5 ms·

When I tell people how important and how epically flawed the current system of academic journal publishing is I'm often met with blank stares. Can you imagine a

When I tell people how important and how epically flawed the current system of academic journal publishing is I'm often met with blank stares. Can you imagine any other industry where the people doing most of the work aren't compensated financially and conglomerates make most of the profit. You can try to make parallels to the record industry at its worse, but those people at least receive advances. And with journal publishing, it's not some random niche. This is where "new knowledge" becomes validated. You're not hearing talking heads on television mentioning some new thing mentioned in a first year college textbook – instead you hear "a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine." Scholars need to and are adopting ways to take scholarly communication into their own hands. A sociology journal called Sociological Science, with an editorial board out of Stanford and Cornell has recently made a buzz by taking the process into their own hands: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/group-sociologists-launch-new-online-journal http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/group-sociologist... (Full disclosure: this is a problem my startup works on)

paulgb 12y ago
> You can try to make parallels to the record industry at its worse, but those people at least receive advances. Also, recording artists don't receive taxpayer money.
- nraynaud 12y ago
  note that neither do record companies.
  - teddyh 12y ago
    Actually, yes, record companies do receive taxpayer money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
    - nraynaud 12y ago
      let's talk about proportions and tax law here. I don't find my argument countered in any ways. 1) this is a collection that doesn't go to the general budget, it's a directed levy. 2) it's not as if the record companies main income and business model was to sell to public institutions. Whereas most of the scientific articles are bought by publicly funded laboratories, hospitals, universities (in the non-US world) etc.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  Musicians are extensively subsidised in nearly all countries that have a functioning economy able to subsidise stuff.
- watwut 12y ago
  I'm ok with taxpayer money going on research, I'm less ok with those taxpayer money being used to feed company sitting on monopoly.
mcrider 12y ago
What is your startup? I used to work in the same space (albeit for a non-profit).
- robertwalsh0 12y ago
  http://www.scholasticahq.com http://www.scholasticahq.com
  - mcrider 12y ago
    Ah right, I remember reading about you guys a couple of years ago. Glad to hear of your success! I used to work for the Public Knowledge Project and I think we learned a thing or two from your companies' attention to UX and design.
    - robertwalsh0 12y ago
      Cool! And thanks for the compliment :)
czr80 12y ago
> Can you imagine any other industry where the people doing most of the work aren't compensated financially and conglomerates make most of the profit. Every online company relying on user generated content?
- ansible 12y ago
  Yeah, but with Facebook and Reddit, you're not paying a ton of money to have access to journal articles you need to study for your chosen profession. You're just looking at some advertisements in exchange for some funny cat pictures. One of those may lighten your mood for the day, the other of those advances civilization and the human condition as a whole.
  - omnisci 12y ago
    Also you don't pay a lot of money to post to Facebook or Reddit. You do when you publish (Cheapest publication I have was ~$500). Publishing a paper is expensive.
    - return0 12y ago
      and they don't even do proofreading or formatting.
    - mjn 12y ago
      Varies quite a bit by field afaict. In CS, I've never paid to publish in journals, and I think it would be seen as weird. However we do often publish papers at conferences (big conferences like SIGGRAPH, CHI, and IJCAI are possibly actually more prestigious than journals to publish in), and in that case it costs money to attend and register for the conference.
      - omnisci 12y ago
        I didn't know that:) In the Life sciences, we tend to pay. We also publish images which are very costly. We have one publication that is going to cost us around $3k to publish as it has a lot of microscopy images.
jdorw 12y ago
Years ago when I was in grad school in chemistry I insisted that my work get published in a open journal. I actually got a very key step of my research from an open journal and I felt I should repay the act. This did not go over well since my PI was not yet tenured and ultimately it was his choice.
mjn 12y ago
CS academics have been slowly taking control of more of our own journals. It somewhat helps that there is already relatively little editing/layout work done on the journal's side, because computer scientists like to produce publication-ready PDFs straight out of LaTeX, and a journal is more or less just a concatenation of those. In some other fields it's more common to send a draft-formatted manuscript, which the journal staff will format into professional-looking magazine style; that requires more of a "real" staff, which then means you need a budget and source of funds and such. This is one reason some open-access publications in other areas are turning to charging the authors to fund the operations (although reputable journals will waive the fee for authors who don't have a source of funds such as a grant to cover the fee, so it's not fully "pay to play"). In AI, two of the top journals are now open-access and run on a shoestring budget by academics, so also don't have any publication charges: http://jmlr.org http://jmlr.org http://jair.org http://jair.org Here was the 2001 letter that kicked off JMLR: http://jmlr.org/statement.html http://jmlr.org/statement.html
- jebus989 12y ago
  Lots of fields primarily use LaTeX to typeset papers, e.g. physics and computational biology. Typesetting and hosting a PDF never justifies a $1500 publishing fee given that reviewers, editors and of course authors are all working for free. Hence even the good-guy (non-profit) publisher PLOS took about 20% excess revenue in 2012, primarily by charging $1300 odd dollars for publication in PLOS ONE. Why do we even need the dated journal model? Push everything to a central arXiv, biorXiv like repo (funded as they are by small donations from institutions). Couple this with open post-publication peer review and endorsements. Millions of tax dollars saved around the world, research open to everyone. The counter argument is the rubber stamp that accompanies a prestigious journal (and filtering the crazies) but if the repo was accompanied with a suitable array of article-level metrics and thorough categorisation the good science can continue to filter to the top, much like how HN and reddit work.
njharman 12y ago
> most of the work aren't compensated financially and conglomerates make most of the profit. The "conglomerates make most of the profit" applies to most every content industry, music, movies, even fine art. Most of the money is made in controlling distribution. A few percentage points of the very top artists make crap loads. The other 99.x% is poorly compensated and routinely exploited.
craigyk 12y ago
I'm glad you have a startup working on it. I've long thought fixing this problem would be a true boon to humanity vs. the typical social fad focus of most tech startups. I've even debated doing it myself multiple times over the past couple of years. If your venture needs any help maybe I can pitch in?
codemac 12y ago
> Can you imagine any other industry where the people doing most of the work aren't compensated financially and conglomerates make most of the profit. The NCAA. Ironically, it also has the same bullshit lofty wording around why this is ok. I think this combination of research + vocational school + sport is going to have this kind of problem.
hackuser 12y ago
> Can you imagine any other industry where the people doing most of the work aren't compensated financially and conglomerates make most of the profit. One that comes to mind, not coincidentally, is also in the academic world: College sports. Perhaps both are due to the same cause, the misalignment of academic and market values: Academia is not profit-oriented; money is not their priority[1]. When they generate something of financial value (journal articles or football games), someone naturally jumps in (journal publishers, TV networks, NCAA), charges market prices for it, gives the academics producing it (faculty or student-athletes) the wages of academia (fame, status and pride), and keeps the cash for themselves. [1] Next time someone tells you the free market is the one and only god that solves all problems and anything else is 'socialist', consider the many things that aren't market-oriented: Almost everything ever produced by academia, from relativity to the double helix to the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire; the Internet, World Wide Web, email, LAMP, etc.; the U.S. Constitution, the work of Gandhi and MLK; everything every soldier has accomplished ...
GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
"Can you imagine any other industry where the people doing most of the work aren't compensated financially and conglomerates make most of the profit." http://www.debeers.com/ http://www.debeers.com/

paulgb 12y ago

> You can try to make parallels to the record industry at its worse, but those people at least receive advances. Also, recording artists don't receive taxpayer money.

nraynaud 12y ago
note that neither do record companies.
- teddyh 12y ago
  Actually, yes, record companies do receive taxpayer money: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
  - nraynaud 12y ago
    let's talk about proportions and tax law here. I don't find my argument countered in any ways. 1) this is a collection that doesn't go to the general budget, it's a directed levy. 2) it's not as if the record companies main income and business model was to sell to public institutions. Whereas most of the scientific articles are bought by publicly funded laboratories, hospitals, universities (in the non-US world) etc.
lotsofmangos 12y ago
Musicians are extensively subsidised in nearly all countries that have a functioning economy able to subsidise stuff.
watwut 12y ago
I'm ok with taxpayer money going on research, I'm less ok with those taxpayer money being used to feed company sitting on monopoly.

mcrider 12y ago

What is your startup? I used to work in the same space (albeit for a non-profit).

robertwalsh0 12y ago
http://www.scholasticahq.com http://www.scholasticahq.com
- mcrider 12y ago
  Ah right, I remember reading about you guys a couple of years ago. Glad to hear of your success! I used to work for the Public Knowledge Project and I think we learned a thing or two from your companies' attention to UX and design.
  - robertwalsh0 12y ago
    Cool! And thanks for the compliment :)

czr80 12y ago

> Can you imagine any other industry where the people doing most of the work aren't compensated financially and conglomerates make most of the profit. Every online company relying on user generated content?

ansible 12y ago
Yeah, but with Facebook and Reddit, you're not paying a ton of money to have access to journal articles you need to study for your chosen profession. You're just looking at some advertisements in exchange for some funny cat pictures. One of those may lighten your mood for the day, the other of those advances civilization and the human condition as a whole.
- omnisci 12y ago
  Also you don't pay a lot of money to post to Facebook or Reddit. You do when you publish (Cheapest publication I have was ~$500). Publishing a paper is expensive.
  - return0 12y ago
    and they don't even do proofreading or formatting.
  - mjn 12y ago
    Varies quite a bit by field afaict. In CS, I've never paid to publish in journals, and I think it would be seen as weird. However we do often publish papers at conferences (big conferences like SIGGRAPH, CHI, and IJCAI are possibly actually more prestigious than journals to publish in), and in that case it costs money to attend and register for the conference.
    - omnisci 12y ago
      I didn't know that:) In the Life sciences, we tend to pay. We also publish images which are very costly. We have one publication that is going to cost us around $3k to publish as it has a lot of microscopy images.

jdorw 12y ago

Years ago when I was in grad school in chemistry I insisted that my work get published in a open journal. I actually got a very key step of my research from an open journal and I felt I should repay the act. This did not go over well since my PI was not yet tenured and ultimately it was his choice.

mjn 12y ago

CS academics have been slowly taking control of more of our own journals. It somewhat helps that there is already relatively little editing/layout work done on the journal's side, because computer scientists like to produce publication-ready PDFs straight out of LaTeX, and a journal is more or less just a concatenation of those. In some other fields it's more common to send a draft-formatted manuscript, which the journal staff will format into professional-looking magazine style; that requires more of a "real" staff, which then means you need a budget and source of funds and such. This is one reason some open-access publications in other areas are turning to charging the authors to fund the operations (although reputable journals will waive the fee for authors who don't have a source of funds such as a grant to cover the fee, so it's not fully "pay to play"). In AI, two of the top journals are now open-access and run on a shoestring budget by academics, so also don't have any publication charges: http://jmlr.org http://jmlr.org http://jair.org http://jair.org Here was the 2001 letter that kicked off JMLR: http://jmlr.org/statement.html http://jmlr.org/statement.html

jebus989 12y ago
Lots of fields primarily use LaTeX to typeset papers, e.g. physics and computational biology. Typesetting and hosting a PDF never justifies a $1500 publishing fee given that reviewers, editors and of course authors are all working for free. Hence even the good-guy (non-profit) publisher PLOS took about 20% excess revenue in 2012, primarily by charging $1300 odd dollars for publication in PLOS ONE. Why do we even need the dated journal model? Push everything to a central arXiv, biorXiv like repo (funded as they are by small donations from institutions). Couple this with open post-publication peer review and endorsements. Millions of tax dollars saved around the world, research open to everyone. The counter argument is the rubber stamp that accompanies a prestigious journal (and filtering the crazies) but if the repo was accompanied with a suitable array of article-level metrics and thorough categorisation the good science can continue to filter to the top, much like how HN and reddit work.

njharman 12y ago

> most of the work aren't compensated financially and conglomerates make most of the profit. The "conglomerates make most of the profit" applies to most every content industry, music, movies, even fine art. Most of the money is made in controlling distribution. A few percentage points of the very top artists make crap loads. The other 99.x% is poorly compensated and routinely exploited.

craigyk 12y ago

I'm glad you have a startup working on it. I've long thought fixing this problem would be a true boon to humanity vs. the typical social fad focus of most tech startups. I've even debated doing it myself multiple times over the past couple of years. If your venture needs any help maybe I can pitch in?

codemac 12y ago

> Can you imagine any other industry where the people doing most of the work aren't compensated financially and conglomerates make most of the profit. The NCAA. Ironically, it also has the same bullshit lofty wording around why this is ok. I think this combination of research + vocational school + sport is going to have this kind of problem.

hackuser 12y ago

> Can you imagine any other industry where the people doing most of the work aren't compensated financially and conglomerates make most of the profit. One that comes to mind, not coincidentally, is also in the academic world: College sports. Perhaps both are due to the same cause, the misalignment of academic and market values: Academia is not profit-oriented; money is not their priority[1]. When they generate something of financial value (journal articles or football games), someone naturally jumps in (journal publishers, TV networks, NCAA), charges market prices for it, gives the academics producing it (faculty or student-athletes) the wages of academia (fame, status and pride), and keeps the cash for themselves. [1] Next time someone tells you the free market is the one and only god that solves all problems and anything else is 'socialist', consider the many things that aren't market-oriented: Almost everything ever produced by academia, from relativity to the double helix to the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire; the Internet, World Wide Web, email, LAMP, etc.; the U.S. Constitution, the work of Gandhi and MLK; everything every soldier has accomplished ...

GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago

"Can you imagine any other industry where the people doing most of the work aren't compensated financially and conglomerates make most of the profit." http://www.debeers.com/ http://www.debeers.com/