18 ms·

Author-paid publication fees corrupt science and should be abandoned

305 points by anigbrowl 2y ago

typedef_struct 2y ago
Oh science. Peer review, the ultimate "LGTM", stands in for replication.
elashri 2y ago
> Publishers need money to pay for typesetters, proof-readers, and editors Maybe in the past but most of the journals now will return the manuscript to the author or charge for revisions and any typing service. The margin in academic publishing industry is one of the highest in all industries for a reason. But I agree with the author that open source publishing incentives publishing more papers even if it is of lower quality. But also it does harm the repetition of the journal. The elephant in the room that people usually avoid is that this is a political problem. You cannot rely on publications and journals impact factor in grant selections and academic careers evaluations and expect to solve this problem. No scientist is going to choose to publish an article on their website vs a journal if it will not only not add but harm their careers. Yes people put papers on arxiv but most of who wants to continue in academia will submit them for a traditional journal publication. And how would we fix that? That's a policy reforms of funding agencies and academic institutions evaluation methodology.
- godelski 2y ago
  Funny thing is I've had paper rejected where the only complaints were about a few spelling mistakes and grammar. They didn't say where but I guess that's enough
- throwaway14356 2y ago
  So scientists created this new publishing platform called the www but other scientists with no such expertise pretend it hurts their reputation to use it? That seems rather comical. Do they perhaps have a constructive argument to offer? If they desire a harsh rigorous review mechanism it doesn't seem very hard or expensive to build. Anon reviewers, top noch reviewers, they can have many tiers. It isn't the journal that has prestige but the track record of its reviewers. Mirror the topics on a discussion platform with separate sections for different skill levels. Heavy contributors earn bragging rights. Mirror the topics on a wiki and have experts approve edits. There is prestige in just approving contributions and having conversations. A chat client is also imaginable where one approves/adds contacts by type of publication. Each can run rare expensive advertising that lives up to unreasonable demands. But no? That would hurt the reputation - just because?
  - jpeloquin 2y ago
    The problem with gold OA is the proliferation of low-quality spam, and the recommended remedy is to both restore exclusivity (raise the barrier to entry) without supporting excessive (monopolistic, exploitative) journal subscription fees. The article's recommendation to build up society journals has a decent chance of accomplishing this. It won't prevent spam from getting published, but the only essential aspect is to keep the spam easily identifiable (e.g., published by MDPI) so it can be safely ignored. The www seems to facilitate the spam business model so I don't think the spam will go away entirely.
    - throwaway14356 2y ago
      Assuming you want to get rid of the fees entirely: people will have to look at the spam and divide it into more and less spammy. Others will have to do the same with the less spammy and so on. Eventually there is room for more accomplished moderators Until those with the greatest prestige filter down to a tiny sub set. You assign weights to the experts so that with each level of review the good half raises in rank much more than the previous round. At first you do it by committee but eventually the rating for each scientists can be derived from the importance of their publication(s). I don't think it needs to be free or even cheap. Subscriptions to the archives (and research data) could be more expensive and the money can be divided over the reputation points. Free access can be earned by the sweat of your brow, publish worthy papers and do reviews that closely match other reviewers. Universities should be able to publish enough quality material to get paid. Have the grownups pay for juniors education again. It was a good idea back then it is a good idea now.
  - whatshisface 2y ago
    It is in nobody's individual interest to switch from an established journal to a new one before at least half of the rest have switched, so nobody does it. Scientists are also being squeezed within an inch of their lives by the career advancement / funding system leaving no time for the organization of this kind of change.
    - RobotToaster 2y ago
biomcgary 2y ago
Publish or perish is yet another example of Goodhart's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law). Paper count is a terribly easy metric to game when used to evaluate academic output because publishing low quality papers doesn't count against the authors. We can fix the problem in an unbiased manner by using ChatGPT to quantify article novelty, impact, and quality. /s
- _aavaa_ 2y ago
  I almost missed the /s in my anger while reading that last line. It's too close to being real...
  - ben_w 2y ago
    You might want to get a paper bag to scream into: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06292 https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06292
    - _aavaa_ 2y ago
      They say AI scientist, but it looked more like the NN Evolution by LLM Selection.
- OvbiousError 2y ago
  You also need citations though, and those don't come with low quality papers, nor will they help your reputation. To get citations people have to actually read your stuff.
  - inglor_cz 2y ago
    Or organize a fraudulent citation ring.
    - dguest 2y ago
      Some scientific collaborations put thousands of people on every paper, publish around 100 papers a year, and cite at least 10 of their own papers in each one. To some, that might be "a fraudulent citation ring". To others it's just business as usual. Of course a lot of academia has caught on to the ruse, but the mitigations are pretty ugly: some funding agencies and universities just stopped counting papers from large experiments as valid scientific contributions.
vouaobrasil 2y ago
The problem is not really author-paid fees. It's the fact that paper count and citation count is so important in the first place. Actually, if you want to fix the problem, peer-review should be rewarded rather than publications, with accurate peer-review and unbiased evaluations. Publication count should not be nearly as valued, and peer-review should not be anonymous.
- knighthack 2y ago
  > accurate peer-review and unbiased evaluations And how do you even guarantee this, 'accurate' and 'unbiased'? Any form of peer review will always have a slant, no matter how 'objective' it is intended to be. Until that can be ascertained, I don't see how peer review is fundamentally superior. I would even argue that peer review can be detrimental to true science, especially those on the frontier.
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    > And how do you even guarantee this, 'accurate' and 'unbiased'? Any form of peer review will always have a slant, no matter how 'objective' it is intended to be. Peer review of peer review. Instead of a couple of scientists looking at it, the peer-review process should be entirely open. So other people can scrutinize it.
- bachmeier 2y ago
  > peer-review should not be anonymous How do you prevent movement to an equilibrium where reviewers give favorable reviews to the reviewers of their own papers?
  - vouaobrasil 2y ago
    > How do you prevent movement to an equilibrium where reviewers give favorable reviews to the reviewers of their own papers? Peer-review of peer review. If all peer review is public, then people can analyse the trends.
    - 2y ago
drgo 2y ago
The entire research field needs major reform urgently. There are so many corrupting incentives for its practitioners that nearly most research findings (at least in my field: medicine) are suspect. Most researchers have neither the time nor energy to work on the important problems, to perfect their craft and to understand the limitations of the scientific methods. The metrics used in evaluating grant applications and academic promotion push researchers to work on short-term sensationalist and easy-to-publish ideas. This is sad because if there was a time we need solid unimpugnable science is now.
- hedora 2y ago
  I think the scale of the problem varies wildly between different fields of science. For instance, in computer science, double blind reviewing is the norm, and the biggest issue is that there is an incentive to produce more papers with smaller contributions, instead of a mixture of larger, better, papers, and 1-2 column notes that describe important, but simple results (such notes used to be published routinely). In other fields, not only are submissions not anonymous, but editors sometimes override the reviewers (in both directions), for what appear to be political purposes.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    Uhh, the elephant in the room for CS/ML publications is that a lot of people hardcore lie on their results page since almost no one tries to reproduce anything. I've witnessed folks straight out of their undergrad with literally 1 workshop paper at an ACL track conference get thrown 150K starting offers by no-name startups. Imagine how important it must be to get your first NeurIPS main conference publication. The ROI likely amounts to 300K+ per year, so if anything, I'm surprised that cheating/lies in the academy aren't even more brazen. Dynamics like this are why both Stanford and Harvard's presidents had to step-down for gross academic plagerism/misconduct. 1. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.359.6377.725 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.359.6377.725 (2018) 2. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/12/1011944/artificial-intelligence-replication-crisis-science-big-tech-google-deepmind-facebook-openai/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/12/1011944/artifici... (2020) 3. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03817-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03817-6 (2023, Nature)
throwawaymaths 2y ago
PLOS journals are some of the least bad journals and iirc it's entirely author paid
drdeca 2y ago
A thought I had: what if there were a service which maintained a list of arxiv identifiers (or, maybe also allow doi identifiers, but only if some extra conditions are met) that met their standards for notability/interesting-ness/quality (each URL could maybe be accompanied by the title and a list of the authors of the work). And suppose that all this organization published, was this list of URLs (and titles and names). It seems conceivable that, if their list became respected, getting one’s pdf on this list could, maybe (this seems a stretch) prestigious. Now, if they accepted submissions of URLs to be considered for inclusion in a future issue of their public list of URLs, if being on this list was prestigious, they would presumably be flooded with submissions, and need to reduce the number of submissions they received somehow. Then, I imagine them charging some fee for submitting a URL for them to consider for evaluation. Of course, they might include a few documents that no one submitted, in order to make sure the list remains useful by having most of the most relevant papers in whatever field, in order to maintain prestige. Conceivably there could be multiple such organizations doing this for different fields and subfields. If this happened, it would seem to be essentially a replication of the phenomenon of author-paid publication fees in academic journals, but without relying on copyright or actually doing the publishing of the articles.
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  Who would pay for an article they could get for free? Who would pay to subscribe to a journal that just aggregates open-access articles?
  - drdeca 2y ago
    In what I was imagining, the income was from people paying to be considered for inclusion on the list. Reading the list is free.
  - amatic 2y ago
    The scientific community, or the ministry of science of some country, or a university - might find that paying for peer review, for example, might be more effective in promoting good science than paying for publication.
achillesheels 2y ago
Sorry but I have to disagree. It’s the only way I was able to be read.
wmf 2y ago
Speaking as a published scientist, I never thought open access was supposed to "put an end to the era of impact-chasing, false-positives, and unpublished truths." The point of open access is to stop paywalling science by parasitic publishers and it accomplishes that. I also didn't predict that a flood of pay-to-publish journals would lower their standards, but I only pay attention to the top conferences anyway.
- DataDive 2y ago
  I never thought "open access" means that an author would need to pay $10K to be published in Nature ... that is a lot more parasitic than having a library pay for subscription fees.
- MichaelRo 2y ago
  @wmv has the correct answer. The original argument is utopian (can never happen in a free society) and basically proposes going back to an era of very few scientists, like I dunno, when most people were illiterate peasants and the sea of retardness was dotted here and there with an Euclid or a Fibonacci. Which sounds good in theory if all you had were Einsteins and Newtons and Kelvins but in practice at least some of the available places would be eliminated by nepotism, and most of the approved scientists while genuine in their effort, would still produce mediocre results. Science results, like LLM training, depends on scale. So I would argue rather, let anyone who wants to do science, do it. The cashier lady and plumber guy are unlikely to wanna do research but out of those who do, eventually something's gonna come out. Only it's not clear straight from the start out of whom.
max_ 2y ago
Why can't researchers just publish something on a pre-print like ArXiv? Why do they have to go to Journals that require payment for both readers & authors? The machine learning/ml community pretty much gave up on the Journal model and most of the ground breaking papers are available for free on ArXiv. Why are these scientists complaining? Is it just a prestige seeking thing?
- PeterisP 2y ago
  It's a funding thing - if you don't publish in highly-filtered places, you don't get grants so you can't do science; no one will pay for you, your students and your equipment if you only publish on ArXiv.
- kergonath 2y ago
  > Why can't researchers just publish something on a pre-print like ArXiv? In my field, Arxiv has too many really suboptimal manuscripts, too much garbage, and is not well indexed. Looking for decent stuff is hard. I would really like our institution’s library to pay someone to sift through Arxiv full time and compile lists of decent articles regularly. Like how they used to do when you had to physically go to a library to even get the titles of published articles. This was enough of a hassle to make bibliography lists valuable. But yeah in the meantime, it’s too expensive in terms of wasted time compared to even Google Scholar.
- underbooter 2y ago
  They always have been able to. It's called a blog, personal or company. But everyone knows why "serious research" isn't mostly published on blogs: Corporations like Elsevier have successfully executed takeovers of research centers (universities) and made journal submission a mandatory rite of passage for academics joining the state-mandated academia funnel. Don't publish? No postdoc for you. No professorship for you. No grant approval or news coverage. Do publish in an academic journal? All the work you did, all the IP you invented, is assigned to the university and/or the grant funder. You're basically a non-shareholder: a contractor. Researchers who do publish on their own tend to be viewed as cranks, since they generally don't use "journalese" and aren't required to cite from the same pool of "officially published" articles. Consequently, they also can't really get cited outside of the blogosphere - a blog post isn't "legitimate literature." Researchers who don't publish in official journals and are labeled cranks generally can't afford to do research long term. So how do you divorce yourself from academia? Start a research company or project Get funding via grants, product sales, donations Use your research to directly build products and get a return on R&D invested Decide to not publish your research in the open because doing so would take away the information asymmetry keeping you ahead of the competition Oops, you are no longer publishing.
wakawaka28 2y ago
I think this can be solved (or improved) by making the option to pay publication fees available only after the paper is accepted. In fact, it could even be extended to after the official publication. If the author then wants the article to be free for readers, they can pay having already secured the paper. If this was also combined with an anonymizing factor to hide the identity of the author from the publisher, it would be perfect. But I know that part is impractical.
- gapan 2y ago
  Am I misunderstanding something? Isn't that the way it is already with most open access journals? Apart from hiding the author's identity from the publisher of course.
- dotnet00 2y ago
  My understanding is that's how it already works, at least that's how it's been for the journals I've published in. When you submit the paper you simply promise to pay if the paper is accepted. Then peer review happens and if you pass, they'll ask you to pay.
CobrastanJorji 2y ago
> The remedy is to abandon author-paid OA publishing and seek less harmful alternatives. That's just "No remedy is known" wearing a suit.
- Y_Y 2y ago
  To paraphrase Linus: "Only wimps use traditional journals. REAL men just upload their important stuff on arXiv and let the rest of the world peer review it."
  - kergonath 2y ago
    The problem is that the rest of the world does not really like reviewing stuff. A few people hint frauds, which is a great service, but that’s about it.
  - otherme123 2y ago
    Our group always pre-publish to arXiv, as a way of saying "we did this first/already" because we usually suspect, and half the times are correct, that our competitor are on a similar research. But as soon as we arXiv, we start the hunt to publish with as high Impact Factor as we can. Why? Almost 100% grants applications are going to evaluate you for the weight of your publications, and some of them doesn't even consider indexed publications below Quartile 1 or 2. The IF of the journal is a direct proxy for your work quality. In our experience, arXiv doesn't peer review at all. You get some twitter posts, messages of congratulations, at most a couple of questions. But nothing like the average peer seriously reviewing your paper. I wouldn't pay a dime to publish if my salary wasn't affected (e.g. being Linus). I would submit to arXiv, Github, Twitter or even a "Tell HN", and probably reach a larger audience. In fact, the journals ask you to promote your papers on your social networks, because they know theirs doesn't matter unless you are Science or Nature. But sadly that's not how the scientific world works.
    - raister 2y ago
      I agree that being the first is important. I have had a paper reviewed, then rejected, only to see the same idea elsewhere a while after. I cannot say the reviewer "had the same idea" nor prove, but it is known to happen. Putting into arXiv remediates that. However, my personal issue with that is that the journal might not be that keen to want to publish your paper after knowing it was publicly available elsewhere, as they thrive "innovation" and "being the first" as well. It's a very difficult problem, indeed.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
OvbiousError 2y ago
I published papers in the past. Are the fees (too) high? Probably. Should publishing be free? Good luck with that, especially now with llms. I (my university) paid the journals, review was tough and I sank a ton of work in both the first draft and the revisions. And then upon acceptance the papers went both into the journal and to arxiv. Reading the new papers on arxiv was also my start of the day. That is only possible if that list is heavily moderated, there were around 30-40 of which I would read/skim 1-5.
- Luc 2y ago
  It's almost like you think the fees paid by your university went to reviewers and moderators? That's not how academic publishers make billions of dollars of profit each year. They don't pay those.
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 2y ago
Great idea. Now realize that academia is getting more funding with more citations and that's why research in a capitalist society relies on successful research and not on failure (which objectively 50% of results should be). Then iterate on the corruption idea and realize that the only way to fix this on a societal level is unconditional basic income. Only with basic income and legally forbidden sponsorships you can guarantee objectivity.
- fdej 2y ago
  There's no a priori reason why the expected success rate of research projects should be 50% and not, say, 1% or 99%.
  - h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 2y ago
    > There's no a priori reason why the expected success rate of research projects should be 50% and not, say, 1% or 99%. Humans are really bad at predicting the future, so I'd argue that the large majority should be between 49% and 51%. A 99% success rate would imply that humans can predict the future, which I think is pretty much the opposite of how science should work.
    - Ekaros 2y ago
      I would actually put it 60-80%. As there is plenty enough of ideas that should work. It is not really random search, but applying existing knowledge or expectation to some different area. If doing one thing with one thing works, I would fully expect in many cases that doing same thing with this other thing relatively closely related to also work. Lot of research is iterative process and there you can do iterations that you know could work and already ignore things that certainly won't.
    - frankling_ 2y ago
      If you're able to predict the future with 50% accuracy, you should start filling out some lottery tickets.
spiritplumber 2y ago
Publications Georg, who lives in a cave and publishes over 10000 papers a year, is an outlier and should not have been counted.
kkfx 2y ago
Next topic: how to surpass the economic religion, because the current mania of making anything tradable and measurable in money units actually IS A FORM OF RELIGION. Of course a useful religion for those who know how to master it, but anyway a religion with serious damaging effect on society and human development.
jillesvangurp 2y ago
The solution is on the funding side and the reader side, not the publisher side. Scientists have to publish in order to get other scientists to read their work and (hopefully) refer to it in their own work. This business of referring to other scientific work is what drives academic careers and the allocation of research budgets. Most of the better universities look at metrics that take this into account. The problem is all the second rate universities haggling for funding trying to boost their metrics. Promoting scientific work is essentially an SEO problem. How do you get other scientists to take your work seriously? Well, they need to find your work when they are doing research for their own work. Getting the PDF distributed is the easy part of the problem. That's a solved problem since the nineties. It doesn't really cost anything worth talking about. It's not 0$ but close enough that the difference isn't really worth talking about. Publishers don't matter for distribution any more; it's all digital now. Any website that Google can index will do for distribution. The goto scientific SEO process hasn't really changed in centuries. You submit your article to some exclusive groups of researchers, anonymous peer review is arranged, and if deemed acceptable the article is included in some publication. Which these days just means they put it on their website. Actual printed journals are a side show. Some publishers still do it. But mostly it's a waste of paper. The process beyond that is simple good old SEO. You drive traffic by promoting your work at conferences, workshops, writing books, by talking to others, etc. This is also how you become part of these exclusive groups. You'll be invited to take part in peer reviewing, editorial work, conference organizing, etc. And in return, you are expected to refer back to work of others in the same group. The odd thing is that scientists don't really do any traditional SEO. They aren't buying keywords from Google. They aren't messing with their meta data. And they aren't optimizing their pdfs for readability, AB testing various click baity titles. Nor are they using analytics tools to measure how other scientists engage with their work. They aren't running social media campaigns either. This is super odd. You do all this work and then you throw it over the fence and hope for the best. Why?! This is stupid. The value add of publishing to some paid publisher scam journal that nobody reads and where the peer review is basically bribing the "editor" is of course very low. The key problem is that universities don't scrutinize their metrics enough. That's because they aren't independent. Like researchers, their funding depends on public sources that look at metrics to judge how well the money is being spent. That process is super corrupt and bureaucratic. A lack of standards and integrity in this process is the root cause of the problem. Scientists referring to work from dubious publications is a giant red flag that they are manipulating their metrics. That giant red flag needs to be taken into account during grant applications for public funding. This isn't rocket science. Like plagiarism is frowned upon, referring to work from disreputable sources should be frowned upon as well. It signals scientists trying to mess with the numbers and not taking their own work and integrity seriously. This should be flagged by editors of reputable publications because it threatens their own reputability. Grant application reviewers should be flagging this as well. Metrics should be created to automate this. Simply flag some publications and calculate the least reputable authors based on their citation habits referring to work in these publications. That will sort things out in no time. If you can calculate an impact factor, you can also calculate a reputability factor.
godelski 2y ago
There's so many worse things. Like how people think research can be measured by citations and h-indexes. Yes, these things help, but if you're serious about hiring or promoting just read the god damn papers. The numbers are no substitute and it's insane that so many people outsource their thinking to numbers when there's such rich data within arm's reach. No wonder why people have hacked the metrics, no one vets them -__- As for journals and conferences? Fuck em. Post to arxiv or better, open review. Engage with people who actually care about your work. The whole purpose of punishing is to make your work available and communicate with your peers. We've solved that. We don't need them (well it's still nice to physically meet with people. The conferences can stay, but they should focus on that. Not being "arbitrators of truth")
- throwaway984393 2y ago
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- JohnKemeny 2y ago
  You don't strike me as someone who has hired a lot of faculty members... If you're hiring in your own field (which you should), you don't have to read the papers. You're already familiar with most of them, and judging by the venue their published in, you also know their "level", so to speak. As for open review ... You also don't strike me as someone who has reviewed a lot of papers. I've served on several program committees, and reviewed hundreds of papers. I'm happy with blind reviews.
  - Der_Einzige 2y ago
    That you're struck that this is someone who "doesn't hire faculty members" is exactly the best thing. The academy is so corrupt it should be "shattered into a million pieces and scattered into the wind". H Index ego, P hacking, lazy lies because "no one tries to reproduce", citation cartels, institutionalized systemic academic dishonesty/plagiarism at the highest levels (presidents of top universities and likely their underlings), "reviewer #2", etc. It's all bunk, and most of it is designed to take bright-eyed Ph.D's and grind their soul to bits before they can realize that they can both out-earn and out-produce (in an objective sense) most of their professors by simply leaving the academy. Being ineligible for tenure should be a badge of honor, as the whole system should be abolished and the world would be far better for it - particularly, science would advance far faster. Far more of HN needs to read Paul Feyerabend and actually internalize what "epistemological anarchism" means. The academy does not hold any particularly valid claim to being closer to observing "objective truth" than anyone else. The allegory of the cave/divided line (the primary justifications for a lot of academic wankery) was one of the original lies made by a nascent and authoritarian philosopher class. We should have abandoned these ideas long ago. Oh, and if you leave the STEM fields, the academy goes into full on "charlatan" mode. I go into most social sciences and find a wasteland of footnotes on Foucault and Lacan. That Situationalist International was so successful that the academy is still choked by an obsession with french fashionable nonsense is an indictment of the whole of the academy in the west. It's all intellectually bankrupt.
netcan 2y ago
Was open access actually expected to "put an end to the era of impact-chasing, false-positives, and unpublished truths?" Generally speaking, I don't see how the going ons of seconds tier matter.
DataDive 2y ago
Fundamentally, the problem is today science is framed as nothing else but a competition, an olymic event, that produces winners that we celebrate and losers, rather than cooperation. If you got the grant, you won; if you did not, you lost. Losing means you cannot hire graduate students you cannot perform your job at all! Now consider that around 15% of grants get funded, and it takes about six months to determine whether you got that grant or not. The desperate competition for money overshadows everything in science. Science is often thought of and presented as huge leaps, when in reality, it is an iterative process that builds on small advances.
ynniv 2y ago
- Academia has become a paper throughput competition - Open access journals make it easier to game this system - Ergo, open access journals are bad Well, he's right that one of those things is a serious problem that needs to be addressed.

305 points by anigbrowl 2y ago

Oh science. Peer review, the ultimate "LGTM", stands in for replication.

> Publishers need money to pay for typesetters, proof-readers, and editors Maybe in the past but most of the journals now will return the manuscript to the author or charge for revisions and any typing service. The margin in academic publishing industry is one of the highest in all industries for a reason. But I agree with the author that open source publishing incentives publishing more papers even if it is of lower quality. But also it does harm the repetition of the journal. The elephant in the room that people usually avoid is that this is a political problem. You cannot rely on publications and journals impact factor in grant selections and academic careers evaluations and expect to solve this problem. No scientist is going to choose to publish an article on their website vs a journal if it will not only not add but harm their careers. Yes people put papers on arxiv but most of who wants to continue in academia will submit them for a traditional journal publication. And how would we fix that? That's a policy reforms of funding agencies and academic institutions evaluation methodology.

godelski 2y ago
Funny thing is I've had paper rejected where the only complaints were about a few spelling mistakes and grammar. They didn't say where but I guess that's enough
throwaway14356 2y ago
So scientists created this new publishing platform called the www but other scientists with no such expertise pretend it hurts their reputation to use it? That seems rather comical. Do they perhaps have a constructive argument to offer? If they desire a harsh rigorous review mechanism it doesn't seem very hard or expensive to build. Anon reviewers, top noch reviewers, they can have many tiers. It isn't the journal that has prestige but the track record of its reviewers. Mirror the topics on a discussion platform with separate sections for different skill levels. Heavy contributors earn bragging rights. Mirror the topics on a wiki and have experts approve edits. There is prestige in just approving contributions and having conversations. A chat client is also imaginable where one approves/adds contacts by type of publication. Each can run rare expensive advertising that lives up to unreasonable demands. But no? That would hurt the reputation - just because?
- jpeloquin 2y ago
  The problem with gold OA is the proliferation of low-quality spam, and the recommended remedy is to both restore exclusivity (raise the barrier to entry) without supporting excessive (monopolistic, exploitative) journal subscription fees. The article's recommendation to build up society journals has a decent chance of accomplishing this. It won't prevent spam from getting published, but the only essential aspect is to keep the spam easily identifiable (e.g., published by MDPI) so it can be safely ignored. The www seems to facilitate the spam business model so I don't think the spam will go away entirely.
  - throwaway14356 2y ago
    Assuming you want to get rid of the fees entirely: people will have to look at the spam and divide it into more and less spammy. Others will have to do the same with the less spammy and so on. Eventually there is room for more accomplished moderators Until those with the greatest prestige filter down to a tiny sub set. You assign weights to the experts so that with each level of review the good half raises in rank much more than the previous round. At first you do it by committee but eventually the rating for each scientists can be derived from the importance of their publication(s). I don't think it needs to be free or even cheap. Subscriptions to the archives (and research data) could be more expensive and the money can be divided over the reputation points. Free access can be earned by the sweat of your brow, publish worthy papers and do reviews that closely match other reviewers. Universities should be able to publish enough quality material to get paid. Have the grownups pay for juniors education again. It was a good idea back then it is a good idea now.
- whatshisface 2y ago
  It is in nobody's individual interest to switch from an established journal to a new one before at least half of the rest have switched, so nobody does it. Scientists are also being squeezed within an inch of their lives by the career advancement / funding system leaving no time for the organization of this kind of change.
  - RobotToaster 2y ago

biomcgary 2y ago

Publish or perish is yet another example of Goodhart's Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart's_law). Paper count is a terribly easy metric to game when used to evaluate academic output because publishing low quality papers doesn't count against the authors. We can fix the problem in an unbiased manner by using ChatGPT to quantify article novelty, impact, and quality. /s

_aavaa_ 2y ago
I almost missed the /s in my anger while reading that last line. It's too close to being real...
- ben_w 2y ago
  You might want to get a paper bag to scream into: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06292 https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06292
  - _aavaa_ 2y ago
    They say AI scientist, but it looked more like the NN Evolution by LLM Selection.
OvbiousError 2y ago
You also need citations though, and those don't come with low quality papers, nor will they help your reputation. To get citations people have to actually read your stuff.
- inglor_cz 2y ago
  Or organize a fraudulent citation ring.
  - dguest 2y ago
    Some scientific collaborations put thousands of people on every paper, publish around 100 papers a year, and cite at least 10 of their own papers in each one. To some, that might be "a fraudulent citation ring". To others it's just business as usual. Of course a lot of academia has caught on to the ruse, but the mitigations are pretty ugly: some funding agencies and universities just stopped counting papers from large experiments as valid scientific contributions.

vouaobrasil 2y ago

The problem is not really author-paid fees. It's the fact that paper count and citation count is so important in the first place. Actually, if you want to fix the problem, peer-review should be rewarded rather than publications, with accurate peer-review and unbiased evaluations. Publication count should not be nearly as valued, and peer-review should not be anonymous.

knighthack 2y ago
> accurate peer-review and unbiased evaluations And how do you even guarantee this, 'accurate' and 'unbiased'? Any form of peer review will always have a slant, no matter how 'objective' it is intended to be. Until that can be ascertained, I don't see how peer review is fundamentally superior. I would even argue that peer review can be detrimental to true science, especially those on the frontier.
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  > And how do you even guarantee this, 'accurate' and 'unbiased'? Any form of peer review will always have a slant, no matter how 'objective' it is intended to be. Peer review of peer review. Instead of a couple of scientists looking at it, the peer-review process should be entirely open. So other people can scrutinize it.
bachmeier 2y ago
> peer-review should not be anonymous How do you prevent movement to an equilibrium where reviewers give favorable reviews to the reviewers of their own papers?
- vouaobrasil 2y ago
  > How do you prevent movement to an equilibrium where reviewers give favorable reviews to the reviewers of their own papers? Peer-review of peer review. If all peer review is public, then people can analyse the trends.
  - 2y ago

drgo 2y ago

The entire research field needs major reform urgently. There are so many corrupting incentives for its practitioners that nearly most research findings (at least in my field: medicine) are suspect. Most researchers have neither the time nor energy to work on the important problems, to perfect their craft and to understand the limitations of the scientific methods. The metrics used in evaluating grant applications and academic promotion push researchers to work on short-term sensationalist and easy-to-publish ideas. This is sad because if there was a time we need solid unimpugnable science is now.

hedora 2y ago
I think the scale of the problem varies wildly between different fields of science. For instance, in computer science, double blind reviewing is the norm, and the biggest issue is that there is an incentive to produce more papers with smaller contributions, instead of a mixture of larger, better, papers, and 1-2 column notes that describe important, but simple results (such notes used to be published routinely). In other fields, not only are submissions not anonymous, but editors sometimes override the reviewers (in both directions), for what appear to be political purposes.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  Uhh, the elephant in the room for CS/ML publications is that a lot of people hardcore lie on their results page since almost no one tries to reproduce anything. I've witnessed folks straight out of their undergrad with literally 1 workshop paper at an ACL track conference get thrown 150K starting offers by no-name startups. Imagine how important it must be to get your first NeurIPS main conference publication. The ROI likely amounts to 300K+ per year, so if anything, I'm surprised that cheating/lies in the academy aren't even more brazen. Dynamics like this are why both Stanford and Harvard's presidents had to step-down for gross academic plagerism/misconduct. 1. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.359.6377.725 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.359.6377.725 (2018) 2. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/12/1011944/artificial-intelligence-replication-crisis-science-big-tech-google-deepmind-facebook-openai/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/11/12/1011944/artifici... (2020) 3. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03817-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03817-6 (2023, Nature)

throwawaymaths 2y ago

PLOS journals are some of the least bad journals and iirc it's entirely author paid

drdeca 2y ago

A thought I had: what if there were a service which maintained a list of arxiv identifiers (or, maybe also allow doi identifiers, but only if some extra conditions are met) that met their standards for notability/interesting-ness/quality (each URL could maybe be accompanied by the title and a list of the authors of the work). And suppose that all this organization published, was this list of URLs (and titles and names). It seems conceivable that, if their list became respected, getting one’s pdf on this list could, maybe (this seems a stretch) prestigious. Now, if they accepted submissions of URLs to be considered for inclusion in a future issue of their public list of URLs, if being on this list was prestigious, they would presumably be flooded with submissions, and need to reduce the number of submissions they received somehow. Then, I imagine them charging some fee for submitting a URL for them to consider for evaluation. Of course, they might include a few documents that no one submitted, in order to make sure the list remains useful by having most of the most relevant papers in whatever field, in order to maintain prestige. Conceivably there could be multiple such organizations doing this for different fields and subfields. If this happened, it would seem to be essentially a replication of the phenomenon of author-paid publication fees in academic journals, but without relying on copyright or actually doing the publishing of the articles.

wakawaka28 2y ago
Who would pay for an article they could get for free? Who would pay to subscribe to a journal that just aggregates open-access articles?
- drdeca 2y ago
  In what I was imagining, the income was from people paying to be considered for inclusion on the list. Reading the list is free.
- amatic 2y ago
  The scientific community, or the ministry of science of some country, or a university - might find that paying for peer review, for example, might be more effective in promoting good science than paying for publication.

achillesheels 2y ago

Sorry but I have to disagree. It’s the only way I was able to be read.

wmf 2y ago

Speaking as a published scientist, I never thought open access was supposed to "put an end to the era of impact-chasing, false-positives, and unpublished truths." The point of open access is to stop paywalling science by parasitic publishers and it accomplishes that. I also didn't predict that a flood of pay-to-publish journals would lower their standards, but I only pay attention to the top conferences anyway.

DataDive 2y ago
I never thought "open access" means that an author would need to pay $10K to be published in Nature ... that is a lot more parasitic than having a library pay for subscription fees.
MichaelRo 2y ago
@wmv has the correct answer. The original argument is utopian (can never happen in a free society) and basically proposes going back to an era of very few scientists, like I dunno, when most people were illiterate peasants and the sea of retardness was dotted here and there with an Euclid or a Fibonacci. Which sounds good in theory if all you had were Einsteins and Newtons and Kelvins but in practice at least some of the available places would be eliminated by nepotism, and most of the approved scientists while genuine in their effort, would still produce mediocre results. Science results, like LLM training, depends on scale. So I would argue rather, let anyone who wants to do science, do it. The cashier lady and plumber guy are unlikely to wanna do research but out of those who do, eventually something's gonna come out. Only it's not clear straight from the start out of whom.

max_ 2y ago

Why can't researchers just publish something on a pre-print like ArXiv? Why do they have to go to Journals that require payment for both readers & authors? The machine learning/ml community pretty much gave up on the Journal model and most of the ground breaking papers are available for free on ArXiv. Why are these scientists complaining? Is it just a prestige seeking thing?

PeterisP 2y ago
It's a funding thing - if you don't publish in highly-filtered places, you don't get grants so you can't do science; no one will pay for you, your students and your equipment if you only publish on ArXiv.
kergonath 2y ago
> Why can't researchers just publish something on a pre-print like ArXiv? In my field, Arxiv has too many really suboptimal manuscripts, too much garbage, and is not well indexed. Looking for decent stuff is hard. I would really like our institution’s library to pay someone to sift through Arxiv full time and compile lists of decent articles regularly. Like how they used to do when you had to physically go to a library to even get the titles of published articles. This was enough of a hassle to make bibliography lists valuable. But yeah in the meantime, it’s too expensive in terms of wasted time compared to even Google Scholar.
underbooter 2y ago
They always have been able to. It's called a blog, personal or company. But everyone knows why "serious research" isn't mostly published on blogs: Corporations like Elsevier have successfully executed takeovers of research centers (universities) and made journal submission a mandatory rite of passage for academics joining the state-mandated academia funnel. Don't publish? No postdoc for you. No professorship for you. No grant approval or news coverage. Do publish in an academic journal? All the work you did, all the IP you invented, is assigned to the university and/or the grant funder. You're basically a non-shareholder: a contractor. Researchers who do publish on their own tend to be viewed as cranks, since they generally don't use "journalese" and aren't required to cite from the same pool of "officially published" articles. Consequently, they also can't really get cited outside of the blogosphere - a blog post isn't "legitimate literature." Researchers who don't publish in official journals and are labeled cranks generally can't afford to do research long term. So how do you divorce yourself from academia? Start a research company or project Get funding via grants, product sales, donations Use your research to directly build products and get a return on R&D invested Decide to not publish your research in the open because doing so would take away the information asymmetry keeping you ahead of the competition Oops, you are no longer publishing.

wakawaka28 2y ago

I think this can be solved (or improved) by making the option to pay publication fees available only after the paper is accepted. In fact, it could even be extended to after the official publication. If the author then wants the article to be free for readers, they can pay having already secured the paper. If this was also combined with an anonymizing factor to hide the identity of the author from the publisher, it would be perfect. But I know that part is impractical.

gapan 2y ago
Am I misunderstanding something? Isn't that the way it is already with most open access journals? Apart from hiding the author's identity from the publisher of course.
dotnet00 2y ago
My understanding is that's how it already works, at least that's how it's been for the journals I've published in. When you submit the paper you simply promise to pay if the paper is accepted. Then peer review happens and if you pass, they'll ask you to pay.

CobrastanJorji 2y ago

> The remedy is to abandon author-paid OA publishing and seek less harmful alternatives. That's just "No remedy is known" wearing a suit.

Y_Y 2y ago
To paraphrase Linus: "Only wimps use traditional journals. REAL men just upload their important stuff on arXiv and let the rest of the world peer review it."
- kergonath 2y ago
  The problem is that the rest of the world does not really like reviewing stuff. A few people hint frauds, which is a great service, but that’s about it.
- otherme123 2y ago
  Our group always pre-publish to arXiv, as a way of saying "we did this first/already" because we usually suspect, and half the times are correct, that our competitor are on a similar research. But as soon as we arXiv, we start the hunt to publish with as high Impact Factor as we can. Why? Almost 100% grants applications are going to evaluate you for the weight of your publications, and some of them doesn't even consider indexed publications below Quartile 1 or 2. The IF of the journal is a direct proxy for your work quality. In our experience, arXiv doesn't peer review at all. You get some twitter posts, messages of congratulations, at most a couple of questions. But nothing like the average peer seriously reviewing your paper. I wouldn't pay a dime to publish if my salary wasn't affected (e.g. being Linus). I would submit to arXiv, Github, Twitter or even a "Tell HN", and probably reach a larger audience. In fact, the journals ask you to promote your papers on your social networks, because they know theirs doesn't matter unless you are Science or Nature. But sadly that's not how the scientific world works.
  - raister 2y ago
    I agree that being the first is important. I have had a paper reviewed, then rejected, only to see the same idea elsewhere a while after. I cannot say the reviewer "had the same idea" nor prove, but it is known to happen. Putting into arXiv remediates that. However, my personal issue with that is that the journal might not be that keen to want to publish your paper after knowing it was publicly available elsewhere, as they thrive "innovation" and "being the first" as well. It's a very difficult problem, indeed.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

OvbiousError 2y ago

I published papers in the past. Are the fees (too) high? Probably. Should publishing be free? Good luck with that, especially now with llms. I (my university) paid the journals, review was tough and I sank a ton of work in both the first draft and the revisions. And then upon acceptance the papers went both into the journal and to arxiv. Reading the new papers on arxiv was also my start of the day. That is only possible if that list is heavily moderated, there were around 30-40 of which I would read/skim 1-5.

Luc 2y ago
It's almost like you think the fees paid by your university went to reviewers and moderators? That's not how academic publishers make billions of dollars of profit each year. They don't pay those.

h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 2y ago

Great idea. Now realize that academia is getting more funding with more citations and that's why research in a capitalist society relies on successful research and not on failure (which objectively 50% of results should be). Then iterate on the corruption idea and realize that the only way to fix this on a societal level is unconditional basic income. Only with basic income and legally forbidden sponsorships you can guarantee objectivity.

fdej 2y ago
There's no a priori reason why the expected success rate of research projects should be 50% and not, say, 1% or 99%.
- h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 2y ago
  > There's no a priori reason why the expected success rate of research projects should be 50% and not, say, 1% or 99%. Humans are really bad at predicting the future, so I'd argue that the large majority should be between 49% and 51%. A 99% success rate would imply that humans can predict the future, which I think is pretty much the opposite of how science should work.
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    I would actually put it 60-80%. As there is plenty enough of ideas that should work. It is not really random search, but applying existing knowledge or expectation to some different area. If doing one thing with one thing works, I would fully expect in many cases that doing same thing with this other thing relatively closely related to also work. Lot of research is iterative process and there you can do iterations that you know could work and already ignore things that certainly won't.
  - frankling_ 2y ago
    If you're able to predict the future with 50% accuracy, you should start filling out some lottery tickets.

spiritplumber 2y ago

Publications Georg, who lives in a cave and publishes over 10000 papers a year, is an outlier and should not have been counted.

kkfx 2y ago

Next topic: how to surpass the economic religion, because the current mania of making anything tradable and measurable in money units actually IS A FORM OF RELIGION. Of course a useful religion for those who know how to master it, but anyway a religion with serious damaging effect on society and human development.

jillesvangurp 2y ago

The solution is on the funding side and the reader side, not the publisher side. Scientists have to publish in order to get other scientists to read their work and (hopefully) refer to it in their own work. This business of referring to other scientific work is what drives academic careers and the allocation of research budgets. Most of the better universities look at metrics that take this into account. The problem is all the second rate universities haggling for funding trying to boost their metrics. Promoting scientific work is essentially an SEO problem. How do you get other scientists to take your work seriously? Well, they need to find your work when they are doing research for their own work. Getting the PDF distributed is the easy part of the problem. That's a solved problem since the nineties. It doesn't really cost anything worth talking about. It's not 0$ but close enough that the difference isn't really worth talking about. Publishers don't matter for distribution any more; it's all digital now. Any website that Google can index will do for distribution. The goto scientific SEO process hasn't really changed in centuries. You submit your article to some exclusive groups of researchers, anonymous peer review is arranged, and if deemed acceptable the article is included in some publication. Which these days just means they put it on their website. Actual printed journals are a side show. Some publishers still do it. But mostly it's a waste of paper. The process beyond that is simple good old SEO. You drive traffic by promoting your work at conferences, workshops, writing books, by talking to others, etc. This is also how you become part of these exclusive groups. You'll be invited to take part in peer reviewing, editorial work, conference organizing, etc. And in return, you are expected to refer back to work of others in the same group. The odd thing is that scientists don't really do any traditional SEO. They aren't buying keywords from Google. They aren't messing with their meta data. And they aren't optimizing their pdfs for readability, AB testing various click baity titles. Nor are they using analytics tools to measure how other scientists engage with their work. They aren't running social media campaigns either. This is super odd. You do all this work and then you throw it over the fence and hope for the best. Why?! This is stupid. The value add of publishing to some paid publisher scam journal that nobody reads and where the peer review is basically bribing the "editor" is of course very low. The key problem is that universities don't scrutinize their metrics enough. That's because they aren't independent. Like researchers, their funding depends on public sources that look at metrics to judge how well the money is being spent. That process is super corrupt and bureaucratic. A lack of standards and integrity in this process is the root cause of the problem. Scientists referring to work from dubious publications is a giant red flag that they are manipulating their metrics. That giant red flag needs to be taken into account during grant applications for public funding. This isn't rocket science. Like plagiarism is frowned upon, referring to work from disreputable sources should be frowned upon as well. It signals scientists trying to mess with the numbers and not taking their own work and integrity seriously. This should be flagged by editors of reputable publications because it threatens their own reputability. Grant application reviewers should be flagging this as well. Metrics should be created to automate this. Simply flag some publications and calculate the least reputable authors based on their citation habits referring to work in these publications. That will sort things out in no time. If you can calculate an impact factor, you can also calculate a reputability factor.

godelski 2y ago

There's so many worse things. Like how people think research can be measured by citations and h-indexes. Yes, these things help, but if you're serious about hiring or promoting just read the god damn papers. The numbers are no substitute and it's insane that so many people outsource their thinking to numbers when there's such rich data within arm's reach. No wonder why people have hacked the metrics, no one vets them -__- As for journals and conferences? Fuck em. Post to arxiv or better, open review. Engage with people who actually care about your work. The whole purpose of punishing is to make your work available and communicate with your peers. We've solved that. We don't need them (well it's still nice to physically meet with people. The conferences can stay, but they should focus on that. Not being "arbitrators of truth")

throwaway984393 2y ago
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JohnKemeny 2y ago
You don't strike me as someone who has hired a lot of faculty members... If you're hiring in your own field (which you should), you don't have to read the papers. You're already familiar with most of them, and judging by the venue their published in, you also know their "level", so to speak. As for open review ... You also don't strike me as someone who has reviewed a lot of papers. I've served on several program committees, and reviewed hundreds of papers. I'm happy with blind reviews.
- Der_Einzige 2y ago
  That you're struck that this is someone who "doesn't hire faculty members" is exactly the best thing. The academy is so corrupt it should be "shattered into a million pieces and scattered into the wind". H Index ego, P hacking, lazy lies because "no one tries to reproduce", citation cartels, institutionalized systemic academic dishonesty/plagiarism at the highest levels (presidents of top universities and likely their underlings), "reviewer #2", etc. It's all bunk, and most of it is designed to take bright-eyed Ph.D's and grind their soul to bits before they can realize that they can both out-earn and out-produce (in an objective sense) most of their professors by simply leaving the academy. Being ineligible for tenure should be a badge of honor, as the whole system should be abolished and the world would be far better for it - particularly, science would advance far faster. Far more of HN needs to read Paul Feyerabend and actually internalize what "epistemological anarchism" means. The academy does not hold any particularly valid claim to being closer to observing "objective truth" than anyone else. The allegory of the cave/divided line (the primary justifications for a lot of academic wankery) was one of the original lies made by a nascent and authoritarian philosopher class. We should have abandoned these ideas long ago. Oh, and if you leave the STEM fields, the academy goes into full on "charlatan" mode. I go into most social sciences and find a wasteland of footnotes on Foucault and Lacan. That Situationalist International was so successful that the academy is still choked by an obsession with french fashionable nonsense is an indictment of the whole of the academy in the west. It's all intellectually bankrupt.

netcan 2y ago

Was open access actually expected to "put an end to the era of impact-chasing, false-positives, and unpublished truths?" Generally speaking, I don't see how the going ons of seconds tier matter.

DataDive 2y ago

Fundamentally, the problem is today science is framed as nothing else but a competition, an olymic event, that produces winners that we celebrate and losers, rather than cooperation. If you got the grant, you won; if you did not, you lost. Losing means you cannot hire graduate students you cannot perform your job at all! Now consider that around 15% of grants get funded, and it takes about six months to determine whether you got that grant or not. The desperate competition for money overshadows everything in science. Science is often thought of and presented as huge leaps, when in reality, it is an iterative process that builds on small advances.

ynniv 2y ago

- Academia has become a paper throughput competition - Open access journals make it easier to game this system - Ergo, open access journals are bad Well, he's right that one of those things is a serious problem that needs to be addressed.