5 ms·

We already have open-access publications: Just put it on arXiV. Most researchers I work with do this already. The problem isn't access, it's citations. arXiV i

• contubernio 8mo ago
  Exactly. The solution already exists. However another problem is that the arxiv is creeping towards the old model ...
• bad_haircut72 8mo ago
  Unfortunately I think charging money is a necessary signal that this particular gatekeeper is doing a good job. We should recognise that money is a necessary part of this process, else there is no gate to keep. But we shpuld reverse the economics by having people pay to get their stuff peer reviewed. Imagine if reviewing research papers was something you could get paid to do, the incentive then isnt to rubber stamp things, actually your rating as a reviewer would come down to quality of reviews
  • amluto 8mo ago
    > I think charging money is a necessary signal that this particular gatekeeper is doing a good job. I’ve never seen the slightest relationship between the charge to read a paper and the quality of review.
    • D-Machine 8mo ago
      Because there isn't such a relation. It's a thing people believe when they don't have actual experience with peer review. If anything, predatory journals and low-quality pubs can charge more, since publication is more guaranteed (and researchers reaching for these pay-to-publish journals are more desperate).
      • fireflash38 8mo ago
        It's a reputation economy. Like review sites. They start off truthful, and then as time goes on incentives shift to bad actors to subvert it. Or they just sell out their reputation. Yelp, TripAdvisor, wire cutter, hell even Google results themselves. Once you start poisoning that well, it's difficult if not impossible to claw it back.
    • azan_ 8mo ago
      I tend to agree, but keep in mind that most likely you just don't even bother reading the shittiest of the shittiest papers just based on title and abstract. And for every good article there are like 10 unindexed shitty ones.
  • RGamma 8mo ago
    Yeah review takes time and time is money. This needs to be priced in somehow. Bonus side effect: Frauds get discovered and filtered out (in theory). But who watches the watchers? I guess review fraud will need to be considered as well.
    • fanf2 8mo ago
      Scientific publishers do not pay for peer review. Reviews are done by researchers as part of their jobs which are paid for by their research grants.
  • kergonath 8mo ago
    > But we shpuld reverse the economics by having people pay to get their stuff peer reviewed. Not really. There would be perverse incentives where the publisher benefits from accepting more articles. For good journals that would be a conflict of interests at best where they would optimise the marketing-to-acceptance ratio. I can’t believe I am writing something good about scientific publisher, but at least when the reader pays they are incentivise to publish things that have an audience. Otherwise, they are going to cut corners, and I mean more than they currently do. And it’s not hypothetical, there are already terrible publishers doing this.
  • blharr 8mo ago
    The problem is that this becomes a race to the bottom of actual quality and turns into advertising. Sponsored reviews of products are basically this. If you are paying a reviewer for a stamp of approval and the reviewer sets the bar too high, why would you want to pay that reviewer? On the other end of the reviewer, it's easy to get more money by providing that stamp of approval to more people--not fewer--so they're incentivized to make it fairly easy to achieve.
• D-Machine 8mo ago
  > The first thing an academic does is check where a paper is published, before even reading it. It's a crutch IMO, academics that do this are not very competent, because we have plenty of research suggesting that higher-profile journals are in fact less trustworthy in many ways, or that there is no correlation at all between reputation and quality (see my other post here in this thread). Yes, some trash journals publish all trash, but, beyond that, competent researchers scan the abstract, look at sample sizes and basic stats, and if those check out, you skip to the methods and look for red flags there. Also, most early publications will be on an arXiv-like place anyway so you can't look to reputation yet. Likewise, serious analytic reviews like meta-analyses don't factor in e.g. impact factor or paper citations, since that would be nonsense. They focus on methodology and stats. I really think we ought to shame academics that are filtering papers based on journal alone, it is almost always the wrong way to make a quick judgement.
  • emil-lp 8mo ago
    > IMO, academics that do this are not very competent, because ... Where's the cry-laugh emoji when I need it. Of course academics check where stuff is published. Please... There are still real journals put there, although you might not know which is which.
    • D-Machine 8mo ago
      Ah, look, another smug sneer that ignores the evidence I presented, and makes another circular argument (i.e. that because academics look at rep, this is justified, even though I provided evidence disputing this). I know what journals are better / not. But reputation only is helpful in letting you ignore trash journals, once you are out of trash land, rep is just not a very meaningful factor, and you have to focus on methodology and substance.
      • emil-lp 8mo ago
        Where's the evidence you presented? What are some higher-profile journals that are in fact less trustworthy in many ways?
• tokai 8mo ago
  Just putting it on arXiv does not automatically make it OA. It needs a permissive license.
  • D-Machine 8mo ago
    I think people in this post are using arXiv as sort of metonymy / stand-in for OA here, but, yes.
• butILoveLife 8mo ago
  >The first thing an academic does is check where a paper is published, before even reading it. It's a crutch. This is actually what ruined my respect for Academia. My Science PhD buddy looked at the journal title and the claim, then said: "Its true!" I look at him with horror. Who cares about the journal, I want to know data and methodology. I've basically never forgiven Academia since this. I see even Ivys put out bad research and journals will publish bad research (Replication crisis and the ivy fake psychology studies) For outsiders, there is a prestige to being a PhD or working as a professor. Now that I'm mid career and lived through the previous events I mentioned + seeing who stuck with academia... These are your C grade performers. They didnt get hired by industry, so they stayed in school. They are so protective of their artificial rank because they cannot compete in Industry. Its like being the cool person on the tennis team. They are locally cool, but not globally cool.
  • beambot 8mo ago
    > This is actually what ruined my respect for Academia. Spoken like someone who never went through grad school at a competitive R1 program It was already a grueling 60-80 hour grind every week with frequent all nighters, high-pressure deadlines, absolute minimal pay, thankless duties, and plenty of politics. It's about the same for professors too. We already paid our dues by helping peer review (for free) a half dozen papers for each one we submitted. Why should we be expected to review random papers on arxiv too...?
    • butILoveLife 8mo ago
      >It was already a grueling 60-80 hour grind every week with frequent all nighters, high-pressure deadlines, absolute minimal pay, thankless duties, and plenty of politics. You know what else works really hard? A washing machine. Hard work alone doesnt create value. I could give you a spoon and tell you to dig a hole, or I can teach you how to use a Digger.
      • beambot 8mo ago
        Some things are hard because you overcomplicate them. Some things are hard by their very nature. Unless you are a Claude Shannon type, adding fundamental new knowledge to humanity's corpus is generally actually hard - at least in science & engineering. If you feel differently, I look forward to reading your groundbreaking papers!
• the__alchemist 8mo ago
  Check out the "Collective action problem" described in this article. It describes why "Just publish on arXiV" isn't a practical solution. It doesn't lead to the problem being fixed, because of inertia against any individual breaking out of the system.
• Aurornis 8mo ago
  > The problem isn't access, it's citations. arXiV is not considered a credible citation source since anyone can publish anything I do some due diligence work from time to time. Uploading to arXiV is becoming a favorite tactic from companies trying to look impressive for investors. I’ve read a lot of “papers” submitted by startup founders that are obviously ChatGPT written slop uploaded to arXiV. They then go to investor and show their record of “published research”. Smart investors are catching on but there are a lot of investors who associate journals with quality and filtering and assume having a paper on there means something. The filtering and curation problem is real. It seems like academic pettiness or laziness from the outside, until you see the volume of bad “papers” that everyone is trying to publish to chase the incentives.
• engineer_22 8mo ago
  We have a gatekeeper already in the funding source - they do the work of vetting researchers prior to funding the work. Piggy back this system so that the funding source publishes the papers itself, and researchers can only publish their papers that are directly funded. This system requires the cooperation of an organization to build the publishing infrastructure, but this could be a lowest capable bidder, and less drag on the system overall.
• SoftTalker 8mo ago
  Why isn't a citation just a citation. It's a pointer to a source, that's all. If it implies some standards have been applied or editorial or scientific review has been done, then that's going to have to be paid for by someone. TFA implies that doesn't happen: [and then] we stop doing all that stuff and then the cash just pours out. So a citation to an article in Nature isn't any better than one on arXiV.
  • gus_massa 8mo ago
    > So a citation to an article in Nature isn't any better than one on arXiV. The real problem is that nobody can grade and compare article in different topics, so there are proxies like number of articles in "serious" journals (whatever that means[1]) and number of citations in "serious" journals (whatever that means[1]). Do we count also citations in X/Tweeter, FaceBook, WordPress [2], StackOverflow, ... ? If links in HN also count as citations, there are 3 additional citations for my last paper: http://www.example.com/gus_massa/very_good_paper_2026.pdf http://www.example.com/gus_massa/very_good_paper_2026.pdf http://www.example.com/gus_massa/very_good_paper_2026.pdf http://www.example.com/gus_massa/very_good_paper_2026.pdf http://www.example.com/gus_massa/very_good_paper_2026.pdf http://www.example.com/gus_massa/very_good_paper_2026.pdf [1] Which journals are serious and which are paper mills? In the extremes the difference is clear, but there in the middle there is a gray zone. [2] A citation in Tao's blog in WordPress should be worth at least half official citation, or perhaps a whole point.
• armoredkitten 8mo ago
  I've long wished that "journals" and academic societies would transition from a publishing model to a cultivation model. If everything is available on arXiv, that's great, but it also means the best of the best is mixed in with all the rest. Journals (in the sense of whoever is on the editorial board) don't need to cease to exist; they just need to transition to "here's our list this month of what the best new articles are on X topic". The paper's already there on arXiv, you could already read it before. But having a group of editors that cultivate a list of good articles (as well as the peer review process that can, in an ideal world, serve to improve a paper) can serve to make sifting through arXiv less overwhelming, and draw attention to papers in particular subfields, subject matter, or whatever other criteria might be relevant.
  • convolvatron 8mo ago
    I don't see any reason why we shouldn't make this transitive. working professionals track the literature. if there were a standard way to publish a "I think this paper is interesting" signal, then we could roll that all up. there are certainly practitioners that I really do trust to be in the game for the right reasons, if they think a paper represents a contribution, then that's a strong signal for me.
  • bglazer 8mo ago
    This is quite similar to how eLife does publishing. You still have to submit to them but they basically just add reviewer comments and an “eLife Assessment” that serves as the quality/curation signal rather than a binary publish/reject
• jcranmer 8mo ago
  In the publishing world, there is this thing called the slush pile: the collection of unsolicited submissions, essentially the only way a person without an agent can break into the field. And you can find quite a few editors' experiences with the slush pile in various blog posts or articles online. And the general reaction goes from naïve wonder at the idea of finding the diamond-in-the-rough to frustration with the quality of the submissions and a realization that the actual game is to figure out how to reject submissions with as little reading as possible (because they don't have the time to do any reading!). This is before LLMs came about, which have made the slush pile problem much worse because they don't improve the quality of the submissions but the increase the amount of reading that needs to be done to reject them. Academia has the same fundamental problem. We don't actually have the time to read every possible paper someone has for us, because keeping up with literature takes time that we don't have. And while relying on the quality of the journal or conference as a metric for "is this paper worth reading?" has issues, to be honest, it is more effective than other proposed solutions. When I have done the literature searches that delved into the unknown, low-quality tiers of journals... no, those results were not worth the time I spent reading them.
• kleiba 8mo ago
  There's also a middle ground, i.e., renowned publishers who aren't free but still publish everything as OA. One example is Dagstuhl Publishing for CS research papers.
• j45 8mo ago
  Maybe studies could be dual published in open access publications and private. Then you get the private branded badge social proof and access can continue. Also, til anyone can publish to arxiv.org?
• avadodin 8mo ago
  I just checked in case it had changed, but Arxiv is nowhere near as free-for-all as you imply. Any crank who learned to use LaTeX is not allowed to post articles willy-nilly. You need endorsements in the field.
• mitthrowaway2 8mo ago
  I don't think there's really such a thing as a credible citation source. The citation just has to point to a source that hosts the genuine article; the credibility of the article comes from the articles that point to it, and the independent verifiability of the article's claims, not the location that it is hosted.