3 ms·

Publishers do a lot more than print things out. I'm not saying that what they do is good, but "let's just put it on the internet" doesn't replace publishers any

Publishers do a lot more than print things out. I'm not saying that what they do is good, but "let's just put it on the internet" doesn't replace publishers any more than rideshares replace long-haul trucking.

impendia 2y ago
What, exactly, is this "a lot more"? I am an academic who publishes regularly, and I'm having difficulty figuring this out. They clearly employ lots of bureaucrats, middle managers, and lawyers. They are constantly trying to make sketchy side deals with third parties, as T&F did. They employ copyeditors, who in theory (and sometimes in practice) improve papers but who very often are totally incompetent. They maintain large databases of something-or-other, presumably so they can sell out my data. They maintain complicated systems to submit and review papers, when it seems that email would suffice, presumably so they can track all this metadata they want to sell. Oh! And they lobby the government for their own selfish ends: https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2018/jun/29/elsevier-are-corrupting-open-science-in-europe https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2018/j... Seriously. Imagine all of them up and vanished tomorrow. Would anybody miss them?
- richardw 2y ago
  They’re branding experts. Getting published by Nature is far more valuable to someone compared to (all the other options). Humans prize exclusivity. We’ll hand our time and resources to people who can give us a tiny bit of it. The harder we have to work, the better. A fancy watch. A low production supercar you can’t buy unless you have 5 of the same marque already. All the same broken stupid pattern.
- chefandy 2y ago
  Again, I didn't say that what they do is the right way to do it, but what about discoverability? Would researchers just submit their document to every library in the world? If no entity is vetting these papers in a basic way, what's to prevent the entire channel from being taken over with spam? Is it done entirely by URL, and what's to stop the cited content from changing? What if they lose their domain? Is the similar domain that pops up with similar content the same author or someone that just ripped the site and is going to start serving up ads as soon as everyone switches their URIs? Or maybe we'd have libraries go out and actively retrieve this stuff rather than passively accepting it-- Would they monitor... mailing lists? What if someone posts a timely and incredibly controversial paper that lists a respected authority that just died as its author? What's to stop an author that published a bullshit paper from passively claiming it was a forgery? Would you, currently, give equal weight to citations published in the New England Journal of Medicine and a google doc with a bunch of citations to other google docs and personal websites? If we have centralized locations for this work, how would they not be publishers? Beyond that, current URL citations are a fucking mess. Link rot is a huge problem and most of the people that make citations in papers have no idea how to mitigate it. Discoverability, relatively stable hosting, and the most base-level vetting and credibility are problems that they address, even if they do so poorly and greedily. If they went away tomorrow, so would the databases of work they manage, the APIs libraries use to query them, their mechanisms to confirm that whoever said they published something actually published it... Publishers don't have to be the answer-- I think a lot of these problems could be resolved through field organizations, librarianship and university organizations, but what's the likelihood that of universities and field organizations will try to monetize it and essentially become publishers in all of the worst ways?
  - skeledrew 2y ago
    The Internet Archive et al alleviates the majority of those concerns. And it isn't publishers in and of themselves that make a work credible, but the peer reviewers. I can easily see some extra function on IA that allows verified users, some of whom will be peers, to formally review and endorse works. Want to find high quality works? Search and filter by number of endorsing reviewers with related works on their profile.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - FireBeyond 2y ago
    > the most base-level vetting and credibility are problems that they address No they don't. They get that for free too, with "volunteer editors". Stable hosting and gatekeeping, that's about it.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - pdonis 2y ago
      Stable hosting--which we, the taxpayers, who already paid for the research that was published, then have to pay again to get access to, unless we're affiliated with an academic institution, in which case the academic institution is paying for access to papers that the taxpayers already paid for.
      - chefandy 2y ago
        Even for the large amount of research that isn't publicly funded and is done by private research organizations and universities, there's no reason it shouldn't be available to the general public, for free. I wish someone would actually do it while meeting the use cases of the other stakeholders.
  - pdonis 2y ago
    > what about discoverability? That's what Google and other search engines are for. arxiv.org even has its own search function. Nobody depends on journals for this. > Would researchers just submit their document to every library in the world? No, just post it on a known website like arxiv.org. Then anyone with Internet access can get to it, and they don't even have to go to a library. > If no entity is vetting these papers in a basic way You do have to have academic credentials to post papers on arxiv.org. Not only that, but plenty of papers published in journals turn out to have been bogus--not just wrong (many papers published in good faith later turn out to be wrong, that's part of science) but based on faked data, and nobody in the journal review chain spotted it. So the supposed vetting that journals provide doesn't really add any value anyway. > What if they lose their domain? arxiv.org is supported by many academic institutions and foundations. They're not going anywhere. > If we have centralized locations for this work, how would they not be publishers? By being arxiv.org or something like it. In other words, there is already an existing example of a non-publisher that addresses all the problems you say journal publishers address--and does it much better.
- musicale 2y ago
  > Seriously. Imagine all of them up and vanished tomorrow. Would anybody miss them? Probably not much. Arxiv works pretty well. Usenix is already open access. NSF-funded research already has to comply with their 12 month open access policy (zero months would be better though.) I don't see many good reasons for journals to stick with non open access publishers.
pdonis 2y ago
If what they do isn't good, why would we want them to keep doing it?

impendia 2y ago

What, exactly, is this "a lot more"? I am an academic who publishes regularly, and I'm having difficulty figuring this out. They clearly employ lots of bureaucrats, middle managers, and lawyers. They are constantly trying to make sketchy side deals with third parties, as T&F did. They employ copyeditors, who in theory (and sometimes in practice) improve papers but who very often are totally incompetent. They maintain large databases of something-or-other, presumably so they can sell out my data. They maintain complicated systems to submit and review papers, when it seems that email would suffice, presumably so they can track all this metadata they want to sell. Oh! And they lobby the government for their own selfish ends: https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2018/jun/29/elsevier-are-corrupting-open-science-in-europe https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2018/j... Seriously. Imagine all of them up and vanished tomorrow. Would anybody miss them?

richardw 2y ago
They’re branding experts. Getting published by Nature is far more valuable to someone compared to (all the other options). Humans prize exclusivity. We’ll hand our time and resources to people who can give us a tiny bit of it. The harder we have to work, the better. A fancy watch. A low production supercar you can’t buy unless you have 5 of the same marque already. All the same broken stupid pattern.
chefandy 2y ago
Again, I didn't say that what they do is the right way to do it, but what about discoverability? Would researchers just submit their document to every library in the world? If no entity is vetting these papers in a basic way, what's to prevent the entire channel from being taken over with spam? Is it done entirely by URL, and what's to stop the cited content from changing? What if they lose their domain? Is the similar domain that pops up with similar content the same author or someone that just ripped the site and is going to start serving up ads as soon as everyone switches their URIs? Or maybe we'd have libraries go out and actively retrieve this stuff rather than passively accepting it-- Would they monitor... mailing lists? What if someone posts a timely and incredibly controversial paper that lists a respected authority that just died as its author? What's to stop an author that published a bullshit paper from passively claiming it was a forgery? Would you, currently, give equal weight to citations published in the New England Journal of Medicine and a google doc with a bunch of citations to other google docs and personal websites? If we have centralized locations for this work, how would they not be publishers? Beyond that, current URL citations are a fucking mess. Link rot is a huge problem and most of the people that make citations in papers have no idea how to mitigate it. Discoverability, relatively stable hosting, and the most base-level vetting and credibility are problems that they address, even if they do so poorly and greedily. If they went away tomorrow, so would the databases of work they manage, the APIs libraries use to query them, their mechanisms to confirm that whoever said they published something actually published it... Publishers don't have to be the answer-- I think a lot of these problems could be resolved through field organizations, librarianship and university organizations, but what's the likelihood that of universities and field organizations will try to monetize it and essentially become publishers in all of the worst ways?
- skeledrew 2y ago
  The Internet Archive et al alleviates the majority of those concerns. And it isn't publishers in and of themselves that make a work credible, but the peer reviewers. I can easily see some extra function on IA that allows verified users, some of whom will be peers, to formally review and endorse works. Want to find high quality works? Search and filter by number of endorsing reviewers with related works on their profile.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- FireBeyond 2y ago
  > the most base-level vetting and credibility are problems that they address No they don't. They get that for free too, with "volunteer editors". Stable hosting and gatekeeping, that's about it.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - pdonis 2y ago
    Stable hosting--which we, the taxpayers, who already paid for the research that was published, then have to pay again to get access to, unless we're affiliated with an academic institution, in which case the academic institution is paying for access to papers that the taxpayers already paid for.
    - chefandy 2y ago
      Even for the large amount of research that isn't publicly funded and is done by private research organizations and universities, there's no reason it shouldn't be available to the general public, for free. I wish someone would actually do it while meeting the use cases of the other stakeholders.
- pdonis 2y ago
  > what about discoverability? That's what Google and other search engines are for. arxiv.org even has its own search function. Nobody depends on journals for this. > Would researchers just submit their document to every library in the world? No, just post it on a known website like arxiv.org. Then anyone with Internet access can get to it, and they don't even have to go to a library. > If no entity is vetting these papers in a basic way You do have to have academic credentials to post papers on arxiv.org. Not only that, but plenty of papers published in journals turn out to have been bogus--not just wrong (many papers published in good faith later turn out to be wrong, that's part of science) but based on faked data, and nobody in the journal review chain spotted it. So the supposed vetting that journals provide doesn't really add any value anyway. > What if they lose their domain? arxiv.org is supported by many academic institutions and foundations. They're not going anywhere. > If we have centralized locations for this work, how would they not be publishers? By being arxiv.org or something like it. In other words, there is already an existing example of a non-publisher that addresses all the problems you say journal publishers address--and does it much better.
musicale 2y ago
> Seriously. Imagine all of them up and vanished tomorrow. Would anybody miss them? Probably not much. Arxiv works pretty well. Usenix is already open access. NSF-funded research already has to comply with their 12 month open access policy (zero months would be better though.) I don't see many good reasons for journals to stick with non open access publishers.

pdonis 2y ago

If what they do isn't good, why would we want them to keep doing it?