7 ms·

The state of academic publishing is in a truly dreadful state. The same monopolies that created the industry hundreds of years ago have never been pushed out an

The state of academic publishing is in a truly dreadful state. The same monopolies that created the industry hundreds of years ago have never been pushed out and innovate in the slowest way possible, aqui-murdering even worse than EA when they have to. Online journals and the promise they provide are peddled by high pressure sales pitches who insist on absurdly high prices. For many institutions, when taking usage stats, the price of online access per user often works out to several dollars per search... This is why I've given up trying to work in the field or found a company in the sector... Anyone with an idea and need a technical cofounder? ;)

twog 13y ago
I am working on something that may be of interest. Drop me a line, my email is in my profile
pms 13y ago
I think that there should be something like SO (Stack Overflow) for scientific papers, with anonymous user-generated reviews and ratings of the papers, and reputation being acquired by the users, both based on papers and their reviews. I wrote 'anonymous' because it's a more heavy-weight business than posting and assessing questions about coding. To avoid the situations when scientists get angry because of bad reviews, and try to revenge on their reviewers, it should be at least in the first years anonymous. The reviews would be voluntary, and also would be rated, just like answers to question in SO. I am a scientist, and I know that reviews have very low quality because of many reasons, such system could perhaps help improving the reviews, while keeping the reviewing process automatized, and reducing its cost to the minimum. In fact, costs of storing papers are low (Arxiv), reviews are free (nobody pays to the scientists anyway, they do it for the community and reputation), and the only cost that is high is the cost of managing the reviews. But if reviews could be automatized then we have a system that is as cheap as Arxiv is, and peer-reviewed :) In the long run I see such system emerging and being successful, and eventually replacing everything else. Needless to say it will take a lot of time though to popularize it. What do you think? Could this be done?
- tedsanders 13y ago
  There are a few websites already trying to do this, but as with all networks, it only works if you get enough users.
  - pms 13y ago
    Could you give me examples? Thanks!
    - alokv28 13y ago
      ResearchGate (http://www.researchgate.net/ http://www.researchgate.net/) and Academia.edu (http://academia.edu/ http://academia.edu/) are two examples of companies looking to build networks for academics.
- rrrrtttt 13y ago
  Refereeing papers is an odious chore that you only do to get your back scratched in return in the future. (They call it "giving back to the community", but it's really a protection racket.) You can't replace this with a voluntary system.
  - pms 13y ago
    Why not, if you would get reputation points for it? The idea is to review the papers which you want to read anyways, or perhaps you have already read them and you want to express your feelings about these papers, hopefully in a way useful to other viewers of the paper. Nobody tells you to do it, so you do it by heart, this surely would increase reviews quality.
    - rrrrtttt 13y ago
      Well, maybe this could work, but probably it would have to replicate the "coercive" component of the current system. In other words, by reviewing other people's papers you somehow improve the chances of having your own papers reviewed. And if somehow that system manages to also provide an incentive to do the job thoroughly, then that would be a huge improvement on top of what we have now.
omnisci 13y ago
Yes, I actually do:) Me: Neuroscience PhD at Columbia w/ some a technical background but not a coder.I'm working on going up against academic publishing right now. I have a YC application that is currently being reviewed and I'm in need of a technical cofounder. Project: Very briefly, I'm working on collecting raw data (positive AND negative), indexing it, and making relationships between datasets. For example, my neuroscience study has relationships to cancer biology, so the data presented to the user would include results from both. Re: Publishing, I'm going to provide raw data to scientists and create a venue for them to "blog" about these datasets. I think science needs to move incrementally (at internet speed) and get away from taking 3 years to produce a study and publishing a big paper of only positive data. Also, I'd like for the "peer review" portion to be more transparent, so that we can avoid the insane bias that goes into peer review. Goal 2: Create "big data" by combining small academic science results into a big ass database. Meta data could be the new preliminary data for academic grants. So yeah, if anyone is interested in playing with this, let me know. klg2142 @t columbia.edu
pseut 13y ago
Serious question: why does this need a technical solution? Researchers comprise the editorial staff for these journals, conduct the peer reviews, and submit the papers, all for free (or nearly so). They (we) universally want the papers to be accessible by other researchers (because that means the paper might get cited) and are at worst indifferent to the papers being accessible to the public at large, and by that I mean some people care a lot about that issue, some people don't care very much, but I don't know anyone who is opposed to public access. So there's an ongoing transition now by researchers/editorial boards/etc to move to a system with lower access costs (some of which involves taking back journal ownership, some doesn't). There's some logistical overhead and fixed costs, but those are falling. It seems like in 20 years (conservatively) all new research will be available to whomever wants it no matter what Elsevier or other companies do in the meantime (the papers may not be literally free, but affordable). So, like I said initially, I can see how some software for logistics or communication would be helpful, but the main issues don't strike me as technical.
- omnisci 13y ago
  One of the many problems with academic publishing is that it's holding on to an antiquated idea behind publishing and not progressing with the way communications are moving now. In a sense, publications are moving at 1970s speed and this hurts science. Hence the technical need to bring it to current times. Is it a "technical issue"? No, but neither is booking your flight via phone, that worked just fine. Could it be made much better, more accessible, cheaper, and overall better via technology. Yes.
  - pseut 13y ago
    An anecdote: I finished a decent draft of a paper two weeks ago and posted it to my website an hour before submitting it to a journal. The code to replicate it is on github available to anyone who wants to look at it, and the statistical methods I use I've put in a GPL R package. I've already discussed aspects of the paper and some implementation issues with other researchers over email, presented the paper at conferences, and I think people are already writing papers that use the statistic I propose (again, despite the paper having been submitted to a journal for the first time two weeks ago). In the process of discussing the paper (in person, over email, etc) I've already essentially done two rounds of peer review without journal submission. Maybe you could give details about what you mean by "antiquated idea behind publishing" because I'm pretty sure what I described is not 1970s speed. Now, if your point is that what I've described is not common practice, I agree completely. But that means that people need to be persuaded to use existing technical tools -- I can't see a specific step that's going to be a significant pain point (I'll grant that not everyone can/will use github, but uploading a zip archive of the paper's directory to a personal webpage is easy and is almost as good for code and data dissemination). Other anecdotes are blogs that announce and discuss new research: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2012/10/nber-asset-pricing-conference.html http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2012/10/nber-asset-pricing... http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2012/09/woodford-at-jackson-hole.html http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2012/09/woodford-at-jackso... That is legitimate academic discourse, put out by an extremely established and credentialed economist, almost instantly. On blogger.
tomrod 13y ago
I know a guy. Shoot me an email, let me know what tech you know, and I'll chat with him to see if he's interested.
narrator 13y ago
Aqui-murdering is a consequence of our financial system. When some big company can get bank money at far less than other companies, let's say 3% just as a hypothetical example, they can buy any business with a 6% cap rate and run it poorly so it only makes a 4% cap and still make a profit. This happens all the time. Meanwhile the entrepreneur cannot get money for anywhere near that and has to actually create real value instead of performing financial arbitrage as these companies with access to the cheap money can.
verisimilidude 13y ago
There was a time when I would've been on board. But I think that time has passed. I have a wife, a new baby, and a nice day job that allows me to enjoy both. A couple years ago, I spent many nights and weekends working on the academic publishing problem. The effort culminated in a massive hypermedia-style XML schema for distributed and inter-connected publishing, referencing, archiving, etc. There were hundreds of elements just in the common metadata model before I even got around to defining content modules. Then something hit me like a ton of bricks. I think it was seeing backbone.js for the first time. I realized how quickly web technology was moving forward, how easy it was becoming, and, by contrast, how absolutely shitty it was going to be to write mountains of XSLT on top of my huge DTD. Even in my attempt to create something really different, my approach was still totally clouded by the prevailing anti-wisdom of the academic publishing technology community. I realized I was on the wrong path. It was a great thought exercise that contributed immeasurably to my day work, but I had to move on. Happy to share more information if you like, though I'd need to dig the files out of deep storage.

twog 13y ago

I am working on something that may be of interest. Drop me a line, my email is in my profile

pms 13y ago

I think that there should be something like SO (Stack Overflow) for scientific papers, with anonymous user-generated reviews and ratings of the papers, and reputation being acquired by the users, both based on papers and their reviews. I wrote 'anonymous' because it's a more heavy-weight business than posting and assessing questions about coding. To avoid the situations when scientists get angry because of bad reviews, and try to revenge on their reviewers, it should be at least in the first years anonymous. The reviews would be voluntary, and also would be rated, just like answers to question in SO. I am a scientist, and I know that reviews have very low quality because of many reasons, such system could perhaps help improving the reviews, while keeping the reviewing process automatized, and reducing its cost to the minimum. In fact, costs of storing papers are low (Arxiv), reviews are free (nobody pays to the scientists anyway, they do it for the community and reputation), and the only cost that is high is the cost of managing the reviews. But if reviews could be automatized then we have a system that is as cheap as Arxiv is, and peer-reviewed :) In the long run I see such system emerging and being successful, and eventually replacing everything else. Needless to say it will take a lot of time though to popularize it. What do you think? Could this be done?

tedsanders 13y ago
There are a few websites already trying to do this, but as with all networks, it only works if you get enough users.
- pms 13y ago
  Could you give me examples? Thanks!
  - alokv28 13y ago
    ResearchGate (http://www.researchgate.net/ http://www.researchgate.net/) and Academia.edu (http://academia.edu/ http://academia.edu/) are two examples of companies looking to build networks for academics.
rrrrtttt 13y ago
Refereeing papers is an odious chore that you only do to get your back scratched in return in the future. (They call it "giving back to the community", but it's really a protection racket.) You can't replace this with a voluntary system.
- pms 13y ago
  Why not, if you would get reputation points for it? The idea is to review the papers which you want to read anyways, or perhaps you have already read them and you want to express your feelings about these papers, hopefully in a way useful to other viewers of the paper. Nobody tells you to do it, so you do it by heart, this surely would increase reviews quality.
  - rrrrtttt 13y ago
    Well, maybe this could work, but probably it would have to replicate the "coercive" component of the current system. In other words, by reviewing other people's papers you somehow improve the chances of having your own papers reviewed. And if somehow that system manages to also provide an incentive to do the job thoroughly, then that would be a huge improvement on top of what we have now.

omnisci 13y ago

Yes, I actually do:) Me: Neuroscience PhD at Columbia w/ some a technical background but not a coder.I'm working on going up against academic publishing right now. I have a YC application that is currently being reviewed and I'm in need of a technical cofounder. Project: Very briefly, I'm working on collecting raw data (positive AND negative), indexing it, and making relationships between datasets. For example, my neuroscience study has relationships to cancer biology, so the data presented to the user would include results from both. Re: Publishing, I'm going to provide raw data to scientists and create a venue for them to "blog" about these datasets. I think science needs to move incrementally (at internet speed) and get away from taking 3 years to produce a study and publishing a big paper of only positive data. Also, I'd like for the "peer review" portion to be more transparent, so that we can avoid the insane bias that goes into peer review. Goal 2: Create "big data" by combining small academic science results into a big ass database. Meta data could be the new preliminary data for academic grants. So yeah, if anyone is interested in playing with this, let me know. klg2142 @t columbia.edu

pseut 13y ago

Serious question: why does this need a technical solution? Researchers comprise the editorial staff for these journals, conduct the peer reviews, and submit the papers, all for free (or nearly so). They (we) universally want the papers to be accessible by other researchers (because that means the paper might get cited) and are at worst indifferent to the papers being accessible to the public at large, and by that I mean some people care a lot about that issue, some people don't care very much, but I don't know anyone who is opposed to public access. So there's an ongoing transition now by researchers/editorial boards/etc to move to a system with lower access costs (some of which involves taking back journal ownership, some doesn't). There's some logistical overhead and fixed costs, but those are falling. It seems like in 20 years (conservatively) all new research will be available to whomever wants it no matter what Elsevier or other companies do in the meantime (the papers may not be literally free, but affordable). So, like I said initially, I can see how some software for logistics or communication would be helpful, but the main issues don't strike me as technical.

omnisci 13y ago
One of the many problems with academic publishing is that it's holding on to an antiquated idea behind publishing and not progressing with the way communications are moving now. In a sense, publications are moving at 1970s speed and this hurts science. Hence the technical need to bring it to current times. Is it a "technical issue"? No, but neither is booking your flight via phone, that worked just fine. Could it be made much better, more accessible, cheaper, and overall better via technology. Yes.
- pseut 13y ago
  An anecdote: I finished a decent draft of a paper two weeks ago and posted it to my website an hour before submitting it to a journal. The code to replicate it is on github available to anyone who wants to look at it, and the statistical methods I use I've put in a GPL R package. I've already discussed aspects of the paper and some implementation issues with other researchers over email, presented the paper at conferences, and I think people are already writing papers that use the statistic I propose (again, despite the paper having been submitted to a journal for the first time two weeks ago). In the process of discussing the paper (in person, over email, etc) I've already essentially done two rounds of peer review without journal submission. Maybe you could give details about what you mean by "antiquated idea behind publishing" because I'm pretty sure what I described is not 1970s speed. Now, if your point is that what I've described is not common practice, I agree completely. But that means that people need to be persuaded to use existing technical tools -- I can't see a specific step that's going to be a significant pain point (I'll grant that not everyone can/will use github, but uploading a zip archive of the paper's directory to a personal webpage is easy and is almost as good for code and data dissemination). Other anecdotes are blogs that announce and discuss new research: http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2012/10/nber-asset-pricing-conference.html http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2012/10/nber-asset-pricing... http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2012/09/woodford-at-jackson-hole.html http://johnhcochrane.blogspot.com/2012/09/woodford-at-jackso... That is legitimate academic discourse, put out by an extremely established and credentialed economist, almost instantly. On blogger.

tomrod 13y ago

I know a guy. Shoot me an email, let me know what tech you know, and I'll chat with him to see if he's interested.

narrator 13y ago

Aqui-murdering is a consequence of our financial system. When some big company can get bank money at far less than other companies, let's say 3% just as a hypothetical example, they can buy any business with a 6% cap rate and run it poorly so it only makes a 4% cap and still make a profit. This happens all the time. Meanwhile the entrepreneur cannot get money for anywhere near that and has to actually create real value instead of performing financial arbitrage as these companies with access to the cheap money can.

verisimilidude 13y ago

There was a time when I would've been on board. But I think that time has passed. I have a wife, a new baby, and a nice day job that allows me to enjoy both. A couple years ago, I spent many nights and weekends working on the academic publishing problem. The effort culminated in a massive hypermedia-style XML schema for distributed and inter-connected publishing, referencing, archiving, etc. There were hundreds of elements just in the common metadata model before I even got around to defining content modules. Then something hit me like a ton of bricks. I think it was seeing backbone.js for the first time. I realized how quickly web technology was moving forward, how easy it was becoming, and, by contrast, how absolutely shitty it was going to be to write mountains of XSLT on top of my huge DTD. Even in my attempt to create something really different, my approach was still totally clouded by the prevailing anti-wisdom of the academic publishing technology community. I realized I was on the wrong path. It was a great thought exercise that contributed immeasurably to my day work, but I had to move on. Happy to share more information if you like, though I'd need to dig the files out of deep storage.