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Network effect. "Everyone" subscribed to Elsevier, so if you wanted your papers to get visibility and citations, you tried to get it published in their journal

Network effect. "Everyone" subscribed to Elsevier, so if you wanted your papers to get visibility and citations, you tried to get it published in their journals. They are a relic of a bygone era. They made sense when journals were physical publications in the library. Elsevier was the one-stop-shop for all of the major academic journals. But with the internet, they make less sense and kept their position through inertia and rent seeking behavior.

adelmotsjr 2y ago
I think the issue is more than that though, because if the physical aspect were only the barrier, they should have disappeared by the time the Internet came along. I think (and this is only my honest, outsider perspective) that the issue is, and always was, about trust. As in: who is this dude publishing this paper about high-energy particle physics? I don't know him, so I don't trust him. But I do know about Science, and Nature, and other Journals, so I'm gonna use them. That's why Elsevier and Springer and other publishers continued to exist. Problem is, science isn't about trust. It's about knowledge, and more importantly, truth. But how do get the truth? Well, there's witnesses, and evidence, and Reproducibility™ of statements to produce facts. Y'know, science itself. If we could somehow resolve the reproducibility crisis of science, I think we would be one step closer to ending the parasitic mono-duo-oligo-whateverpoly of these publishers. Because then it would not be about who I trust to move forward the science enterprise. Instead it would be about facts themselves, and about confirming, via evidence and reproducibility of these facts, that would promote a piece of statement into knowledge. And that is how science should always have been, since the very beginning. But the reproduction of experiments is a problem in itself, that might be the cause of the 'relying-on-trust' issue. Since not all experiments are a simple ./build-and-run.sh script, and some involve a lot of money (think anything in medicine, physics, geology, oceanography, and the list goes on to ∞), it ends up being about someone that is reputable and reliable that had money and did the experiment and published in some journal that I know.
- amadeuspagel 2y ago
  A certain trust is necessary even to invest the effort to understand a paper.
rtpg 2y ago
Curation is, theoretically, a value-add that doesn't magically disappear with the internet. "This paper is not utter garbage" is a nice signal, if it's true.
- mitthrowaway2 2y ago
  Anybody can curate. Curating a work doesn't require an exclusive copyright to publish that work. Michelin curates restaurants without charging their guests for admission. You can even start a subscription newsletter titled "rtpg's best of Arxiv", containing curated links to a shortlist of the highest quality research you can find. It could become very prestigious for researchers to be mentioned in your newsletter, and your own reputation will hinge on the quality of the papers you link to (and the ones you leave out). Even so, this service still doesn't require that you host or own copyright to those works! Nor does this arrangement require that any one work be found on only one single curator's shortlist and no others.
  - rtpg 2y ago
    I agree! I don't think these actions need to be bundled together. I'm mainly just saying that curation is helpful, IMO.
  - lelanthran 2y ago
    > You can even start a subscription newsletter titled "rtpg's best of Arxiv", containing curated links to a shortlist of the highest quality research you can find. That's something worth signing up for.
- canjobear 2y ago
  There are prestigious open-access journals that are curated in exactly the same way Elsevier ones are. Curation is completely orthogonal to whether a paper is owned by the publisher cartels.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
dredmorbius 2y ago
More importantly, prestige journals gateway career advancement, and in some cases, degree attainment, within numerous disciplines. This is covered extensively by advocates including Tim Gowers (maths) and Bjoern Brembs, both of whom blog heavily: <https://gowers.wordpress.com/category/Elsevier/ https://gowers.wordpress.com/category/Elsevier/> <https://bjoern.brembs.net/tag/open-access/ https://bjoern.brembs.net/tag/open-access/> More so for some fields than others: physics, chemistry, and biology are making significant use of pre-publication and open-publication options (e.g.., arXiv, PLOS, PUBMED, BioMED). Medicine apparently less so (closed-access publishers include the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, and Nature). For social sciences open-access/prepub options include SSRN, RePEc, and EconStore, but much research remains in closed-access journals. Law is almost exclusively closed-access, which is problematic in all manner of ways.

adelmotsjr 2y ago

I think the issue is more than that though, because if the physical aspect were only the barrier, they should have disappeared by the time the Internet came along. I think (and this is only my honest, outsider perspective) that the issue is, and always was, about trust. As in: who is this dude publishing this paper about high-energy particle physics? I don't know him, so I don't trust him. But I do know about Science, and Nature, and other Journals, so I'm gonna use them. That's why Elsevier and Springer and other publishers continued to exist. Problem is, science isn't about trust. It's about knowledge, and more importantly, truth. But how do get the truth? Well, there's witnesses, and evidence, and Reproducibility™ of statements to produce facts. Y'know, science itself. If we could somehow resolve the reproducibility crisis of science, I think we would be one step closer to ending the parasitic mono-duo-oligo-whateverpoly of these publishers. Because then it would not be about who I trust to move forward the science enterprise. Instead it would be about facts themselves, and about confirming, via evidence and reproducibility of these facts, that would promote a piece of statement into knowledge. And that is how science should always have been, since the very beginning. But the reproduction of experiments is a problem in itself, that might be the cause of the 'relying-on-trust' issue. Since not all experiments are a simple ./build-and-run.sh script, and some involve a lot of money (think anything in medicine, physics, geology, oceanography, and the list goes on to ∞), it ends up being about someone that is reputable and reliable that had money and did the experiment and published in some journal that I know.

amadeuspagel 2y ago
A certain trust is necessary even to invest the effort to understand a paper.

rtpg 2y ago

Curation is, theoretically, a value-add that doesn't magically disappear with the internet. "This paper is not utter garbage" is a nice signal, if it's true.

mitthrowaway2 2y ago
Anybody can curate. Curating a work doesn't require an exclusive copyright to publish that work. Michelin curates restaurants without charging their guests for admission. You can even start a subscription newsletter titled "rtpg's best of Arxiv", containing curated links to a shortlist of the highest quality research you can find. It could become very prestigious for researchers to be mentioned in your newsletter, and your own reputation will hinge on the quality of the papers you link to (and the ones you leave out). Even so, this service still doesn't require that you host or own copyright to those works! Nor does this arrangement require that any one work be found on only one single curator's shortlist and no others.
- rtpg 2y ago
  I agree! I don't think these actions need to be bundled together. I'm mainly just saying that curation is helpful, IMO.
- lelanthran 2y ago
  > You can even start a subscription newsletter titled "rtpg's best of Arxiv", containing curated links to a shortlist of the highest quality research you can find. That's something worth signing up for.
canjobear 2y ago
There are prestigious open-access journals that are curated in exactly the same way Elsevier ones are. Curation is completely orthogonal to whether a paper is owned by the publisher cartels.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

dredmorbius 2y ago

More importantly, prestige journals gateway career advancement, and in some cases, degree attainment, within numerous disciplines. This is covered extensively by advocates including Tim Gowers (maths) and Bjoern Brembs, both of whom blog heavily: <https://gowers.wordpress.com/category/Elsevier/ https://gowers.wordpress.com/category/Elsevier/> <https://bjoern.brembs.net/tag/open-access/ https://bjoern.brembs.net/tag/open-access/> More so for some fields than others: physics, chemistry, and biology are making significant use of pre-publication and open-publication options (e.g.., arXiv, PLOS, PUBMED, BioMED). Medicine apparently less so (closed-access publishers include the New England Journal of Medicine, Lancet, and Nature). For social sciences open-access/prepub options include SSRN, RePEc, and EconStore, but much research remains in closed-access journals. Law is almost exclusively closed-access, which is problematic in all manner of ways.