6 ms·

The main problem is the incentives are off. Publishers are now rewarded for publishing more papers, as opposed to having more readers. When it was more readers,

• rovr138 10mo ago
  Is it a fee for publication or a fee for reviewing? Found, > Once your paper has been accepted, we will confirm your eligibility automatically through the eRights system, and you’ll get to choose your Creative Commons license (CC BY or CC BY-NC-ND).
  • zipy124 10mo ago
    Upon publication almost exclusively.
  • specialp 10mo ago
    It is on acceptance almost universally. This is why more selective journals have higher APCs. The overhead of reviewing and processing more papers when less ultimately convert costs money.
• nairboon 10mo ago
  The incentives are alright. Publishers who now start publishing too much low quality slop will lose readers (who has time to read all those low quality publications). Less readers leads to less citations, which will drag dawn their impact factor resulting in less authors willing to pay a high publication fee. For those fields with an existing market, meaning there is more than one high quality journal, the market will provide the right incentives for those publishers.
  • zipy124 10mo ago
    For academia's sake I hope you are correct, but my experience of the system leads me to suspect otherwise, though only time will tell. One hope might be that it incentivises institutions away from the publish or perish mind set and starts to discourage salami slicing and other such practices, allowing researchers to focus on putting out less work of a higher quality, but I suspect the fees would need to be larger to start seeing this sort of change.
  • hbplawinski 10mo ago
    I doubt that this is true except maybe for the top journals. Mid and low tier journals cater to scientists whose main incentive is to publish no matter how while moderately optimizing for impact factor (i.e. readers and citations). This lower quality market is huge. The fact that even top tier publishers have created low-ranking journals that address this market segment using APC-based open-access models shows the alignment between publisher and author interests will not necessarily lead to increasing quality, rather the opposite.
    • nairboon 10mo ago
      Does anyone actually read articles from those low tier journals? Many of those articles are illegible fluff pieces. That top tier publishers create new low-tier journals for this market shows that they are very well aware of these incentives and risks. They are not flooding their top journals with low quality OA "pay to publish" articles, which was the argument from OP.
• strangattractor 10mo ago
  The people that pay are the Institutions (Universities mainly). Not the readers. The publications are sold to them as bundles even if the Institution does not want all the journals.
  • zipy124 10mo ago
    Yes you are correct, however I don't understand how this relates to my point, do you mind clarifying? I'd also caveat that the library (the purchaser of these bundles at most universities) often buys bundles based on requests from academics (more specifically research groups/departments) at the university, thus the readers do have some sway over which are purchased.
    • strangattractor 10mo ago
      I do not know specifics of bundling agreements (shocker that I admit not knowing something:). I do know that libraries at some Institutions have started to provide funds to their researchers to pay the APCs. The library then goes to the Open Access publisher and negotiates bulk APC deals if they commit to a certain number of publications. Sort of a win win grant wise. This does not necessarily guaranty publication but if it does not get published you don't pay (processing submissions is an expense Open Access publishers incurs). I am certain that that no system is perfect. My belief is that the Closed Access publishers have had free reign for so long that the largest ones abuse the system and competitive models are useful to restore some balance. The model also restricts access to information. I would argue that one downside to Open Access is that incentives volume over quality (as others have said) but I would judge that on a per publisher basis just as I would any publisher. Closed Access models might also provide publication in areas of research that don't get tons of attention and research money. I would also argue that there are other problems within research such as lack of reproducible results in many papers that is a far more pressing issue. Just my 2 cents. Thank you for the honest discussion.
      • zipy124 10mo ago
        Thanks for clarifying, I agree with you for sure.
• __MatrixMan__ 10mo ago
  It still wouldn't be perfect, but I'd like to see a system that rewarded publishers and authors for coming up with work that was a load bearing citation for other work (by different authors on different publishers, i.e. ones with no ulterior motive for having chosen it as a source). Like some escrow account that the universities pay into and the publisher payouts go to whoever best enables their authors to do the most useful work... as determined by the other authors.
  • swiftcoder 10mo ago
    You know, we briefly had this with the h-index, and now h-index manipulation is so rife that it is no longer highly correlated with successful academic careers
    • __MatrixMan__ 10mo ago
      I see, I hadn't seen the h-index before. I guess that's Goodhart's law for you. There's got to be ways to improve things though.
  • _jsmh 10mo ago
    I built something like this but it didn't get users. Replying to an author for the valuable info they posted would pay the author and it also accepted public payments. An AI or search engine that identified the value of a contribution and paid the author directly from advertising money based on query traffic could be a way to solve this.
    • __MatrixMan__ 10mo ago
      I can imagine that adoption was hard to achieve gradually. I figure you'd need a bunch of universities to get together and all at once say to the publishers: > The only way we'll pay you ever again is through {the protocol}, deal with it. If people just sought out and participated in better incentive alignment under the expectation that things would be better if only everybody did so... Well then things would already be better and we wouldn't be dreaming these dreams in the first place.
• rorytbyrne 10mo ago
  I disagree. We haven't chosen quantity over quality, we have decided that journals should not be the arbiters of quality. I think these new incentives are exactly what we want: 1. Journals want to publish lots of articles, so they are incentivised to provide a better publishing experience to authors (i.e. better tech, post-PDF science, etc) - Good. 2. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means they will relinquish their "prestige" factor and potentially end the reign of glam-journals - Good. 3. Journals will stop prioritising quality, which means we can move to post-publication peer-review unimpeded - Good.
  • j_maffe 10mo ago
    I can tell you for a fact that points 2 and 3 usually do not hold simply because publishing fees are directly correlated with the "prestige" perception of the journal.
  • zipy124 10mo ago
    These are all valid points. I think we agree we are just looking at different things, I argued if journals maintained their arbiter quality then the system is bad, but you rightly point out that this could finally grip this quality out of their hands, and so it could be good for science overall actually. I think these are fair points :)
    • rorytbyrne 10mo ago
      Haha yes I jumped off in a very different direction. The points you raised are very much valid in the short-term. But longer term, I think journals charging authors for some kind of enhanced research presentation service is actually quite valuable, so the short-term negative effects might lead to a good outcome for the industry down the line - we hope.
  • RossBencina 10mo ago
    > journals should not be the arbiters of quality It is the editorial board, i.e. academic peers, not the publisher, that are (?were) the arbiters. As far as I can see, the primary non-degenerate function of journals is to provide a quality control mechanism that is not provided by "publishing" on your own webpage or arxiv.org. If journals really are going to abandon this quality control role (personally I doubt it) then I fail to see their relevance to science and academic discourse at large.
• kqr 10mo ago
  > Publishers are now rewarded for publishing more papers, as opposed to having more readers. That's the first order effect, but you have to look beyond it. If authors have to pony up $1500, they will only do so for journals that have readers. The journals that are able to charge will be those that focus on their readership.
  • zipy124 10mo ago
    > If authors have to pony up $1500, they will only do so for journals that have readers On the other hand predatory journals make a killing from APCs so there is some market for journals with no readers.
    • samarthr1 10mo ago
      My university had made it mandatory for students to publish atleast 1 paper to graduate from their bachelors degree, and would pay all the associated fees. Most kids unfortunately did end up paying to publish.
  • youainti 10mo ago
    This would probably depend heavily on how tenure decisions handles publishing. If it is heavily biased towards quantity of publishing, then that won't matter as much as you can "pay to win your paycheck". If the tenure process focuses on quality of work, then it should work better.
  • KeplerBoy 10mo ago
    Authors don't pay for that personally though. Nobody bats an eye at the $1500 publishing fee for a mediocre paper, that could have been a blog post, because the institution is happy to bolster its publication count. Heck, nobody even bats an eye if that publication is to be presented at a conference with a few thousand bucks in travel costs.
• theptip 10mo ago
  Disagree. The journals are now acting like a paid certification. If they admit any old slop, who would pay to submit their papers? The service they are providing is peer review and applying a reputable quality bar to submissions. Think of it this way, if you have a good paper why would you publish on Arxiv instead of Nature? And then if you are Nature, why would you throw away this edge to become a free-to-publish (non-revenue-accruing) publication?
  • TomasBM 10mo ago
    Small correction to your point: they perhaps provide a reason for peer review to happen, but it's scientists themselves who coordinate and provide the actual peer review. That is, unless ACM and Nature have a different approach to organizing peer review, in which case my correction is wrong. But I believe my point stands for many conferences and journals.
  • _jsmh 10mo ago
    Reputable quality bar isn't the right metric. Quality is a better metric. To the extent it can be estimated, impact is another. Neither of these require journals specifically. A different way to look at this is to question what "old slop" actually means. The reason not to publish in Nature is that it might take a long time to get everything right in the paper to publish, to the point it takes years to get it read. Publishing fewer results faster spreads the results faster.
• aimanbenbaha 10mo ago
  What about a better deal: Scientific knowledge shouldn't be a for-profit venture to pursue.
  • NetMageSCW 10mo ago
    Do you work for free?
• jojobas 10mo ago
  The whole publication model is broken, not just the incentives. It used to be researchers eager to share their new findings with the few hundred people that could understand them, now it's throngs of PhD students grinding their way to degrees and postdocs trying to secure tenure. The journals are flooded with nonsense and actual researchers resort to word of mouth point out valuable papers to each other.
  • D-Machine 10mo ago
    This is accurate and known to anyone actually in the area.
• beambot 10mo ago
  > Publishers are now rewarded for publishing more papers Publishers have a finite capacity based on the number of credible peer reviewers. In the past, it felt very exploitative as an academic doing peer review for the economic benefit of publishing houses. I'd much rather have "public good" publishers with open access -- at least I feel like the "free" labor is aligned with the desired outcome.
• zwnow 10mo ago
  You had the quantity argument as well when it was about accumulation of subscribers. As a bigger variety of content also attracts a bigger variety of people.
• sheepscreek 10mo ago
  Processing != Publishing (at least I hope not).