4 ms·

Most academic publishers have become parasites: they don't pay for the research, they don't pay the authors, and they don't pay for the peer review, yet they ow

Most academic publishers have become parasites: they don't pay for the research, they don't pay the authors, and they don't pay for the peer review, yet they own the result. One solution: as a condition of receiving a government grant, any derived work must be published as open access, zero embargo. The only reasonable reason for the embargo was to give legacy publishers time to adjust their business models. That time has past. We don't need buggy whip manufacturers, and we don't need legacy academic publishers. Good riddance. I welcome the good publishers who have arrived at the future. We need to help get that future evenly distributed.

godelski 3y ago
> they don't pay for the research, they don't pay the authors, and they don't pay for the peer review, yet they own the result. On to of that, they get government funding, they get funding from the universities, they get funding from private industries, and they have all those people work for them for free too. (posted in another comment) I don't get why we just don't publish to OpenReview or improve OR and publish to that thing.
rscho 3y ago
'Open access' currently translates to 'pay the publisher $5000 upfront'. I think they're making even more money with this scheme than the previous pay-to-read one. Keep in mind that most papers are never cited, and who's going to pay to read an old and never cited paper? So, I feel like open access is not a significant improvement, really. It allows laypeople to access papers, but how much of that is really useful?
em3rgent0rdr 3y ago
We don't even need publishers! Just remove them entirely from the equation! PDFs can be hosted on the net for a trivial cost.
- derefr 3y ago
  Are we talking about textbook publishers, or journal publishers? For textbooks, I completely agree; but part of the value of journals is 1. (purported) peer review of the articles as a prerequisite to publication, and 2. a hierarchy of journal importance, where only the most ground-shaking things "make the cut" for the "highest" journals, thereby allowing people to follow a field "from the top down" by reading the top N journals (which should confer "most" knowledge of updates in the field, while dropping most noise; a bit like reading the first N paragraphs of a news article written in inverted-pyramid style.) I know that trait #1 is on shaky ground these days, and trait #2 is something most people don't even publicly acknowledge is valuable. But they're both things that, if we discarded the current model of journals, we'd be doomed to reinvent (and therefore to produce new middle-men out of.) If we're to have a proper replacement for journal publishers, it would have to perform these functions, while not being so parasitic about it. (As just one idea, maybe journals could be run as nonprofit or industry-membership-funded bodies, rather than as corporations.)
dclowd9901 3y ago
I welcome published papers that aren't PDFs. Give me a published paper (fingerprinted) on a website that's imminently readable. Hell, maybe even has interactive elements! Bring the whole damn thing into the 21st century.
Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago
That's already a condition for many governments/grants/etc. The publishers are ok with it because they just put an open-access surcharge of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per article.
huijzer 3y ago
Here is a joke I came up with: give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach a man how to run an academic journal and academia will feed him for a lifetime
conradev 3y ago
Like this? https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/08/25/ostp-issues-guidance-to-make-federally-funded-research-freely-available-without-delay/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/08/25/ostp...
methou 3y ago
"Open Access" is actually a paid option in the publishing process. You have to pay for that with your grant money, or worse, out of your own pocket. Some authors publish manuscripts somewhere(e.g. PubMed in my previous area), which might be slightly different from the final version (editing, and/or formatting). If there's a law to support real Open Access, may be they should require the paper to be posted on the grants.gov, or somewhere equivalent.

godelski 3y ago

> they don't pay for the research, they don't pay the authors, and they don't pay for the peer review, yet they own the result. On to of that, they get government funding, they get funding from the universities, they get funding from private industries, and they have all those people work for them for free too. (posted in another comment) I don't get why we just don't publish to OpenReview or improve OR and publish to that thing.

rscho 3y ago

'Open access' currently translates to 'pay the publisher $5000 upfront'. I think they're making even more money with this scheme than the previous pay-to-read one. Keep in mind that most papers are never cited, and who's going to pay to read an old and never cited paper? So, I feel like open access is not a significant improvement, really. It allows laypeople to access papers, but how much of that is really useful?

em3rgent0rdr 3y ago

We don't even need publishers! Just remove them entirely from the equation! PDFs can be hosted on the net for a trivial cost.

derefr 3y ago
Are we talking about textbook publishers, or journal publishers? For textbooks, I completely agree; but part of the value of journals is 1. (purported) peer review of the articles as a prerequisite to publication, and 2. a hierarchy of journal importance, where only the most ground-shaking things "make the cut" for the "highest" journals, thereby allowing people to follow a field "from the top down" by reading the top N journals (which should confer "most" knowledge of updates in the field, while dropping most noise; a bit like reading the first N paragraphs of a news article written in inverted-pyramid style.) I know that trait #1 is on shaky ground these days, and trait #2 is something most people don't even publicly acknowledge is valuable. But they're both things that, if we discarded the current model of journals, we'd be doomed to reinvent (and therefore to produce new middle-men out of.) If we're to have a proper replacement for journal publishers, it would have to perform these functions, while not being so parasitic about it. (As just one idea, maybe journals could be run as nonprofit or industry-membership-funded bodies, rather than as corporations.)

dclowd9901 3y ago

I welcome published papers that aren't PDFs. Give me a published paper (fingerprinted) on a website that's imminently readable. Hell, maybe even has interactive elements! Bring the whole damn thing into the 21st century.

Eddy_Viscosity2 3y ago

That's already a condition for many governments/grants/etc. The publishers are ok with it because they just put an open-access surcharge of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per article.

huijzer 3y ago

Here is a joke I came up with: give a man a fish and he will eat for a day, teach a man how to run an academic journal and academia will feed him for a lifetime

conradev 3y ago

Like this? https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/08/25/ostp-issues-guidance-to-make-federally-funded-research-freely-available-without-delay/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/08/25/ostp...

methou 3y ago

"Open Access" is actually a paid option in the publishing process. You have to pay for that with your grant money, or worse, out of your own pocket. Some authors publish manuscripts somewhere(e.g. PubMed in my previous area), which might be slightly different from the final version (editing, and/or formatting). If there's a law to support real Open Access, may be they should require the paper to be posted on the grants.gov, or somewhere equivalent.