a significant portion of their funding for that.
      - lapinot 3y ago
        Indeed, most likely the question of paying or not wasn't even asked properly and this is just the norm.. In any case my point is that the problem of this capture from some scientific publishers is much deeper than just a problem of how publishing is setup. Its one of the many symptoms of how current research institutions are governed.
layer8 3y ago
Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35654783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35654783
rg111 3y ago
The field of AI, fortunately has made big publishers irrelevant. We just publish on arXiv and get done with it. And also conferences are "prestigious" venues for publishing.
ajsnigrutin 3y ago
I find the outcry here kind of funny... On one side academics are crying about outrageous fees (rightfully so, since it's us, the taxpayers who usually pay for that), and immediately after, those same people require other academics to pay those same publishers to go up the academic ladder, get tenure, etc. I don't know how it's in other countries, but in mine, it's the university itself that decides the requirements for their teaching stuff (including the required number of articles and scores).
cashsterling 3y ago
In the age of Github/Gitlab, federated database systems & search, plus social media, and many other advances... we need to move off the old model of publishing research. I offer to the HN community that modern research 'publishing' should include: - providing all raw data - provided a timestamped electronic lab notebook that documented what you and when you did it... if applicable. - working code for your data analysis and all figures/graphs. - a write up of your work that can be commented on by the public (questions, critique, supporting information, etc.). Markdown or Latex rendered online would be great. The ability to continue updating the same 'publication' in place with new information would be really helpful; for one, this would make review articles much more useful over a longer duration [ if they were maintained regularly]. - supporting pictures, video, audio. e.g. a video walk-through of your experimental setup. - a means for other folks in the field of study to endorse or critique your work, like "weighted Github" stars. We need a Github for science. Benefits: - free access for everyone. more people having access and participating will hopefully increased pace of development. - better feedback over time on the quality of research as each 'article' or body of research would have issues raised, people commenting whether or not they we are able to duplicate the findings, revisions over time to deal with comments/issues, etc. - Potentially easier to search and find relevant research through knowledge graphs of inter-related work, meta tags, and the "awesome X" type of publications/sites that would pop up to aggregate solid research in a particular area of study. - Low or no barrier to publishing research, scientific community bias will not stop work from publication. - will encourage and make it easy to publish null results: i.e. "I tried this... didn't work? Here why I think it didn't work...anyone got ideas?" Null results are very important and seldom published. - may reduce fraud. No Science or Nature... just publish your work, if it is awesome, it will get lots of views and stars. All data and code needing to be available will limit ability to get away with stuff. etc...
- remram 3y ago
  GitHub, the company with the closed-source platform, training CoPilot on their users' hosted code against license terms. That's to be our guiding star?
- lapinot 3y ago
  Exploitative publishing is not a technical problem. Publishing a journal isn't very hard and in particular in the academic world where writing stuff and organizing committees is something that people do all the time. Tons of artifacts are already available on various software and data repositories, either public or institutional. The problem is that through some hoops of history a couple companies hold quite firmly the political control of important (and less important) journals and publications. To attack this there is no other way than to organize and move the journals to either an alternative administrative "host" entity (university, association, ...) or setup a new one. Which takes time, lots of emails, solid reputation and some luck in convincing people that have a say. And it's not like the academic world is particularly well currently, with everybody having tons of time to bootstrap such things. Just calling for change and starting your "github for research" won't do anything (semantic scholar exists, tons of startup exist in this space). Anyone a bit serious studying what's happening for 1h can come up with tons of deficiencies. The question to ask is why it stays in this obviously deficient state: corporate political control, time, support from employers, ..
nixpulvis 3y ago
Am I the only one that thinks comparing profit margins of a publisher and a software/hardware company is a bit far fetched?
starbird3000 3y ago
I think one point is that a profit margin of 40% is only viable because of the size of their platform. If they were broken up and smaller, on competing platforms, then it would be no where near 40%.
wdpt 3y ago
Sadly, this is not novel where the problem and researcher community stand is well known (or, should be). See "the cost of knowledge" release in 2012 by Timothy Gowers. http://thecostofknowledge.com/ http://thecostofknowledge.com/

529 points by mindracer 3y ago

readthenotes1 3y ago

The always entertaining question of do you pay for value or cost

drno123 3y ago
And another question - did you already pay for value through your taxes?
uniqueuid 3y ago
That's not really the interesting part. The interesting question is: Is there a quasi-monopolistic predatory exploitation of a historically captive market? And what are the mechanisms to destroy it? From my perspective, it's clear that we have a multi-billion dollar/year heist by corporations whose value proposition (logistics, layout, quality assurance) are quickly eroding. They need to die yesterday.
mjburgess 3y ago
The "value" here is a racket though, right? The publishing companies do not create anything of value, they hold a resource (prestige) that they do nothing to improve, transform or grow. Academies do all that labour for free, and the publishers rent-seek on that free labour and run a racket ("publish here or else"). It's a feudal setup: a king controls the land but does nothing with it. The serfs do all the labour and then pay the king for "access" to the land.
- seydor 3y ago
  > It's a feudal setup: Yes it is, but why hasnt it changed in the past 30 years? Because the serfs (academics) cannot agree on a replacement ruler. It's not like there arent many good open access publishers. But there aren't many open 'prestige givers'
  - nicoburns 3y ago
    I'd argue that it has changed quite dramatically in the last 30 years. As you say, there are now many great open access publishers. That wasn't nearly so established 30 years ago. Paid access journals haven't died yet, but they're well on their way.
  - signaru 3y ago
    > why it changed in the past 30 years? In my former university, the people in power hasn't changed in the past 30 years. So worshiping the big publishers is still the norm and it takes a while for new students to detach themselves from their supervisors' delusions and realize the whole scam.
- refurb 3y ago
  they hold a resource (prestige) that they do nothing to improve, transform or grow That's absolutely untrue. A journals prestige is not a given. It has to be maintained and I know of at a couple journals that have fallen out of favor. The editorial board makes decisions on which papers to publish, and it's that track record that maintains the level of prestige. They also have to get peer reviewers (nobody will waste their time reviewing for a no-name journal) of a certain caliber to review. it better to think of the journals as more similar to a luxury good - the value is not in the work done or how much it costs, but the perceived value of other people. That has real value, and it's clearly apparent people are willing to pay for it.
  - mjburgess 3y ago
    > willing to pay for it Willing? Or required? eg. https://www.ref.ac.uk https://www.ref.ac.uk
Grimblewald 3y ago
Unfortunately, in this regard what you pay for isn't what it seems. There's a reason that machine learning is moving fast as a field, and that is because for this field academic discourse happens primarily through pre-prints and conferences. This would stop if discourse moved to publishing via journals. This is because the publishing system is cripplingly slow, exploitative, and a perverse shadow of what it was supposed to grow to become.

IMSAI8080 3y ago

Good. I hope their alternative journal takes off. Scientists want to be published in these journals for the prestige that it brings. Hopefully a cost recovery priced journal with high standards of peer review can be successful in attracting papers.

noisy_boy 3y ago

Curious what is the leading open source system being used for publication of journals where academics are trying to get out of such exploitative practices? Or is it a collection of bespoke setups with no clear leader?

AraceliHarker 3y ago
They say they are working with MTI Press to launch a new journal. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35654783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35654783
tsbischof 3y ago
There are several open access solutions but few (if any?) open source solutions. Arxiv is free but lacks reputation outside a small number of fields. PLOS One has a decent reputation in some fields and probably comes closest in being good value. I know a couple of people working in this space, and ultimately it ends up being a networking issue: in order to get peer reviewers at a scale which is acceptable, you basically have to buy editors with networks of contacts. Since good or even mediocre reviewers are scarce, this ends up leading to significant competition for reviews. But reviewers are not compensated so there is no market pressure for reviewers to actually exist. Publishing is now a profit-driven system built on top of an informal network created by enthusiasts who were originally doing the work because it was important to them. There have been a couple of attempts at matchmaking systems and rewards systems. https://www.reviewcommons.org/ https://www.reviewcommons.org/ is the most visible in my field, but they only get 1-2 preprint reviews out per day so far. This is still quite new and there are a couple of other platforms in development.
a_bonobo 3y ago
The problem is that academics are evaluated based on the impact factor of the journal they publish in. If I submit a grant application and I have five papers in Nature, I will get the job. If I submit the application with five preprints on biorxiv, I might as well not have published those. It's like that all the way down - my last academic employer required me to publish a certain amount of papers per year in my niche's top 10% impact factor journals. it's due to laziness - I'm an expert, my employer is not, so my employer cannot evaluate my work quality. So the evaluation is outsourced to journal editors, with a paper acceptance in a prestigious journal being a stamp of approval of my skills. The reason why people do not build their own journals is that they will work, for a long time, outside this impact factor system. You could chuck all of your papers into alternative journals, but you will fast jeopardise your career. It's not a technological problem, it's a political problem.

apples_oranges 3y ago

By watching the vintage TV show Miami Vice I learned that many people make a living out of selling an image (one of the cornerstones of Sonny Crockett's policing philosophy). TED comes to mind. Or WEF in Davos. They are all basically just marketing operations. (TED sells the hip/green young futurists and WEF plays the conspiracy angle.) Same with this science stuff here. Of course the professional scientists love the prestige that comes from such a publication, but that's the reason why they are gamed by these publishers in the first place.

ramraj07 3y ago
This is one case where it’s not just being hip though. Publishing in Nature Science Cell is pretty much a minimum requirement if you want to get tenure track in any top university. I’m out of academia by a few years so not sure if eLife/PLOS Biology is starting to make inroads as acceptable top tier or not. You’re also betting your long term reputation on the reputability of the journal. The best bet is that more of the top scientists commit to only publishing in fully open journals and bury NSC.
itronitron 3y ago
'measuring influence' was established in the science community long, long before it ever became a social media thing.
- psychomugs 3y ago
  SEO, a precursor to social media influence as a metric, is itself precursed by the academic citation metric.
mjklin 3y ago
It has been well said that academia is “show business for ugly people”.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  I thought that was politics.

auggierose 3y ago

You cannot really blame Elsevier here. They are just taking advantage of a dysfunctional academic system. The cost of reviewing a paper properly is high, but academia is not paying that cost by simply not doing a proper review. If the money saved by cutting Elsevier out (in this case £2700 per accepted paper) would actually be added to a pool out of which reviews are financed, I would see the point. But as it is, they will just continue to pretend that reviews are free, and the quality continues to go down the drain. Elsevier itself obviously adds very little to no value, but it is laughable that reviews are supposed to be free. If reviews were priced properly, the £2700 would probably appear to be a minor cost not worth worrying about.

AraceliHarker 3y ago
The article states that peer review is done on a volunteer basis, right? All Elsevier does, at best, is put PDFs of the papers on their servers.
- auggierose 3y ago
  My comment is not about the value that Elsevier adds. You are reading my comment as reviewers review papers these days.
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    I think your point is the GBP2700 gatekeep is better than no gatekeep as you’d get worse junk if it were free?
- tsbischof 3y ago
  They also manage the review process (screen papers, find reviewers, communicate with authors and reviewers), make sure that papers are accessible long-term (decades to centuries), typeset manuscripts, print paper issues, and several other tasks. But yes, reviewers are not paid. A half-decent review can easily take 3-4 hours, and a typical paper gets 2-3 reviews, so something like 8-12 hours of PhD-level labor which are not currently compensated.

denton-scratch 3y ago

I wonder whether the walkout is connected with this? https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-europe-infrastructure-2023-5-eu-ready-to-back-immediate-open-access-without-author-fees/ https://www.researchprofessionalnews.com/rr-news-europe-infr... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35845085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35845085

dan-robertson 3y ago
There are a lot of journals with their own editorial boards and these mass-resignations happen somewhat regularly. My guess is that usually some people on the board will first want to decide to get away and then figure out where to move to (eg find some other publisher that is more preferable / get some funding from somewhere for a cheaper to run journal[1]) and then maybe also figure out a plan for the new journal to have a good start (eg with some good papers ready from people who are less constrained by journal impact metrics). So these things tend to take a long time to happen and aren’t really precipitated by EU rule changes. [1] In mathematics there is the concept of an ‘arxiv overlay journal’ which is an example of something cheap to run: you have a website and editors and forewords and suchlike but each issue is, in some sense, a list of links to specific versions of papers on the arxiv.

data_maan 3y ago

I wonder who still pays for this, if all you need is a single playment - then it's online on www.sci-hub.se and free forever. So I'm not sure why people don't vote with their feet (well, mouse clicks) regarding Elsevier. Of course, copying and stealing is very bad.

ftxbro 3y ago
I don't know for sure, but I think that some of their customers are universities, and possibly governments and large enterprises, who subscribe to large swaths of their offerings as bundles.
signaru 3y ago
It's not just readers who pay. Scientists also have to pay some journals to get their work published (assuming the submission went through) which is totally backwards. Scientists do not get anything monetary from what the readers pay. Now look at other publishing industries. It's the publishers that pay the creators (even if the rates may seem unfair at times, it is still far far better than negative gain for scientific research content creators). Been there multiple times back when I was a PhD student. So I have absolutely nothing against those who use the free sites.
currymj 3y ago
first, sometimes there are publication fees on the author end. on the buyer end, university libraries buy huge bundles of journal subscriptions for millions per year to give access to everyone at their institution. this is essentially enterprise sales and the publishers are really good at it using all the typical tactics for winning lucrative contracts. and the universities don't want to just tell their researchers to use sci-hub, although I think e.g. UC Berkeley essentially did this with a nudge and a wink a few years ago during negotiations.

throwawaaarrgh 3y ago

Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? First off, if the only publisher you have a problem with is Elsevier, you have already shown your hand. A half dozen other publishers are more expensive, but you can only name Elsevier. That means you're just repeating a meme that started on forums like this one. So take a moment and ask yourself why any of these publishers shouldn't take the same flak? The "value" expensive publishers provide is clearly real, as customers are willing to pay for it. And there is clearly no monopoly; dozens of other publishers could make a similar journal at a lower price. Large publishers like Elsevier have thousands of journals, which isn't easy to replicate. But their profit is still in gold toilet territory. So why isn't a competitor able to take their business at lower profit? Answer: Prestige. Louis Vouitton sells a handbag for $2k. Is it worth $2k? You could say no, that any other bag would be just as useful. But value isn't utility alone. People find that the bag is worth the price because of the prestige that the brand imbues the owner with. Expensive publishers are still getting business because their customers still find value. Can you do it cheaper? Of course. Can you charge less profit? Of course. But will customers pay for it anyway? Of course. Because they're not paying for utility. They're paying for prestige. Academic research is addicted to publishing in prestigious journals. Their entire system of grants and research positions is completely dependent on it. They simply have no alternative system. It's the industry dirty secret: prestigious journals are like coca cola with real coca leaf extract. You pay for it largely because you're dependent on it. Of course, the customers complain about the price, so the question is, why not just buy something cheaper? Because that would defeat the whole point, which is to buy prestige. You can't just pay a kid in high school to run a web server for PDFs and say you have a prestigious journal. You have to have a brand that carries prestige, like that Louis Vouitton bag. Until academic research no longer depends on prestige, no amount of walk-out stunts or individual universities walking out of deals will change anything. People still buy Louis Vouitton even though there are knockoffs. Because prestige is what they're buying, not a handbag.

gtsop 3y ago
I like your point but let's dive another layer down the rabbithole. Why do researchers need to buy prestige in the first place? Academic research should be done for the sake of advancement of knowledge and of course the people doing it should make a good living out of it. How does buying prestige come into play here? (just asking)

amelius 3y ago

These scientists have more balls than app store developers.

softgrow 3y ago

Half of the article is about the disparity between pricing of print and e-books. Universities have been moving to ebooks for ease of access, and also to avoid building structurally expensive libraries that cope with the weight of the books. Looks like the publishers are raising the prices of e-books to match the value to institutions. Another case of excessive profits for little effort on the part of publishers.

bombcar 3y ago

The only reason the status quo works is that 90% of scientific research output is worthless; unreviewed, unreproducible, and unvalued.

maximus-decimus 3y ago
90% of EVERYTHING is shit -- sturgeon's law

FabHK 3y ago

Excellent. Don Knuth instigated a similar walkout 20 years ago at the Journal of Algorithms. Wikipedia has its own section on these walkouts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Control_of_journals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Control_of_journals

mistrial9 3y ago
I was told onsite at a major pharm research house in California, that "science publishing in Japan is controlled by their mafia" .. with "Reed-Elsevier" as the Dutch version of that. historical note: the Dutch worked with Japan before many other Western nations, long ago.
hgsgm 3y ago
It's weird that "choosing not to give away your IP to a 3rd party" is called a "walkout".

gigatexal 3y ago

Lol fees, Aaron Swartz was killed for freedom of knowledge let alone high fees. I hope to see all paid for journals be a thing of the past in my lifetime.

pengaru 3y ago
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._Aaron_Swartz_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._...

nologic01 3y ago

They have 25% of the market. Just split them in five, mandate that no entity can have more than five percent of the market and watch their margins shrink. Maybe there is a less brutal way to do it, e.g., raise corporate tax in proportion to market share. The point is that the market system we currently have does not prevent oligopoly power and that is creating all sorts of problems.

Consultant32452 3y ago
The product they are selling isn't science/articles, it's exclusivity. Despite the rhetoric, most people don't want inclusivity. They want their stuff to be in the best/exclusive/fancy group, and only want to consume the best, most exclusive stuff. Obviously, my statement is not universal so providing some counter-examples is irrelevant.
- nologic01 3y ago
  That behavior definitely applicable here, but 25% of the market doesn't sound too exclusive even if they managed to pick in each and every domain the top journals. I mean, the sector is definitely very peculiar with a lot of baggage. The publish-or-perish environment was not inflicted by publishers, its something that emerged in the science communities. The obsessive impact ranking, citations etc reflects ultimately the difficulty of judging academic worth (on which careers and funding rely) at such industrial scales. But when you see fat margins (and if it bothers you, as it seems to be the case with those walkouts) always look for the reasons nobody can undercut them. Most of the time the "moat" (as they like to say here on HN) is some cozy arrangement.

fast_neutron 3y ago

Elsevier is far from the only offender in the academic publishing space. This price gouging is rampant, and it affects everyone you could call a "customer." The only variable is who gets stuck with the bill. When I was in grad school, I easily went through 1000+ articles via my institution's library, most of which were dead ends. My school even had to drop the subscription of a journal I was actively using because the price was unaffordable. For unaffiliated readers, such as those doing industry R&D or individuals researching a medical condition, there are no circumstances under which $30-$50 price per article is affordable, let alone justifiable. This is more expensive than many books, and it's just to read a 10-page PDF which may or may not even provide sufficient context to answer the reader's question. Sci-hub is a literal life-saver for this audience. "Open access" alleviates the price problem for the reader, but just pushes another unaffordable burden onto the researcher. My group could not afford the multi-thousand dollar "processing charge," and those that could were paying for it with taxpayer money anyway. So no matter what, someone is getting gouged, be it the reader, the University, the PI, or the public. Prices need to come down by at least an order of magnitude before I would even consider the for-profit academic publishing industry to be anything other than a predatory anachronism.

anonymouskimmer 3y ago
I wonder how much of the journal bureaucracy, such as peer-review, actually adds value. Do we really need vetted journals? Are pre-print upload sites with the ability to comment good enough?
- gavinsyancey 3y ago
  Peer reviewers are fellow academics who are not paid. Peer review does not add any cost to publishing. The cost all goes to for-profit companies making record profits.
  - anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    Someone is getting paid to loop in the peer-reviewers in the first place. Probably not a lot for any given article, but it's something. I guess peer-reviewers may save money by doing some editing that the paid editor would have to do instead. I don't know how this balances out.

garbagecoder 3y ago

Bravo. This doesn’t get enough airtime for its contribution to the student loan issue too.

esalman 3y ago

I have nothing against the Dutch but these two Dutch companies, Shell and Elsevier, are scourge of humanity.

AlbertCory 3y ago

For a while, I was (sometimes) busting patents at Google. That meant searching through literally 1000's of articles to see if one or more provided prior art to invalidate some patent being asserted against us. Quite often, an article would be behind a paywall (and btw, @throwawaaarrgh, it was often Springer or Taylor, not Elsevier). We'd gladly pay $30 for it if it did the job, but nothing to just find out IF it did. And 99% of the time, it didn't. So I never paid. Nearly always, the professor published something else on the same topic that was open access.

lapama 3y ago

Those fees seem well below where I publish.

baidifnaoxi 3y ago

Honestly if even $1 of public money goes toward research, the work, data, journal, etc should all be public domain. End of story. That should be a basic requirement of taking public funds.

neuronerdgirl 3y ago
The NIH indeed requires all work published under their grants to be made available open-access. Problem is publishers figured out that meant they could charge EVEN MORE for submissions to be made open access than they charged for standard closed publishing. Wiley charged me $2,975 last year for an accepted submission to Human Brain Mapping.
- lapinot 3y ago
  And why did you pay if i may ask? I would guess it's because if you don't your career will be in trouble because that's what employers value. The current state of affair isn't a random thing. It's because the global policy of employment in public research and the definition of success is completely stupid and based on metrics (i don't care which metrics, the sole fact that we try to quantify everything just makes this kind of situations possible).
  - PeterisP 3y ago
    They probably paid because, as the grandparent post suggested, taking public funds from NIH imposes a requirement to publish the research results in this manner, so for the research team it's an unavoidable part of the expenses related to the grant - and so it's not the researchers' money nor their decision; NIH defined what they want and so they're paying publishers a significant portion of their funding for that.
    - lapinot 3y ago
      Indeed, most likely the question of paying or not wasn't even asked properly and this is just the norm.. In any case my point is that the problem of this capture from some scientific publishers is much deeper than just a problem of how publishing is setup. Its one of the many symptoms of how current research institutions are governed.

layer8 3y ago

Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35654783 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35654783

rg111 3y ago

The field of AI, fortunately has made big publishers irrelevant. We just publish on arXiv and get done with it. And also conferences are "prestigious" venues for publishing.

ajsnigrutin 3y ago

I find the outcry here kind of funny... On one side academics are crying about outrageous fees (rightfully so, since it's us, the taxpayers who usually pay for that), and immediately after, those same people require other academics to pay those same publishers to go up the academic ladder, get tenure, etc. I don't know how it's in other countries, but in mine, it's the university itself that decides the requirements for their teaching stuff (including the required number of articles and scores).

cashsterling 3y ago

In the age of Github/Gitlab, federated database systems & search, plus social media, and many other advances... we need to move off the old model of publishing research. I offer to the HN community that modern research 'publishing' should include: - providing all raw data - provided a timestamped electronic lab notebook that documented what you and when you did it... if applicable. - working code for your data analysis and all figures/graphs. - a write up of your work that can be commented on by the public (questions, critique, supporting information, etc.). Markdown or Latex rendered online would be great. The ability to continue updating the same 'publication' in place with new information would be really helpful; for one, this would make review articles much more useful over a longer duration [ if they were maintained regularly]. - supporting pictures, video, audio. e.g. a video walk-through of your experimental setup. - a means for other folks in the field of study to endorse or critique your work, like "weighted Github" stars. We need a Github for science. Benefits: - free access for everyone. more people having access and participating will hopefully increased pace of development. - better feedback over time on the quality of research as each 'article' or body of research would have issues raised, people commenting whether or not they we are able to duplicate the findings, revisions over time to deal with comments/issues, etc. - Potentially easier to search and find relevant research through knowledge graphs of inter-related work, meta tags, and the "awesome X" type of publications/sites that would pop up to aggregate solid research in a particular area of study. - Low or no barrier to publishing research, scientific community bias will not stop work from publication. - will encourage and make it easy to publish null results: i.e. "I tried this... didn't work? Here why I think it didn't work...anyone got ideas?" Null results are very important and seldom published. - may reduce fraud. No Science or Nature... just publish your work, if it is awesome, it will get lots of views and stars. All data and code needing to be available will limit ability to get away with stuff. etc...

remram 3y ago
GitHub, the company with the closed-source platform, training CoPilot on their users' hosted code against license terms. That's to be our guiding star?
lapinot 3y ago
Exploitative publishing is not a technical problem. Publishing a journal isn't very hard and in particular in the academic world where writing stuff and organizing committees is something that people do all the time. Tons of artifacts are already available on various software and data repositories, either public or institutional. The problem is that through some hoops of history a couple companies hold quite firmly the political control of important (and less important) journals and publications. To attack this there is no other way than to organize and move the journals to either an alternative administrative "host" entity (university, association, ...) or setup a new one. Which takes time, lots of emails, solid reputation and some luck in convincing people that have a say. And it's not like the academic world is particularly well currently, with everybody having tons of time to bootstrap such things. Just calling for change and starting your "github for research" won't do anything (semantic scholar exists, tons of startup exist in this space). Anyone a bit serious studying what's happening for 1h can come up with tons of deficiencies. The question to ask is why it stays in this obviously deficient state: corporate political control, time, support from employers, ..

nixpulvis 3y ago

Am I the only one that thinks comparing profit margins of a publisher and a software/hardware company is a bit far fetched?

starbird3000 3y ago

I think one point is that a profit margin of 40% is only viable because of the size of their platform. If they were broken up and smaller, on competing platforms, then it would be no where near 40%.

wdpt 3y ago

Sadly, this is not novel where the problem and researcher community stand is well known (or, should be). See "the cost of knowledge" release in 2012 by Timothy Gowers. http://thecostofknowledge.com/ http://thecostofknowledge.com/