17 ms·

It's sad that this process hasn't started earlier. It's a farce that publishers got to erect a walled garden around tax funded research without adding anything

It's sad that this process hasn't started earlier. It's a farce that publishers got to erect a walled garden around tax funded research without adding anything of value. That being said, EU CS academia is a cess pool where more often than not it matters more who you know than what your actual research is. I partially blame the funding agencies for attaching unrealistic publication metrics to grants (publish or perish). On the other hand i had high ranking university staff tell me "they love how they can just burn €6M in 2 year EU project with zero outcome without consequences". Reviewers of such projects only need to have the right political color and zero domain knowledge. It's sad really and i'm happy i don't have to work in such an environment amnymore.

_dark_matter_ 11y ago
Ouch, that's a scathing comment on EU CS research. Being in the US I know very little about it, though I do see a lot of quality work in my field come out of ETH-Zurich. I want to say we don't have the problems you're talking about, but I could just be an oblivious grad student :)
- Someone 11y ago
  Zürich, Switzerland, isn't in the EU :-)
  - protothomas 11y ago
    For the purposes of European research funding it effectively is.
    - folli 11y ago
      I would hope not. The single biggest research foundation in Switzerland is SNF (http://www.snf.ch/ http://www.snf.ch/), especially since the swiss participation in Horizon 2020 is unresolved due to political reasons.
anigbrowl 11y ago
Well, the administrators have outsourced the domain knowledge to the journal reviewers and pay for this service indirectly through journal fees, so from an accounting point of view it makes total sense. If not publication, what metric should funding agencies use to decide who gets grants? Of course they could hire senior scientists in the field to evaluate grant roposals, but that would mean hiring lots and lots of scientists across all the fields in which they disburse grants; those jobs would be sinecures and from the point of view of the grant applicant it would still be about 'who you know,' just a referee at a grant-issuing agency instead of an editor/reviewer at a journal. I don't disagree with you about the problem, but I'm not clear on how you would address it. Making the journals less profitable by refusing to pay silly subscription prices to read publicly-funded research would be a good thing for universities, and maybe for scientific publishing, but it's not going to fix the disconnect between people who control the public purse strings and which scientists will get the grants they want.
- sago 11y ago
  > outsourced the domain knowledge to the journal reviewers Except that, by and large, those reviewers aren't being paid. So the 'outsourcing' argument isn't quite it. If it were there would be no problem with open access. It is more about brand. They're outsourcing the need to determine quality by buying into a brand. That brand is kept afloat by unpaid labour on all sides, yet charges heftily for its brand. It is an understandable model, but not a very pleasant one. Unless you're an Elsevier shareholder, getting paid for your brand IP.
  - Fomite 11y ago
    While their not being paid directly, it should be noted that reviewing, and sitting on editorial boards, is considered in a great many tenure decisions.
  - anigbrowl 11y ago
    Agreed. When I use the term 'outsourcing' I mean that from grant administrators' point of view the scientific journal is a black box, providing X level of quality control for Y subscription cost.
dougmccune 11y ago
I'll take a little of the publisher bait (I sit on the board of a "dinosaur paywall publisher"). I'd like to question the popular thinking that publishers do not add anything of value. There has never been a time in history when it has been easier to publish your research output in any number of other places than a paywall journal. You can post it on your own blog. You want a DOI? You can post it on The Winnower. You need it in a journal with an impact factor (even though you hate impact factor)? Submit it to PLOS One or PeerJ. By publishing with a paywall journal you are acknowledging the fact that your field values the prestige awarded by that journal. That's what you're getting, the prestige. You can argue all day about whether that prestige is earned or not, but it's not the publishers that are dictating the prestige, it's the tenure committees and faculty. Everyone is "against" the journal impact factor until it comes time to apply for tenure, at which point your tenure committee weighs it so highly that you can't avoid pandering to it. So you publish in the highest impact factor journal. We're all hoping to change this system. Publishers don't like being held hostage by Thomson Reuters (who controls impact factor) and having to constantly worry about the next year's impact factor. In a lot of ways we'd all love to move to academia-accepted alternative metrics. I would love a system that allows third parties to provide editorial review of the importance of a paper, and allow that to be separated from the journal. As a publisher that's what we're really trying to do, provide a way to judge the importance of a paper before you can get all the citation data coming in over the years. I would love to figure out a different way of doing so. But changing that means changing deep-rooted behavior throughout all of academia. And that is HARD.
- tsurantino 11y ago
  Doesn't "publishing with a paywall journal you acknowledge that your field values the prestige awarded by that journal" contract with "it's not the publishers that are dictating the prestige". Your arguing that if I post it on a blog, it gets lost in a sea of other content. If I publish it, then I get validation. If I understand correctly, you are saying that one of the fundamental reasons for publishers to exist is because they validate someone's work (citations, vetting, peer approval). Why does this have to happen at the expense of public access, if the research that goes through that vetting process is publicly funded?
rspeer 11y ago
I once went to a meeting sponsored by the EU about how to make data resources for computational linguistics more interoperable. I noted with increasing dismay that everything people were saying aimed to check off requirements that met EU definitions of interoperability without doing anything at all to the data. For example, someone asked to produce XML could just submit something like this: <xml>  <dataset type="text/csv" href="http://example.server/example.csv" /> <license>unusably restrictive academic license text goes here</license> </xml> And now I kind of understand that was the goal. The people running that meeting weren't trying to be useful, they were trying to create a bureaucracy that would excuse their lack of usefulness.
bovik 11y ago
Aren't all serious Math and CS papers free on the arXiv anyway?
- ylem 11y ago
  It's not math or CS, but some chemistry journals don't allow preprints on the arxiv. Also, for some new results in physics, you don't put them on the arxiv if you're worried about being scooped...
- Maken 11y ago
  Only recent papers and only from publishers which allow it.
Jugurtha 11y ago
And for what! I left Universtiy a year ago. To prepare my dissertation, I had to read hundreds of articles like everyone, and like everyone, I had to sort through all the crap that somehow makes it to IEEE. I expected that peer reviewed articles would be the best there is. I was working on ECG signals that were acquired in our institute and in a hospital to deal with all sorts of unbearable noises and artefacts. And then there were articles that would be published after testing their algorithms on a synthetic ECG (as if the world is lacking true hearts) with a cute gaussian noise (as if the world is lacking funky electrodes on sweaty hairy dudes), or the least noisy signals of the MIT database (the ones who test their stuff on the first seconds of 100.dat, you know who you are). What I also found frustrating is that we have to trust the words of the authors about the results. Cool, the signal is filtered but how long does your program take to deal with the 1.5 million samples? How many lines of code? What was the gear used? These are all important things to know so that people know if they're improving stuff or not. But the FPGA cluster seldom gets mentioned in the articles. I didn't expect I had to go through all that crap because I assumed they're frigging on renowed journals (so pre-filtered). So I spoke to some people about it and it appears there are "international conferences" where you don't even have to attend for them to vouch you attended. You only need to pay. After hanging out in some of the labs and seeing the mindset of the publishing game and how it's done, my supervisor still calls me so that we can publish something together but the answer is always that I don't have the necessary skills, nor the desire to publish. I don't want to publish something that'll be a waste of time for other students. There seem to be some efforts to deal with this racket (I think some companies are doing that)..
- anonymousDan 11y ago
  IEEE is meaningless. You need to look at the top 2-3 venues in your field and submit there. Most of the rest is noise. Except perhaps for work published in 2nd tier venues by people that have other papers in top tier venues, as most likely such work is at least solid if not quite novel enough to get in to a top tier venue.
jrochkind1 11y ago
I'm a librarian computer programmer, and somewhat familiar with the 'industry'. We've definitely inherited something from a pre-digital age, where it took non-trivial capital and staff to actually publish and distribute stuff. But on the other hand, there are still aspects that make it unclear exactly how to change the 'market'. Someone else in this thread said what the publishers provide is 'prestige'. I don't think that's exactly it -- the editors and peer-reviewers, which are who provides the prestige, are largely unpaid (or very trivially paid), even at commercial publishers. That's not where the money is going. It still takes some staff to organize and provide administrative services for the actual prestige-providing volunteer editorial staff. Receive papers, send the out, copy edit them, get them in the right format for publication. I'm not actually sure how much staff, not being on that side of the industry. But it's also not actually free to publish things online, at least not if you do it right (which some publishers do and some don't). Someone's got to write and maintain the software and deal with the operations, pay for the hardware and network, etc. The costs are presumably less than for print distribution, but we on HN know they are not non-existent. The barriers for a startup may be lower than they used to be, but you still can't scale to serving millions of customers without any income at all. It costs money to put up something on the web, in this case the something being hundreds of thousands (millions?) of articles, that you keep up forever, with good metadata, etc. So who will pay for it, and how? Formerly, largely libraries paid for it as customers of publishers, and they paid for it because if they didn't pay their subscription they didn't have access to it. They were customers. Who's going to fund the endeavor when you will get access to the content whether you pay or not? University libraries, who pay for it now, don't generally have budgets (and the people who set the budgets) which allow them to pay for things just because it's good for society. They are getting their budgets squeezed too. Even though it's the universities who pay the exhorbitant rates to get access to the content produced by people who's salaries they already pay. (the authors, editors, and peer-reviewers), and they would benefit from a 'market' that worked entirely differently -- nobody's yet figured out how to create that market. Maybe governments will pay. Perhaps via university systems in other wealthy countries where, unlike the U.S., universities are almost all public and part of a centralized organization. It sounds like that's what the Dutch are trying to do. People are trying to figure it out. In the U.S., government grants are starting to maybe include line items to pay for publication, but we're still figuring out what the actual right cost for that is, or how to create the organizations to organize it without charging extortionate rates. And meanwhile, existing faculty, without who's buy-in no change can happen, have a fear of major changes to the existing precarious system which may be a mess, but existing faculty know how to deal with it (or they wouldn't be existing faculty). Like people scared of change everywhere.

_dark_matter_ 11y ago

Ouch, that's a scathing comment on EU CS research. Being in the US I know very little about it, though I do see a lot of quality work in my field come out of ETH-Zurich. I want to say we don't have the problems you're talking about, but I could just be an oblivious grad student :)

Someone 11y ago
Zürich, Switzerland, isn't in the EU :-)
- protothomas 11y ago
  For the purposes of European research funding it effectively is.
  - folli 11y ago
    I would hope not. The single biggest research foundation in Switzerland is SNF (http://www.snf.ch/ http://www.snf.ch/), especially since the swiss participation in Horizon 2020 is unresolved due to political reasons.

anigbrowl 11y ago

Well, the administrators have outsourced the domain knowledge to the journal reviewers and pay for this service indirectly through journal fees, so from an accounting point of view it makes total sense. If not publication, what metric should funding agencies use to decide who gets grants? Of course they could hire senior scientists in the field to evaluate grant roposals, but that would mean hiring lots and lots of scientists across all the fields in which they disburse grants; those jobs would be sinecures and from the point of view of the grant applicant it would still be about 'who you know,' just a referee at a grant-issuing agency instead of an editor/reviewer at a journal. I don't disagree with you about the problem, but I'm not clear on how you would address it. Making the journals less profitable by refusing to pay silly subscription prices to read publicly-funded research would be a good thing for universities, and maybe for scientific publishing, but it's not going to fix the disconnect between people who control the public purse strings and which scientists will get the grants they want.

sago 11y ago
> outsourced the domain knowledge to the journal reviewers Except that, by and large, those reviewers aren't being paid. So the 'outsourcing' argument isn't quite it. If it were there would be no problem with open access. It is more about brand. They're outsourcing the need to determine quality by buying into a brand. That brand is kept afloat by unpaid labour on all sides, yet charges heftily for its brand. It is an understandable model, but not a very pleasant one. Unless you're an Elsevier shareholder, getting paid for your brand IP.
- Fomite 11y ago
  While their not being paid directly, it should be noted that reviewing, and sitting on editorial boards, is considered in a great many tenure decisions.
- anigbrowl 11y ago
  Agreed. When I use the term 'outsourcing' I mean that from grant administrators' point of view the scientific journal is a black box, providing X level of quality control for Y subscription cost.

dougmccune 11y ago

I'll take a little of the publisher bait (I sit on the board of a "dinosaur paywall publisher"). I'd like to question the popular thinking that publishers do not add anything of value. There has never been a time in history when it has been easier to publish your research output in any number of other places than a paywall journal. You can post it on your own blog. You want a DOI? You can post it on The Winnower. You need it in a journal with an impact factor (even though you hate impact factor)? Submit it to PLOS One or PeerJ. By publishing with a paywall journal you are acknowledging the fact that your field values the prestige awarded by that journal. That's what you're getting, the prestige. You can argue all day about whether that prestige is earned or not, but it's not the publishers that are dictating the prestige, it's the tenure committees and faculty. Everyone is "against" the journal impact factor until it comes time to apply for tenure, at which point your tenure committee weighs it so highly that you can't avoid pandering to it. So you publish in the highest impact factor journal. We're all hoping to change this system. Publishers don't like being held hostage by Thomson Reuters (who controls impact factor) and having to constantly worry about the next year's impact factor. In a lot of ways we'd all love to move to academia-accepted alternative metrics. I would love a system that allows third parties to provide editorial review of the importance of a paper, and allow that to be separated from the journal. As a publisher that's what we're really trying to do, provide a way to judge the importance of a paper before you can get all the citation data coming in over the years. I would love to figure out a different way of doing so. But changing that means changing deep-rooted behavior throughout all of academia. And that is HARD.

tsurantino 11y ago
Doesn't "publishing with a paywall journal you acknowledge that your field values the prestige awarded by that journal" contract with "it's not the publishers that are dictating the prestige". Your arguing that if I post it on a blog, it gets lost in a sea of other content. If I publish it, then I get validation. If I understand correctly, you are saying that one of the fundamental reasons for publishers to exist is because they validate someone's work (citations, vetting, peer approval). Why does this have to happen at the expense of public access, if the research that goes through that vetting process is publicly funded?

rspeer 11y ago

I once went to a meeting sponsored by the EU about how to make data resources for computational linguistics more interoperable. I noted with increasing dismay that everything people were saying aimed to check off requirements that met EU definitions of interoperability without doing anything at all to the data. For example, someone asked to produce XML could just submit something like this: <xml>  <dataset type="text/csv" href="http://example.server/example.csv" /> <license>unusably restrictive academic license text goes here</license> </xml> And now I kind of understand that was the goal. The people running that meeting weren't trying to be useful, they were trying to create a bureaucracy that would excuse their lack of usefulness.

bovik 11y ago

Aren't all serious Math and CS papers free on the arXiv anyway?

ylem 11y ago
It's not math or CS, but some chemistry journals don't allow preprints on the arxiv. Also, for some new results in physics, you don't put them on the arxiv if you're worried about being scooped...
Maken 11y ago
Only recent papers and only from publishers which allow it.

Jugurtha 11y ago

And for what! I left Universtiy a year ago. To prepare my dissertation, I had to read hundreds of articles like everyone, and like everyone, I had to sort through all the crap that somehow makes it to IEEE. I expected that peer reviewed articles would be the best there is. I was working on ECG signals that were acquired in our institute and in a hospital to deal with all sorts of unbearable noises and artefacts. And then there were articles that would be published after testing their algorithms on a synthetic ECG (as if the world is lacking true hearts) with a cute gaussian noise (as if the world is lacking funky electrodes on sweaty hairy dudes), or the least noisy signals of the MIT database (the ones who test their stuff on the first seconds of 100.dat, you know who you are). What I also found frustrating is that we have to trust the words of the authors about the results. Cool, the signal is filtered but how long does your program take to deal with the 1.5 million samples? How many lines of code? What was the gear used? These are all important things to know so that people know if they're improving stuff or not. But the FPGA cluster seldom gets mentioned in the articles. I didn't expect I had to go through all that crap because I assumed they're frigging on renowed journals (so pre-filtered). So I spoke to some people about it and it appears there are "international conferences" where you don't even have to attend for them to vouch you attended. You only need to pay. After hanging out in some of the labs and seeing the mindset of the publishing game and how it's done, my supervisor still calls me so that we can publish something together but the answer is always that I don't have the necessary skills, nor the desire to publish. I don't want to publish something that'll be a waste of time for other students. There seem to be some efforts to deal with this racket (I think some companies are doing that)..

anonymousDan 11y ago
IEEE is meaningless. You need to look at the top 2-3 venues in your field and submit there. Most of the rest is noise. Except perhaps for work published in 2nd tier venues by people that have other papers in top tier venues, as most likely such work is at least solid if not quite novel enough to get in to a top tier venue.

jrochkind1 11y ago

I'm a librarian computer programmer, and somewhat familiar with the 'industry'. We've definitely inherited something from a pre-digital age, where it took non-trivial capital and staff to actually publish and distribute stuff. But on the other hand, there are still aspects that make it unclear exactly how to change the 'market'. Someone else in this thread said what the publishers provide is 'prestige'. I don't think that's exactly it -- the editors and peer-reviewers, which are who provides the prestige, are largely unpaid (or very trivially paid), even at commercial publishers. That's not where the money is going. It still takes some staff to organize and provide administrative services for the actual prestige-providing volunteer editorial staff. Receive papers, send the out, copy edit them, get them in the right format for publication. I'm not actually sure how much staff, not being on that side of the industry. But it's also not actually free to publish things online, at least not if you do it right (which some publishers do and some don't). Someone's got to write and maintain the software and deal with the operations, pay for the hardware and network, etc. The costs are presumably less than for print distribution, but we on HN know they are not non-existent. The barriers for a startup may be lower than they used to be, but you still can't scale to serving millions of customers without any income at all. It costs money to put up something on the web, in this case the something being hundreds of thousands (millions?) of articles, that you keep up forever, with good metadata, etc. So who will pay for it, and how? Formerly, largely libraries paid for it as customers of publishers, and they paid for it because if they didn't pay their subscription they didn't have access to it. They were customers. Who's going to fund the endeavor when you will get access to the content whether you pay or not? University libraries, who pay for it now, don't generally have budgets (and the people who set the budgets) which allow them to pay for things just because it's good for society. They are getting their budgets squeezed too. Even though it's the universities who pay the exhorbitant rates to get access to the content produced by people who's salaries they already pay. (the authors, editors, and peer-reviewers), and they would benefit from a 'market' that worked entirely differently -- nobody's yet figured out how to create that market. Maybe governments will pay. Perhaps via university systems in other wealthy countries where, unlike the U.S., universities are almost all public and part of a centralized organization. It sounds like that's what the Dutch are trying to do. People are trying to figure it out. In the U.S., government grants are starting to maybe include line items to pay for publication, but we're still figuring out what the actual right cost for that is, or how to create the organizations to organize it without charging extortionate rates. And meanwhile, existing faculty, without who's buy-in no change can happen, have a fear of major changes to the existing precarious system which may be a mess, but existing faculty know how to deal with it (or they wouldn't be existing faculty). Like people scared of change everywhere.