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>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
by 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 agoThe 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 agoThis 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.