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>the need to ensure that the valuable contributions that the scientific publishing industry provides are not lost. Honestly, what value does the publishing ind

>the need to ensure that the valuable contributions that the scientific publishing industry provides are not lost. Honestly, what value does the publishing industry provide? Search? Google, Microsoft Bing, and any number of other search providers could do that at the fraction of the cost. Peer review? No, that is performed by independent scientists, who are either not paid, or paid a negligible fee. Editing? Nope. Scientific journals are not edited for content or even proofread; I know a few professors who found that out the hard way after discovering typos in their own articles. Typesetting? OK. I'll give them that one. So, for the cost of thousands of dollars to the original researchers, on top of the outrageously high licensing fees paid by people who wish to read the articles, we get papers that have been typeset. Hoo boy, what a great deal.

rayiner 14y ago
> Honestly, what value does the publishing industry provide? Search? Google, Microsoft Bing, and any number of other search providers could do that at the fraction of the cost. You can't compare the curation you get in a proper journal to the shitsplatter of your typical search engine results. A very good example of how crappy search technology is for this sort of thing is to do legal research on Google Scholar versus Westlaw. The indexing, head notes, directories, and topical summaries you get from Westlaw make Google Scholar look like a toy. And why should we expect differently? We're comparing the product of human labor to the results of extremely primitive AI technology optimized not for research but for making sure that people can quickly find the latest celebrity nip slip photos.
- MBlume 14y ago
  The curation is done by scientists volunteering their time to the journals. The publishers add nothing. They are parasites and deserve swift, merciless death.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Volunteer scientists do not do the curation. They do editing and peer review, but they don't do the editorial work of deciding what articles are published, how they are presented, what's featured, etc.
    - MBlume 14y ago
      Sorry, you're right, I conflated curation with peer-review. Is curation much harder? It seems like if you're already reviewing, you're most of the way there.
      - rayiner 14y ago
        It's not about whether it's hard or not, it's about supply and demand for curation. Effective curation depends on the readers' faith in the organization to back quality articles, and there is a limited supply of such organizations. E.g. if I type "economics of deflation" into Google, I get: wikipedia, a youtube video, "tutor2u.net", and investopedia among other things. Businessweek and the Economist show up on the bottom half of the first page. The first several pages of results are full of Austrian and Mises gibberish--lot's of "counter conventional wisdom" sites. This is why I don't go to Google to research economics. I don't trust it to pick quality research. So where do I turn? "tutor2u.net?" No. I have no idea whether they can be trusted or not. So I use signaling and proxies. I look for things that have "Harvard" or "London School of Economics" domains. The folks at Harvard and LSE long ago figured out that basic dynamic, and that's why they use their names to publish journals. Is it a hard job other people couldn't do? No. But the journals exist because we trust Harvard to do the job, and we don't trust "tutor2u.net". My wife actually hates the NIH open access policy for this reason. She argues a lot on the internet about pediatrics/child birth. She gets crazies who peddle crackpot theories by citing to sketchy papers that happen to be hosted on an NIH domain. They assume that by hosting those papers, NIH vouches for the content in those papers, but of course that's not the case.
        adiM 14y ago
        If you are interested in academic articles, why not search on google scholar? It provides much more relevant results.
- InvisibleCities 14y ago
  If you think that Google can't crawl a paper to find the section labeled 'Abstract' and index it, you are hopelessly naive. Google Scholar sucks because of a lack of available, open access papers, not because of technological limitations.
  - rayiner 14y ago
    Google Scholar sucks for legal research too, and it's got a very thorough database of federal cases going back to 1923, and has a formidable database of state cases. It sucks because it uses extremely primitive technology (even if it's start of the art, it's primitive in the grand scheme of things) to perform indexing. Like the web search engine, it relies heavily on things like citation counts, which makes it nearly useless for researching any complex point of law because your search results are full of highly-cited cases that might cover the relevant subject only in passing or in boilerplate. The results are shitty in precisely the way you'd expect them to be based on the kind of algorithms Google uses. The limitations of Google's search algorithms (search algorithms generally) aren't apparent for web searches because by and large everyone is searching for the same things. Google is great at helping people converge onto popular resources like that. It falls apart in situations where you might be the only person searching for a particular issue. The basic problem with search is that computers don't understand documents. The whole idea behind Page Rank was to side-step that by incorporating human intelligence--that is the human intelligence encoded into the graph of links. Further refinements have been based on things like taking into account human behavior in response to search results, and aggregating over all the millions of people who search for the same things. Without all that human intelligence, all that context, you're left with a computer that just sees a bunch of text, instead of background, dicta, holding, etc.
- robrenaud 14y ago
  If expensive human curation of research papers is valuable, that's fine with me. Let the non-public funded curation be proprietary. But that's no reason to lock up the publicly funded research papers themselves.
  - MBlume 14y ago
    Right, Nature can publish a list of URLS which in their opinion is worth reading, and they can charge $50k to read that list if they like. Keep the papers in the open, is all.

rayiner 14y ago

> Honestly, what value does the publishing industry provide? Search? Google, Microsoft Bing, and any number of other search providers could do that at the fraction of the cost. You can't compare the curation you get in a proper journal to the shitsplatter of your typical search engine results. A very good example of how crappy search technology is for this sort of thing is to do legal research on Google Scholar versus Westlaw. The indexing, head notes, directories, and topical summaries you get from Westlaw make Google Scholar look like a toy. And why should we expect differently? We're comparing the product of human labor to the results of extremely primitive AI technology optimized not for research but for making sure that people can quickly find the latest celebrity nip slip photos.

MBlume 14y ago
The curation is done by scientists volunteering their time to the journals. The publishers add nothing. They are parasites and deserve swift, merciless death.
- rayiner 14y ago
  Volunteer scientists do not do the curation. They do editing and peer review, but they don't do the editorial work of deciding what articles are published, how they are presented, what's featured, etc.
  - MBlume 14y ago
    Sorry, you're right, I conflated curation with peer-review. Is curation much harder? It seems like if you're already reviewing, you're most of the way there.
    - rayiner 14y ago
      It's not about whether it's hard or not, it's about supply and demand for curation. Effective curation depends on the readers' faith in the organization to back quality articles, and there is a limited supply of such organizations. E.g. if I type "economics of deflation" into Google, I get: wikipedia, a youtube video, "tutor2u.net", and investopedia among other things. Businessweek and the Economist show up on the bottom half of the first page. The first several pages of results are full of Austrian and Mises gibberish--lot's of "counter conventional wisdom" sites. This is why I don't go to Google to research economics. I don't trust it to pick quality research. So where do I turn? "tutor2u.net?" No. I have no idea whether they can be trusted or not. So I use signaling and proxies. I look for things that have "Harvard" or "London School of Economics" domains. The folks at Harvard and LSE long ago figured out that basic dynamic, and that's why they use their names to publish journals. Is it a hard job other people couldn't do? No. But the journals exist because we trust Harvard to do the job, and we don't trust "tutor2u.net". My wife actually hates the NIH open access policy for this reason. She argues a lot on the internet about pediatrics/child birth. She gets crazies who peddle crackpot theories by citing to sketchy papers that happen to be hosted on an NIH domain. They assume that by hosting those papers, NIH vouches for the content in those papers, but of course that's not the case.
      - adiM 14y ago
        If you are interested in academic articles, why not search on google scholar? It provides much more relevant results.
InvisibleCities 14y ago
If you think that Google can't crawl a paper to find the section labeled 'Abstract' and index it, you are hopelessly naive. Google Scholar sucks because of a lack of available, open access papers, not because of technological limitations.
- rayiner 14y ago
  Google Scholar sucks for legal research too, and it's got a very thorough database of federal cases going back to 1923, and has a formidable database of state cases. It sucks because it uses extremely primitive technology (even if it's start of the art, it's primitive in the grand scheme of things) to perform indexing. Like the web search engine, it relies heavily on things like citation counts, which makes it nearly useless for researching any complex point of law because your search results are full of highly-cited cases that might cover the relevant subject only in passing or in boilerplate. The results are shitty in precisely the way you'd expect them to be based on the kind of algorithms Google uses. The limitations of Google's search algorithms (search algorithms generally) aren't apparent for web searches because by and large everyone is searching for the same things. Google is great at helping people converge onto popular resources like that. It falls apart in situations where you might be the only person searching for a particular issue. The basic problem with search is that computers don't understand documents. The whole idea behind Page Rank was to side-step that by incorporating human intelligence--that is the human intelligence encoded into the graph of links. Further refinements have been based on things like taking into account human behavior in response to search results, and aggregating over all the millions of people who search for the same things. Without all that human intelligence, all that context, you're left with a computer that just sees a bunch of text, instead of background, dicta, holding, etc.
robrenaud 14y ago
If expensive human curation of research papers is valuable, that's fine with me. Let the non-public funded curation be proprietary. But that's no reason to lock up the publicly funded research papers themselves.
- MBlume 14y ago
  Right, Nature can publish a list of URLS which in their opinion is worth reading, and they can charge $50k to read that list if they like. Keep the papers in the open, is all.