18 ms·

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 Els

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)
- foven 3y ago
  Consider you are another researcher (not the one who has just published). You may want to keep up to date with your field. This is good to do and it helps foster new ideas for now and for future proposals. There will be a selection of journals that are relevant to you and they will publish work that, generally, will be tiered by either the scope or impact of the journal. Journal A publishes a lot of papers you find very insightful or useful, journal B publishes some work that is good to know but not profound. If you have maybe 20 minutes, maybe you will read one paper that catches your eye from Journal A. The truest metric of how good the work you do is, at a surface level, is how well cited it is. How much do people read it, and then do they care once they put it down. It is not necessarily the case that putting your paper in a high impact journal gets a lot of citations, but its a lot of exposure and it maximises those chances.
  - gtsop 3y ago
    Maybe I am wrong here, but shouldn't the quality metric be whether it acts as a basis for practical applications? As far as I understand, research is supposed to give theoretical answers and frameworks. X works like this. Y doesn't work like that. This knowledge should then be applied to the real world and will be prooved wrong or right. Maybe a silly thought, but I suppose pre 1800 science didn't have to pay such fees to proove the quality of their work, they just applied it. (I understand not all papers can be immediatelly applied, but is that the majotity of the work? And if so, is that a good thing?)
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - 6nf 3y ago
      Unpublished science for practical applications of course exists but that is called R&D and is not generally made public cause it’s corporate IP. If that’s what you mean.
    - sseagull 3y ago
      As a society, we want to have a "portfolio" of research. We want short-term research with tangible results, moderate-term research that builds on the current state of the art and advances it, and long-term research that might pay off decades from now. You also want to mix in "moonshot" research that likely won't pay off, but if it did would be revolutionary. The proportion you invest in each is up for debate. Generally, as the time horizon increases, risk increases, and it becomes less and less likely any particular research direction will pay off, but you still need to do it or you won't have anything after all the current directions have dried up, matured, or otherwise run their course. I think the error people make is to assume academia is supposed to cover all three. Largely, academia covers long-term and maybe some moderate-term and moonshot. Short term is better handled by industry where there is a more direct measure of applicability ($$). But business is generally not interested in the longer term stuff because it is too risky. So academia as a whole is about forming the bricks that industry uses to build useful things. While any particular paper is not going to be useful to society anytime soon (if at all), the aggregate knowledge will likely be useful at some point in the future.
logi2mus 3y ago
Terrence Tao once said he will not publish or edit for Elsevier. But he still said he will referee as scientists without tenure do not have that freedom.
refurb 3y ago
You’ve pretty much nailed it. I anticipate you’ll be downvoted for it. Academic research (one of the big complainers about the cost) could fix this easily - stop rewarding scientists for publishing in those journals! Pick other, less expensive, prestigious enough journals, and academics will publish in those. But the system can’t be broken easily. The prestige of many journals has been developed over decades or in some cases centuries. Saying “my paper got published in the same journal that published the first structure of DNA” buys a lot of street cred. There is a level of snobbery to have published in top journals. The ones that got to their position publishing in those journals, aren’t going to be happy being told “those journals aren’t really much better than an open source journal”. So the system continues - scientists keep reviewing papers for these journals, libraries pay the fees, and scientists send their papers there. Nobody has the balls (understandably) to step outside because their personal career will suffer. When people want Elsevier to drop their fees, they just want the current system in place (exclusive, prestigious journals) but not have to pay for it.
- ghaff 3y ago
  Fundamentally, changing the academic journal system is "just" about fundamentally changing how academics are recognized, rewarded, and promoted to something that no one really has a blueprint for. (And publish everything and the cream will somehow rise to the top isn't it.) I also suspect that a lot of people complaining the loudest would also be unhappy if their recognition, reward, and promotion system was changed to something even more arbitrary and subjective than it already is.
- magicalhippo 3y ago
  > Academic research (one of the big complainers about the cost) could fix this easily - stop rewarding scientists for publishing in those journals! From what I know, it's the politicians that rewards scientists for publishing in those journals. At least here in Norway, universities have been competing for funding[1], and publishing in higher-impact ("more prestigious") journals counts for more compared to lower-impact journals. [1]: https://www.regjeringen.no/globalassets/upload/kd/vedlegg/uh/finansiering.pdf https://www.regjeringen.no/globalassets/upload/kd/vedlegg/uh...
jasode 3y ago
>Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, It's because the outsider's mental model of "academic journals publishing" is dominated by seeing the artifacts of publishing: the pdf files. With pdf files then driving the intuition about "what I think the publishing industry is", it makes people conclude that Elsevier is just a "glorified pdf server". (E.g. Scihub can host a bunch of pdf files for free... so academic journals hosting pdf files are not doing anything value-added.) And then to add to the pdf mental model, you have the repeated comments about unpaid volunteer peer reviewers. So the outsiders' intuition follows the same path, if the peer reviewers cost the journal nothing, there is no need for paid academic journals to exist. (E.g. a site like Stackoverflow has unpaid volunteers answering questions and users of that site don't have to pay any subscriptions.) A more accurate mental model looks beyond the "pdf files" and considers how journals also have paid employees to support the journals. E.g.: https://relx.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/ElsevierJobs/?q=editor https://relx.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/ElsevierJobs/?q=editor If one over-simplifies academic journals to "a bunch of pdf files by unpaid peer reviewers" -- then one will always be confused as to why scientists keep submitting their papers to them and why libraries keep paying for subscriptions. The real issue is journals like Elsevier charge too much money.
- watwut 3y ago
  The reason scientists submit to these journals is that your career depends on which journal you published at. It is collective action problem. And elsevier has massive profit margins. It earns way more then needed to pay emplyees. The reason HN dislikes then is that HN has many members who work or worked in academia.
  - jasode 3y ago
    >The reason scientists submit to these journals is that your career depends on which journal you published at. Yes, I agree and wrote a previous comment repeating the reason you gave: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27804504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27804504
  - joshvm 3y ago
    This is not true for all fields. Computer science (specifically machine learning) is possibly the most lucrative area to work in right now and comparatively few people publish in journals. Computer vision has been this way for a long time even with journals like IEEE PAMI. Our equivalent is highly competitive conferences that have sloppy/inconsistent peer review and (as a result of the format) limited submissions. You have to submit a full paper and acceptance rates are low. Researchers plan and structure entire projects around deadlines for big venues. Inconsistent peer review is somewhat made up for by community validation (most of the time, since publishing code is strongly correlated with citations). Really big papers often turn up as preprints first because speed is important (if you wait 6 months to go through review, someone will beat you). Or you have fields like astrophysics where everyone cross-publishes in Arxiv when they submit to a journal.
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
You're saying academic prestige is a Veblen good, like a handbag? Are you sure?
- dguest 3y ago
  The comparison between publications and handbags is cute... but yes, it falls apart for exactly the reason you mention. A prestigious journal would still be prestigious if they made publication free.
  - rizky05 3y ago
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- Dma54rhs 3y ago
  In academic circles absolutely.
- refurb 3y ago
  A better analogy is Ivy League colleges. If you graduate from an Ivy League college (or publish in a prestigious journal) others view that as a signal of your qualifications and that can open up careers that require that the box be checked. As such, people are willing to pay a lot of money to go to an Ivy League college (or publish in Nature). And the "system" has a vested interest in keeping that gateway in place, because the people that passed that gateway years before you, don't want to see it go away as it would reduce their own status.
- throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
  Being published in X journal doesn't make the work any better, but its apparent value is immediately increased by association. Academic institutions openly talk about this as why they use specific journals. They give positions/grants to people who have had more prestigious published articles, not to people who have done better work. The demand for a given researcher increases as their published work in increasingly prestigious journals increases. It's not exactly the same as Veblen goods because what the academic institution is paying for is access to journals. But they need to pay for these expensive journals because they're prestigious, and they need the prestige to decide who gets the money/job, and the prestigious journals know this so they mark up the price. If prestige wasn't what they were paying for, law of supply and demand (and healthy competition - there are many competitors in the market) would make the price dirt cheap. But it's the opposite.
redox99 3y ago
> Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? It's pretty simple. Most of us here are used to just downloading "preprints" pdfs from arxiv for basically any CS/AI paper. If all papers were available on arxiv or an equivalent website for free and without forms, probably nobody here would care or complain about Elsevier et. al. Want to in addition to publishing on arxiv, publish on Nature? Sure go ahead. Want to only read papers after they've been peer reviewed on Nature. Go ahead.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  It still stinks that Nature hijacked the academic prestige system for its own profit.
cma 3y ago
> 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. Change the analogy so that the customers design and mostly manufacture the bag.
- rizky05 3y ago
  [dead]
- christophilus 3y ago
  And the government uses taxpayer dollars to fund the design process.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
krisoft 3y ago
> Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? Because people can have opinions on industries they don’t work in? I don’t work in hospitality, and I have never cooked for a living. I can still confidently tell you when my food is burnt. A chef then can crawl out of the kitchen and explain the complicated process which resulted in me getting burnt food and I won’t care a bit. My tax money paid a researcher to study long years, then my tax money paid for the equipment the researcher used to research and my tax money paid for the researcher’s time too. And then the researcher writes up what they found and pays a third party also from my tax money and that third party does everything in their power to hide the paper away from me. That is burnt food. I don’t have to work in the industry to recognise it.
- refurb 3y ago
  Nothing wrong with having an opinion, but having a strong opinion ("the solution is so obvious, i can solve this in 5 minutes") about an industry of which you known nothing of the inner workings come across as rather ignorant. Your example of "I can tell when my food is burnt" is a poor one. Can you tell a quality scientific paper? Do you know what's required to get tenure? To get scientific funding? All of those are relevant as to why the scientific publishing system works as it does today. If you don't know those things, then you don't know how to solve the problem.
  - j-bos 3y ago
    >Can you tell a quality scientific paper? Given the replication crisis, maybe scientific publishing as it works today also can't tell quality.
    - VHRanger 3y ago
      The replication crisis is much worse in fields without open publishing. Computer science/physics/etc. (arxiv), economics (NBER) and other fields with freely available papers tend to have much better replication numbers than fields that are closed-off. This is even better when data and code are publicly available.
6nf 3y ago
Is our tax dollars funding science or not? If it is tax funded why can’t I have a damn opinion? It’s my money.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  I presume you can still email the author for a free copy.
mycologos 3y ago
> So take a moment and ask yourself why any of these publishers shouldn't take the same flak? It's reasonable to focus on one example of a general problem and try to solve the sub-problem first. > 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. This is conflating two things. A Louis Vuitton bag is a Veblen good because people pay more for it because paying more for it demonstrates that they have a lot of money. Publishing in an Elsevier journal is not a Veblen good, because the researcher wants the prestige of producing research of sufficient quality to appear in an Elsevier journal. They don't want the prestige of paying a high publication fee. Anyway, I'm a computer science researcher. Every paper I've ever written is on Arxiv, and most of them also appeared in archival conferences. Paywall journals are an anti-signal for paper quality in my field. I wrote one paper that appeared in a journal, and that publishing/editing process was nothing but a waste of time to get the material into the journal's format. The publisher added nothing. The continued existence of publishers is a historical accident specific to fields that started when they served a purpose (distributing a hard-copy journal) and have lacked respected senior researchers with enough entrepreneurial vim to set up their own open-access alternatives. The reviewing process and name recognition is the thing keeping those publishers alive. None of that is provided by the publisher, it's provided by the researchers who work inside it. Earlier I wrote "the researcher wants the prestige of producing research of sufficient quality to appear in an Elsevier journal". That's not really true, they want "the prestige of producing research of sufficient quality to [be accepted by the kinds of reviewers who would reviewer for an] Elsevier journal". ML research has sort of solved this problem via conferences, which are imperfect, but seem substantially better than the journal review process I can see my peers in other fields navigating. Free markets are cool and all, but sometimes they screw up, especially when they interact with governments and institutions. Publishers currently live in this sweet spot, but science really doesn't need them to.
bro_thebro 3y ago
The analogy you made using Louis Vuitton handbags is fairly weak. Louis Vouitton handbags are prestigious because they're expensive. If the time comes where Louis Vuitton handbags are given free of charge to any Tom, Dick, or Harry, Louis Vuitton loses its prestige. On the other hand, successfully publishing in a prestigious journal, would still be prestigious even if it was done for free.
- daniel-cussen 3y ago
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- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  > On the other hand, successfully publishing in a prestigious journal, would still be prestigious even if it was done for free. As long as the prestigious journal doesn't balloon to a million pages per issue.
testHNac 3y ago
> Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? I find this with almost any topic I am familiar with. The absolute confidence with which certain things were stated on HN was completely different from my lived experience. This made me start placing less value on HN comments, and going and reading up more when I found a topic interesting. I also find comments related to a certain worldviews generally get voted up more. Probably it's because of the HN demographic.
- bombcar 3y ago
  HN is subject to all the trials and tribulations of any social media, it just hides some of it better through excellent moderation and consisting mainly of identical people.
  - testHNac 3y ago
    If I compare this to Reddit, there are subreddits for different topics with people of different mindset frequenting those subreddits. That at least offers you a space to discuss something which might not be popular with most readers. With HN you if your comment is completely against the thinking of a certain demographic ( identical people as you put it), it's downvoted heavily. No chance for constructive comments or discussion like on subreddits.
- Guest42 3y ago
  Same issue here, could be a topic that I have 10 years of experience in both academically and professionally. The instant contrarianism without any experiene is quite astounding.
eynsham 3y ago
There’s quite an interesting model by which the editors of a prestigious closed journal leave en masse and set up a new open-access one, hopefully transferring the prestige of the former one. Gowers wrote about it here (https://gowers.wordpress.com/2018/06/04/a-new-journal-in-combinatorics/ https://gowers.wordpress.com/2018/06/04/a-new-journal-in-com...). I’d claim that it’s mostly inertia that’s the problem. Prestige doesn’t require profit.
- wolverine876 3y ago
  That's what is described in the article.
fabian2k 3y ago
The big difference here is that prestige has nothing to do with cost, unlike your Louis Voutton comparison. Prestige is entirely based on the perception of the journals among scientists and on the prestige of the papers themselves that are published in them. And the scientists individually don't have a choice unless they are closer to the end of their career. Intentionally publishing in less prestigious journals will sabotage your career, period. And there are certainly aspect here that people without any more in-depth knowledge can criticize, e.g. the overall issue that publicly-funded research is put behind paywalls or that a very large part of the work gets done by reviewers that are not even paid by the publishers but mostly by the public.
- kelipso 3y ago
  > The big difference here is that prestige has nothing to do with cost, unlike your Louis Voutton comparison. Yep, usually it's the opposite. You pay more money to get published through easy to get into conferences. If you're not in academia or don't have some membership, you pay way more to get into conferences. You pay thousands more to get published in low quality open access journals because your paper is not good enough. Etc. (Also no one pays $50 to read a single article, you get it for free through the university library.)
  - nottorp 3y ago
    > Also no one pays $50 to read a single article, you get it for free through the university library. Let's rephrase. No one who doesn't get the article for free through the university library can afford to read it.
- anonymouskimmer 3y ago
  > And the scientists individually don't have a choice unless they are closer to the end of their career. Intentionally publishing in less prestigious journals will sabotage your career, period. I think it would be helpful if corporate scientists published more. They too value prestige for bragging rights, or whatever, but a corporate career is more about patents and blockbuster products than about publication. So corporate scientists could sabotage the prestige of publications. Many corporations could also afford to hire editors and self-publish their own journals. For students looking for jobs in industry, or for PIs who want to place their students in industry, publishing in the corporate journals would be better than publishing in tier 1 journals.
deleted 3y ago
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fluidcruft 3y ago
It would be pretty interesting if Louis Vuitton items were designed, manufactured, quality controlled, etc entirely by customers who then hand them over to Louis Vuitton to have a logo stamped and have put in a box and sold without any of the proceeds returning to suppliers. Having said that Shifting the prices to authors with free access for all is generally seen as pretty fair. Open access publishing has always been expensive and NeuroImage is on the cheaper end and on par with PLOS. https://plos.org/publish/fees/ https://plos.org/publish/fees/ Anticipated publication fees get incorporated into grant budgets and in the grand scheme of a grant budget it's a nothingburger. Some journals are associated with societies (peer reviewed by members and made available to society members for a very discounted rate or free but non-members pay for access). Many of those also are ad-supported, though.
- gs17 3y ago
  > It would be pretty interesting if Louis Vuitton items were designed, manufactured, quality controlled, etc entirely by customers who then hand them over to Louis Vuitton to have a logo stamped and have put in a box and sold without any of the proceeds returning to suppliers. And that Louis Vuitton charged the customers for the right to have their work sold.
sacredgally 3y ago
Your points are correct and thoughtful, but you're overlooking something important: a quasi-natural monopoly forms here. When something becomes more valuable by virtue of its popularity, it takes on its own gravity. It is popular because it is popular, and quickly overshadows everything else. This applies to lots of things like social media platforms, MMOs and publishers. Sure, you can publish on the PDF web server of the high-school kid, but no one will ever see it. You don't HAVE to have your website indexed by Google, but in practice, it'll become invisible because of Google's quasi-natural monopoly. - Do you suppose these kinds of quasi-natural monopolies ought to be regulated? - If it is about prestige as you assert, how would you go around changing this dependence in academia (not a trap; genuinely interested)?
jrochkind1 3y ago
Agreed it's not just Elsivier. Agree that some of it is about "prestige", although I think it's somewhat more complicated than that. But let's just take your model, sure. Where does the prestige come from? The editors of the journal, recognizing that they are pretty much solely responsible for the rigor/quality of the content (well, plus the authors of course), believe they can take their prestige with them. Are they wrong? I'm not sure. If so, why? Getting into it -- which I agree requires some knowledge of the actual business and market -- I think will lead you to the conclusion that it's not that nothing will change until "research no longer depends on prestige". The difficulty in changing things with individual walk-outs is real, but it's more about nothing will change until the entire economics of how the publishing system is funded changes. The University of California's battle with Elsevier was more market-shaking than an individual journal editorial board walk-out. The UC did eventually go back to Elsevier. I think they called Elsevier's bluff though. They went two years without an Elsevier contract, and my guess is that Elsevier was worried that the longer they went without it, the more negotiating power they'd have, rather than the more desperation. They wound up with a contract that provided much more open access than ever before, at similar prices to what they had previously been paying for much less open access. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/ucs-deal-elsevier-what-it-took-what-it-means-why-it-matters https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/ucs-deal-elsevie... The basic mismatch is that much (true, not all) of the value is provided by government and university funding (for the salaries of the faculty who do the research, write the articles, serve on the editorial board or referee articles (unpaid by the journals)) -- but the massive profits are all captured by the publisher (who, yes, provide some of the value). While paywalling the product from the citizens of the government who pay for much of it, or residents of the world that the authors who do the research would be happy to share it with. This is a weird situation, and it's not to me obvious that "relying on prestige" requires it to continue like this. But it's an economic/market problem, that will require major changes to the economic arrangements to change, and which the publishers of course won't cooperate with changing, they'll fight it tooth and nail. The UC Elsevier deal may be one model. From the UC press release: > We refer to these agreements as transformative open access agreements because they convert subscription payments into payments for open access publishing (with reading provided for free). It is a new approach we helped develop with other leading institutions a few years ago, in large part through the OA2020 initiative. Elsevier trying to raise prices for publishing (at least for those not covered by blanket contracts from institutions with more negotiating power, like UC) is their attempt to preserve their super-profits against this attempt at changing the market. It's an economic battle, I don't think it's outcome is certain just based on the nature of "prestige" in academic careers. I gather you do work in publishing? But don't want to reveal how? At a major academic publisher? I don't work in publishing, but do work in librarianship, although I don't work in acquisitions at a university, the vicinity gives me some view of the market and industry. Of course, the interests of librarians and those of commercial academic publishers currently seem to be opposed, or perceived as opposed.
daniel-cussen 3y ago
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marcosdumay 3y ago
> yet none of them work in publishing? Why are you so confident people don't know what they are talking about when you are in a forum with a lot of people that clearly work on that industry and a lot that clearly noped out of it after experiencing all the bullshit?
deleted 3y ago
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pessimizer 3y ago
> Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? To rephrase the question and make it less interesting: Why is it that none of the people who think that academic publishing is a scam are academic publishers? It's like asking why abolitionists never seem to own slaves, or to show any understanding of a slaveholder's overhead.
lapinot 3y ago
> 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're basing your whole argumentation on the fact that only money can provide prestige which is upside down. The community provides prestige. History provides prestige. They just happen to have captured it and monetized it. In fields like compsci -- at least in the subfield of programming languages which i know about -- the most prestigious journals and conferences are being run by independent (non-profit) institutions, charge pennies and publish open access. They are still prestigious.

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)

foven 3y ago
Consider you are another researcher (not the one who has just published). You may want to keep up to date with your field. This is good to do and it helps foster new ideas for now and for future proposals. There will be a selection of journals that are relevant to you and they will publish work that, generally, will be tiered by either the scope or impact of the journal. Journal A publishes a lot of papers you find very insightful or useful, journal B publishes some work that is good to know but not profound. If you have maybe 20 minutes, maybe you will read one paper that catches your eye from Journal A. The truest metric of how good the work you do is, at a surface level, is how well cited it is. How much do people read it, and then do they care once they put it down. It is not necessarily the case that putting your paper in a high impact journal gets a lot of citations, but its a lot of exposure and it maximises those chances.
- gtsop 3y ago
  Maybe I am wrong here, but shouldn't the quality metric be whether it acts as a basis for practical applications? As far as I understand, research is supposed to give theoretical answers and frameworks. X works like this. Y doesn't work like that. This knowledge should then be applied to the real world and will be prooved wrong or right. Maybe a silly thought, but I suppose pre 1800 science didn't have to pay such fees to proove the quality of their work, they just applied it. (I understand not all papers can be immediatelly applied, but is that the majotity of the work? And if so, is that a good thing?)
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - 6nf 3y ago
    Unpublished science for practical applications of course exists but that is called R&D and is not generally made public cause it’s corporate IP. If that’s what you mean.
  - sseagull 3y ago
    As a society, we want to have a "portfolio" of research. We want short-term research with tangible results, moderate-term research that builds on the current state of the art and advances it, and long-term research that might pay off decades from now. You also want to mix in "moonshot" research that likely won't pay off, but if it did would be revolutionary. The proportion you invest in each is up for debate. Generally, as the time horizon increases, risk increases, and it becomes less and less likely any particular research direction will pay off, but you still need to do it or you won't have anything after all the current directions have dried up, matured, or otherwise run their course. I think the error people make is to assume academia is supposed to cover all three. Largely, academia covers long-term and maybe some moderate-term and moonshot. Short term is better handled by industry where there is a more direct measure of applicability ($$). But business is generally not interested in the longer term stuff because it is too risky. So academia as a whole is about forming the bricks that industry uses to build useful things. While any particular paper is not going to be useful to society anytime soon (if at all), the aggregate knowledge will likely be useful at some point in the future.

logi2mus 3y ago

Terrence Tao once said he will not publish or edit for Elsevier. But he still said he will referee as scientists without tenure do not have that freedom.

refurb 3y ago

You’ve pretty much nailed it. I anticipate you’ll be downvoted for it. Academic research (one of the big complainers about the cost) could fix this easily - stop rewarding scientists for publishing in those journals! Pick other, less expensive, prestigious enough journals, and academics will publish in those. But the system can’t be broken easily. The prestige of many journals has been developed over decades or in some cases centuries. Saying “my paper got published in the same journal that published the first structure of DNA” buys a lot of street cred. There is a level of snobbery to have published in top journals. The ones that got to their position publishing in those journals, aren’t going to be happy being told “those journals aren’t really much better than an open source journal”. So the system continues - scientists keep reviewing papers for these journals, libraries pay the fees, and scientists send their papers there. Nobody has the balls (understandably) to step outside because their personal career will suffer. When people want Elsevier to drop their fees, they just want the current system in place (exclusive, prestigious journals) but not have to pay for it.

ghaff 3y ago
Fundamentally, changing the academic journal system is "just" about fundamentally changing how academics are recognized, rewarded, and promoted to something that no one really has a blueprint for. (And publish everything and the cream will somehow rise to the top isn't it.) I also suspect that a lot of people complaining the loudest would also be unhappy if their recognition, reward, and promotion system was changed to something even more arbitrary and subjective than it already is.
magicalhippo 3y ago
> Academic research (one of the big complainers about the cost) could fix this easily - stop rewarding scientists for publishing in those journals! From what I know, it's the politicians that rewards scientists for publishing in those journals. At least here in Norway, universities have been competing for funding[1], and publishing in higher-impact ("more prestigious") journals counts for more compared to lower-impact journals. [1]: https://www.regjeringen.no/globalassets/upload/kd/vedlegg/uh/finansiering.pdf https://www.regjeringen.no/globalassets/upload/kd/vedlegg/uh...

jasode 3y ago

>Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, It's because the outsider's mental model of "academic journals publishing" is dominated by seeing the artifacts of publishing: the pdf files. With pdf files then driving the intuition about "what I think the publishing industry is", it makes people conclude that Elsevier is just a "glorified pdf server". (E.g. Scihub can host a bunch of pdf files for free... so academic journals hosting pdf files are not doing anything value-added.) And then to add to the pdf mental model, you have the repeated comments about unpaid volunteer peer reviewers. So the outsiders' intuition follows the same path, if the peer reviewers cost the journal nothing, there is no need for paid academic journals to exist. (E.g. a site like Stackoverflow has unpaid volunteers answering questions and users of that site don't have to pay any subscriptions.) A more accurate mental model looks beyond the "pdf files" and considers how journals also have paid employees to support the journals. E.g.: https://relx.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/ElsevierJobs/?q=editor https://relx.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/ElsevierJobs/?q=editor If one over-simplifies academic journals to "a bunch of pdf files by unpaid peer reviewers" -- then one will always be confused as to why scientists keep submitting their papers to them and why libraries keep paying for subscriptions. The real issue is journals like Elsevier charge too much money.

watwut 3y ago
The reason scientists submit to these journals is that your career depends on which journal you published at. It is collective action problem. And elsevier has massive profit margins. It earns way more then needed to pay emplyees. The reason HN dislikes then is that HN has many members who work or worked in academia.
- jasode 3y ago
  >The reason scientists submit to these journals is that your career depends on which journal you published at. Yes, I agree and wrote a previous comment repeating the reason you gave: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27804504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27804504
- joshvm 3y ago
  This is not true for all fields. Computer science (specifically machine learning) is possibly the most lucrative area to work in right now and comparatively few people publish in journals. Computer vision has been this way for a long time even with journals like IEEE PAMI. Our equivalent is highly competitive conferences that have sloppy/inconsistent peer review and (as a result of the format) limited submissions. You have to submit a full paper and acceptance rates are low. Researchers plan and structure entire projects around deadlines for big venues. Inconsistent peer review is somewhat made up for by community validation (most of the time, since publishing code is strongly correlated with citations). Really big papers often turn up as preprints first because speed is important (if you wait 6 months to go through review, someone will beat you). Or you have fields like astrophysics where everyone cross-publishes in Arxiv when they submit to a journal.

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago

You're saying academic prestige is a Veblen good, like a handbag? Are you sure?

dguest 3y ago
The comparison between publications and handbags is cute... but yes, it falls apart for exactly the reason you mention. A prestigious journal would still be prestigious if they made publication free.
- rizky05 3y ago
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Dma54rhs 3y ago
In academic circles absolutely.
refurb 3y ago
A better analogy is Ivy League colleges. If you graduate from an Ivy League college (or publish in a prestigious journal) others view that as a signal of your qualifications and that can open up careers that require that the box be checked. As such, people are willing to pay a lot of money to go to an Ivy League college (or publish in Nature). And the "system" has a vested interest in keeping that gateway in place, because the people that passed that gateway years before you, don't want to see it go away as it would reduce their own status.
throwawaaarrgh 3y ago
Being published in X journal doesn't make the work any better, but its apparent value is immediately increased by association. Academic institutions openly talk about this as why they use specific journals. They give positions/grants to people who have had more prestigious published articles, not to people who have done better work. The demand for a given researcher increases as their published work in increasingly prestigious journals increases. It's not exactly the same as Veblen goods because what the academic institution is paying for is access to journals. But they need to pay for these expensive journals because they're prestigious, and they need the prestige to decide who gets the money/job, and the prestigious journals know this so they mark up the price. If prestige wasn't what they were paying for, law of supply and demand (and healthy competition - there are many competitors in the market) would make the price dirt cheap. But it's the opposite.

redox99 3y ago

> Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? It's pretty simple. Most of us here are used to just downloading "preprints" pdfs from arxiv for basically any CS/AI paper. If all papers were available on arxiv or an equivalent website for free and without forms, probably nobody here would care or complain about Elsevier et. al. Want to in addition to publishing on arxiv, publish on Nature? Sure go ahead. Want to only read papers after they've been peer reviewed on Nature. Go ahead.

hgsgm 3y ago
It still stinks that Nature hijacked the academic prestige system for its own profit.

cma 3y ago

> 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. Change the analogy so that the customers design and mostly manufacture the bag.

rizky05 3y ago
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christophilus 3y ago
And the government uses taxpayer dollars to fund the design process.
- deleted 3y ago
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krisoft 3y ago

> Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? Because people can have opinions on industries they don’t work in? I don’t work in hospitality, and I have never cooked for a living. I can still confidently tell you when my food is burnt. A chef then can crawl out of the kitchen and explain the complicated process which resulted in me getting burnt food and I won’t care a bit. My tax money paid a researcher to study long years, then my tax money paid for the equipment the researcher used to research and my tax money paid for the researcher’s time too. And then the researcher writes up what they found and pays a third party also from my tax money and that third party does everything in their power to hide the paper away from me. That is burnt food. I don’t have to work in the industry to recognise it.

refurb 3y ago
Nothing wrong with having an opinion, but having a strong opinion ("the solution is so obvious, i can solve this in 5 minutes") about an industry of which you known nothing of the inner workings come across as rather ignorant. Your example of "I can tell when my food is burnt" is a poor one. Can you tell a quality scientific paper? Do you know what's required to get tenure? To get scientific funding? All of those are relevant as to why the scientific publishing system works as it does today. If you don't know those things, then you don't know how to solve the problem.
- j-bos 3y ago
  >Can you tell a quality scientific paper? Given the replication crisis, maybe scientific publishing as it works today also can't tell quality.
  - VHRanger 3y ago
    The replication crisis is much worse in fields without open publishing. Computer science/physics/etc. (arxiv), economics (NBER) and other fields with freely available papers tend to have much better replication numbers than fields that are closed-off. This is even better when data and code are publicly available.

6nf 3y ago

Is our tax dollars funding science or not? If it is tax funded why can’t I have a damn opinion? It’s my money.

anonymouskimmer 3y ago
I presume you can still email the author for a free copy.

mycologos 3y ago

> So take a moment and ask yourself why any of these publishers shouldn't take the same flak? It's reasonable to focus on one example of a general problem and try to solve the sub-problem first. > 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. This is conflating two things. A Louis Vuitton bag is a Veblen good because people pay more for it because paying more for it demonstrates that they have a lot of money. Publishing in an Elsevier journal is not a Veblen good, because the researcher wants the prestige of producing research of sufficient quality to appear in an Elsevier journal. They don't want the prestige of paying a high publication fee. Anyway, I'm a computer science researcher. Every paper I've ever written is on Arxiv, and most of them also appeared in archival conferences. Paywall journals are an anti-signal for paper quality in my field. I wrote one paper that appeared in a journal, and that publishing/editing process was nothing but a waste of time to get the material into the journal's format. The publisher added nothing. The continued existence of publishers is a historical accident specific to fields that started when they served a purpose (distributing a hard-copy journal) and have lacked respected senior researchers with enough entrepreneurial vim to set up their own open-access alternatives. The reviewing process and name recognition is the thing keeping those publishers alive. None of that is provided by the publisher, it's provided by the researchers who work inside it. Earlier I wrote "the researcher wants the prestige of producing research of sufficient quality to appear in an Elsevier journal". That's not really true, they want "the prestige of producing research of sufficient quality to [be accepted by the kinds of reviewers who would reviewer for an] Elsevier journal". ML research has sort of solved this problem via conferences, which are imperfect, but seem substantially better than the journal review process I can see my peers in other fields navigating. Free markets are cool and all, but sometimes they screw up, especially when they interact with governments and institutions. Publishers currently live in this sweet spot, but science really doesn't need them to.

bro_thebro 3y ago

The analogy you made using Louis Vuitton handbags is fairly weak. Louis Vouitton handbags are prestigious because they're expensive. If the time comes where Louis Vuitton handbags are given free of charge to any Tom, Dick, or Harry, Louis Vuitton loses its prestige. On the other hand, successfully publishing in a prestigious journal, would still be prestigious even if it was done for free.

daniel-cussen 3y ago
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anonymouskimmer 3y ago
> On the other hand, successfully publishing in a prestigious journal, would still be prestigious even if it was done for free. As long as the prestigious journal doesn't balloon to a million pages per issue.

testHNac 3y ago

> Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? I find this with almost any topic I am familiar with. The absolute confidence with which certain things were stated on HN was completely different from my lived experience. This made me start placing less value on HN comments, and going and reading up more when I found a topic interesting. I also find comments related to a certain worldviews generally get voted up more. Probably it's because of the HN demographic.

bombcar 3y ago
HN is subject to all the trials and tribulations of any social media, it just hides some of it better through excellent moderation and consisting mainly of identical people.
- testHNac 3y ago
  If I compare this to Reddit, there are subreddits for different topics with people of different mindset frequenting those subreddits. That at least offers you a space to discuss something which might not be popular with most readers. With HN you if your comment is completely against the thinking of a certain demographic ( identical people as you put it), it's downvoted heavily. No chance for constructive comments or discussion like on subreddits.
Guest42 3y ago
Same issue here, could be a topic that I have 10 years of experience in both academically and professionally. The instant contrarianism without any experiene is quite astounding.

eynsham 3y ago

There’s quite an interesting model by which the editors of a prestigious closed journal leave en masse and set up a new open-access one, hopefully transferring the prestige of the former one. Gowers wrote about it here (https://gowers.wordpress.com/2018/06/04/a-new-journal-in-combinatorics/ https://gowers.wordpress.com/2018/06/04/a-new-journal-in-com...). I’d claim that it’s mostly inertia that’s the problem. Prestige doesn’t require profit.

wolverine876 3y ago
That's what is described in the article.

fabian2k 3y ago

The big difference here is that prestige has nothing to do with cost, unlike your Louis Voutton comparison. Prestige is entirely based on the perception of the journals among scientists and on the prestige of the papers themselves that are published in them. And the scientists individually don't have a choice unless they are closer to the end of their career. Intentionally publishing in less prestigious journals will sabotage your career, period. And there are certainly aspect here that people without any more in-depth knowledge can criticize, e.g. the overall issue that publicly-funded research is put behind paywalls or that a very large part of the work gets done by reviewers that are not even paid by the publishers but mostly by the public.

kelipso 3y ago
> The big difference here is that prestige has nothing to do with cost, unlike your Louis Voutton comparison. Yep, usually it's the opposite. You pay more money to get published through easy to get into conferences. If you're not in academia or don't have some membership, you pay way more to get into conferences. You pay thousands more to get published in low quality open access journals because your paper is not good enough. Etc. (Also no one pays $50 to read a single article, you get it for free through the university library.)
- nottorp 3y ago
  > Also no one pays $50 to read a single article, you get it for free through the university library. Let's rephrase. No one who doesn't get the article for free through the university library can afford to read it.
anonymouskimmer 3y ago
> And the scientists individually don't have a choice unless they are closer to the end of their career. Intentionally publishing in less prestigious journals will sabotage your career, period. I think it would be helpful if corporate scientists published more. They too value prestige for bragging rights, or whatever, but a corporate career is more about patents and blockbuster products than about publication. So corporate scientists could sabotage the prestige of publications. Many corporations could also afford to hire editors and self-publish their own journals. For students looking for jobs in industry, or for PIs who want to place their students in industry, publishing in the corporate journals would be better than publishing in tier 1 journals.

deleted 3y ago

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fluidcruft 3y ago

It would be pretty interesting if Louis Vuitton items were designed, manufactured, quality controlled, etc entirely by customers who then hand them over to Louis Vuitton to have a logo stamped and have put in a box and sold without any of the proceeds returning to suppliers. Having said that Shifting the prices to authors with free access for all is generally seen as pretty fair. Open access publishing has always been expensive and NeuroImage is on the cheaper end and on par with PLOS. https://plos.org/publish/fees/ https://plos.org/publish/fees/ Anticipated publication fees get incorporated into grant budgets and in the grand scheme of a grant budget it's a nothingburger. Some journals are associated with societies (peer reviewed by members and made available to society members for a very discounted rate or free but non-members pay for access). Many of those also are ad-supported, though.

gs17 3y ago
> It would be pretty interesting if Louis Vuitton items were designed, manufactured, quality controlled, etc entirely by customers who then hand them over to Louis Vuitton to have a logo stamped and have put in a box and sold without any of the proceeds returning to suppliers. And that Louis Vuitton charged the customers for the right to have their work sold.

sacredgally 3y ago

Your points are correct and thoughtful, but you're overlooking something important: a quasi-natural monopoly forms here. When something becomes more valuable by virtue of its popularity, it takes on its own gravity. It is popular because it is popular, and quickly overshadows everything else. This applies to lots of things like social media platforms, MMOs and publishers. Sure, you can publish on the PDF web server of the high-school kid, but no one will ever see it. You don't HAVE to have your website indexed by Google, but in practice, it'll become invisible because of Google's quasi-natural monopoly. - Do you suppose these kinds of quasi-natural monopolies ought to be regulated? - If it is about prestige as you assert, how would you go around changing this dependence in academia (not a trap; genuinely interested)?

jrochkind1 3y ago

Agreed it's not just Elsivier. Agree that some of it is about "prestige", although I think it's somewhat more complicated than that. But let's just take your model, sure. Where does the prestige come from? The editors of the journal, recognizing that they are pretty much solely responsible for the rigor/quality of the content (well, plus the authors of course), believe they can take their prestige with them. Are they wrong? I'm not sure. If so, why? Getting into it -- which I agree requires some knowledge of the actual business and market -- I think will lead you to the conclusion that it's not that nothing will change until "research no longer depends on prestige". The difficulty in changing things with individual walk-outs is real, but it's more about nothing will change until the entire economics of how the publishing system is funded changes. The University of California's battle with Elsevier was more market-shaking than an individual journal editorial board walk-out. The UC did eventually go back to Elsevier. I think they called Elsevier's bluff though. They went two years without an Elsevier contract, and my guess is that Elsevier was worried that the longer they went without it, the more negotiating power they'd have, rather than the more desperation. They wound up with a contract that provided much more open access than ever before, at similar prices to what they had previously been paying for much less open access. https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/ucs-deal-elsevier-what-it-took-what-it-means-why-it-matters https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/ucs-deal-elsevie... The basic mismatch is that much (true, not all) of the value is provided by government and university funding (for the salaries of the faculty who do the research, write the articles, serve on the editorial board or referee articles (unpaid by the journals)) -- but the massive profits are all captured by the publisher (who, yes, provide some of the value). While paywalling the product from the citizens of the government who pay for much of it, or residents of the world that the authors who do the research would be happy to share it with. This is a weird situation, and it's not to me obvious that "relying on prestige" requires it to continue like this. But it's an economic/market problem, that will require major changes to the economic arrangements to change, and which the publishers of course won't cooperate with changing, they'll fight it tooth and nail. The UC Elsevier deal may be one model. From the UC press release: > We refer to these agreements as transformative open access agreements because they convert subscription payments into payments for open access publishing (with reading provided for free). It is a new approach we helped develop with other leading institutions a few years ago, in large part through the OA2020 initiative. Elsevier trying to raise prices for publishing (at least for those not covered by blanket contracts from institutions with more negotiating power, like UC) is their attempt to preserve their super-profits against this attempt at changing the market. It's an economic battle, I don't think it's outcome is certain just based on the nature of "prestige" in academic careers. I gather you do work in publishing? But don't want to reveal how? At a major academic publisher? I don't work in publishing, but do work in librarianship, although I don't work in acquisitions at a university, the vicinity gives me some view of the market and industry. Of course, the interests of librarians and those of commercial academic publishers currently seem to be opposed, or perceived as opposed.

daniel-cussen 3y ago

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marcosdumay 3y ago

> yet none of them work in publishing? Why are you so confident people don't know what they are talking about when you are in a forum with a lot of people that clearly work on that industry and a lot that clearly noped out of it after experiencing all the bullshit?

deleted 3y ago

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pessimizer 3y ago

> Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? To rephrase the question and make it less interesting: Why is it that none of the people who think that academic publishing is a scam are academic publishers? It's like asking why abolitionists never seem to own slaves, or to show any understanding of a slaveholder's overhead.

lapinot 3y ago

> 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're basing your whole argumentation on the fact that only money can provide prestige which is upside down. The community provides prestige. History provides prestige. They just happen to have captured it and monetized it. In fields like compsci -- at least in the subfield of programming languages which i know about -- the most prestigious journals and conferences are being run by independent (non-profit) institutions, charge pennies and publish open access. They are still prestigious.