7 ms·

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 no

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?
- ori_b 11y ago
  > "by publishing with a paywall journal you acknowledge that your field values the prestige awarded by that journal" and then going on to say "it's not the publishers that are dictating the prestige". No. the grandparent post is pointing out that journals do provide value in practice, because people care that someone was published in the journal. This has nothing to do with the publisher, and everything to do with the people reading the papers. > If validation is so important, why can't there be a subset of tax dollars towards a committee? You're confusing "ought" and "is". The system, as it works today, isn't that -- you can push for that change, but as it stands, journals add value in an academic career. Until a researcher can actually submit their research to a tax dollar funded committee (or whatever other alternative people dram up), and get that weighted as heavily as a journal publication when applying for tenure, journals will not be replaced. Working towards replacing journals may be nice, but the parts aren't in place today.
  - marincounty 11y ago
    "Working towards replacing journals may be nice, but the parts aren't in place today." You're right! Why do I feel these Institutions(including higher education) want us to debate this to death? They know "the system" has made them rich. They know we don't have the power to change. We can debate, argue, cry--they will still charge whatever they can get away with- I just watched a speaking event at BookExpo America, the publishing industry’s annual trade show, about the use of data in the publishing world--and other topics. Speaker Scott Galloway(NYU professor, and founder of L2) talked about the price of text books, and tuition at his university. I could tell he felt completely hopeless, and demoralized over just how much money they are charging. He said, 'twenty years ago my students were taking the same marketing class they are taking today; Same information, but instead of paying 6 grand to listen to him lecture; they are now paying 65 grand!' He didn't have an answer to the problems, but he said certain industries are ripe for Change. (I don't think he was being melodramatic, nor acting--he literally seemed shocked at the current pricing. It is beyond money--it's on a moral plane now, and they are getting away with it. So this Dutch University decided to buck the system. They just said no to this overpriced journal. They are taking a risk, but at least they are taking a stand. Anyways, I'll give the link to the lecture, and pay attention to Scott Galloway's statements(particularly at around 01:04:37). The hopeless that emanated from this professor was chilling. The other speakers were very polite, and professional, but Scott was the most believable. (http://www.c-span.org/video/?326179-1/bookexpo-discussion-innovation-publishing http://www.c-span.org/video/?326179-1/bookexpo-discussion-in...)
Fomite 11y ago
Beyond that, journals can help financially support their attendant society if they're a society journal, and while it gets dismissed, having a copy editor and a layout person improves papers.
- dougmccune 11y ago
  Thanks for pointing this out. The revenue to scholarly societies is another big aspect that people often overlook. One side effect of killing off paywall journals is that a lot of scholarly societies will need to figure out different ways to make money to survive. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I can get behind the idea that a society should not base it's financial existence on revenue from a paywall journal. But that's a reality of today's situation.
  - benbreen 11y ago
    That's a good point - although based on anecdotal evidence from a couple editors of scholarly society affiliated journals I've talked to, the societies have largely already lost this revenue stream due to steep declines in subscriptions over the past decade. I'm very much in favor of disrupting the existing model of how academic publishing works (and applaud any efforts to cut out exploitative companies like Elsevier) but for anyone reading this who is working on something along those lines, please remember the scholarly societies and ordinary journal editors! If a new system emerges which allows them to be fairly compensated for the work they do but which cuts out the current corporate intermediaries like Elsevier and Brill, I think the current status quo will rapidly shift in a positive direction.
viraptor 11y ago
> having to constantly worry about the next year's impact factor I'm confused by this bit. Isn't impact factor just a complex indicator of the amount of citations, so really an indicator of the quality of the journal? Why is it "worrying about impact factor", rather than "worrying about publication quality"? This reminds me of the pleasing the shareholders vs. trying to run a successful company disconnect.
- dougmccune 11y ago
  Your analogy is spot on. It's a perverse incentive system. It doesn't make any rational sense, but that's the way it is. Even more ironically, the impact factor of open access journals matters even more than for paywall journals. Once a paywall journal is established it's fairly stable. If it loses its impact factor that's bad, but doesn't mean the death of the journal. But with an OA journal if you have an impact factor and then lose it, your submissions drop off a cliff, which directly ties into your revenue, and that will often be the actual death of the journal.
return0 11y ago
These publishers added value back in the days when they actually enabled communication via printing. They should have been abandoned the day after WWW was invented. The "established" publishers literally suck the blood of academia and taxpayer money nowadays. First, they appropriate other people's work in all stages (writing, review, corrections, illustations etc etc.). Then they stymie the development of open-access journals by keeping every good scientist busy reviewing their papers for free (coddling them, showering them with "prestige"). Then they keep the copyrights of work they didn't pay for, they make it impossible for data scientists to collect the experimental data, they hide the papers behind paywalls and they don't even add a comment section where readers can post legitimate q&a's, comments etc. And on top of that they require to be paid for all this free work. If that is not insane, i don't know what is. The entire reasons you mention have nothing absolutely nothing to do with the value of science. Selling "prestige" in 2015 is a ridiculous thought. Lastly, consider this. My institution can only afford to pay subscriptions to the most widely read journals, so I find myself using some obscure russian proxy to download them illegally. Apparently there is a need for that, and there are entire websites dedicated to that. This is outrageous. The HARD thing that need to change is actually simple: it's laziness, and fear, powered heavily by lobbying publishers. Scientists are smart people, all they need is a kick in the butt.
- dougmccune 11y ago
  I'm not going to argue with all the reasons you think publishers are insane. However, I will argue with the comment that "selling prestige in 2015 is a ridiculous thought." Offering prestige in 2015 is even more valuable than it has ever been. There is more research published than there has ever been, from all around the world. The amount of research information is increasing dramatically, just like it is with all information (blog posts, videos published, etc). The value of curation increases with the increase in content, it doesn't decrease. I don't know what the future holds when it comes to how curation is going to be done and how prestige will be awarded, but I'm certain that there will be some mechanism for separating good research from bad research and bestowing prestige. That isn't decreasing in value - on the contrary, it's increasing.
  - 11y ago
elektromekatron 11y ago
you are acknowledging the fact that your field values the prestige awarded by that journal. That's what you're getting, the prestige. If that is what your field is betting on, then it is utterly doomed. Ephemera such as prestige is mobile.
- dougmccune 11y ago
  Trust me, the idea that the prestige currently offered by today's journals might move to an entirely different venue is a top concern. I'm not convinced that betting your business on the idea of curation (ie prestige) is a bad one, although I suppose I'd agree that betting a business on the idea of paywall journals as the mechanism of that prestige bestowment isn't wise.
  - elektromekatron 11y ago
    Prestige isn't curation. Curation is a genuine functional benefit, but it is one that is getting cheaper year on year. Prestige is really just the upmarket term for cool, and cool is flightly. edit - another way of putting it, is if curation is what is being relied upon, then they seriously run the risk of being popcornTimed
    - dougmccune 11y ago
      I'm curious what your view of what academic publishing being "popcornTimed" would look like. PopcornTime isn't really the mechanism for curation, it's merely one avenue to show the result of a highly complicated curation process that's always occurring. The curation of movies involves big-budget advertising, box-office results (which feed news reports which feed box office results), websites like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, and of course some level of purely "viral" spreading of what's good and bad (social recommendation). PopcornTime/BitTorrent itself is just easier distribution that sits on top of and feed off that curation process. So if you can only make money off the distribution, I agree you're going to have trouble. But if you can shift your business model to be based on the business of curation I think you're fairly safe. You mention the price of curation decreases year on year, but in the case of something as highly specialized and expertise-based as academic research I'm not totally sure the analogy with pop-culture movies holds. "The crowd" can relatively easily curate movies (which says nothing about its ability to select high vs low quality actually), but I'm not convinced "the crowd" can effectively curate academic research without large changes to the overall system (see publons.com for a way that might change if peer reviews are rewarded and open).
jhallenworld 11y ago
I would say that the real value of your work could be measured with something like pagerank: basically if your work is eventually cited, it's prestigious. What the journals maybe provide is prestige before your work has been widely cited, plus publicity. Even if the article is on arxiv, more people will take a look if you say it will soon be published in, say, Cell. Maybe they shouldn't even bother publishing- just have a list of articles which they would publish if they actually bothered to do so.
- dougmccune 11y ago
  You're spot on in that citations are largely the pagerank metric and that's really what "counts", but there's a need for having an earlier metric. Journal impact factor is a computation based on historical citation count of articles in a journal. The leap of faith is then that if you publish in a journal that has a history of publishing highly cited work, that means your work is good and likely to be highly cited. There's any number of ways to argue against that logic, but that's the way it works. So yes, what journals typically provide is a leading indicator of quality that you can get before waiting for citations to come in. There's a definite demand for such a leading indicator, and I certainly believe there's an opportunity to replace the journal with something else.
  - tprice7 11y ago
    That makes sense. I'm curious what you think about variants on the PageRank idea that address the slowness problem you point out. You state in an earlier comment “so if there was a committee that provided that evaluation entirely outside of the publishing ecosystem, that would be great”. You could theoretically have a PageRank-like system where some nodes are papers, some nodes are committees, and (maybe) some nodes are individuals. Then there could be different types of edges, expressing relations like “has cited this paper” or “deems this to be a quality paper” or “recognizes the competence/authority/prestige/whatever of this person/committee”. Then run PageRank on the whole mess.
    - dougmccune 11y ago
choppaface 11y ago
Prestige only has value if the community upholds it with integrity and warrant. The journals are fundamentally looking to protect their business model and their attachment to the community. Thus the journals' prestige becomes significantly diluted (and with warrant). Publication prestige originated in the publication's crucial role as a discovery mechanism before the Internet. Now there's a much better discovery mechanism, and the community is adapting well to it. If publications had the community in mind foremost, they'd similarly adapt.
jacquesm 11y ago
Prestige is a cornerstone of circular reasoning.

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?

ori_b 11y ago
> "by publishing with a paywall journal you acknowledge that your field values the prestige awarded by that journal" and then going on to say "it's not the publishers that are dictating the prestige". No. the grandparent post is pointing out that journals do provide value in practice, because people care that someone was published in the journal. This has nothing to do with the publisher, and everything to do with the people reading the papers. > If validation is so important, why can't there be a subset of tax dollars towards a committee? You're confusing "ought" and "is". The system, as it works today, isn't that -- you can push for that change, but as it stands, journals add value in an academic career. Until a researcher can actually submit their research to a tax dollar funded committee (or whatever other alternative people dram up), and get that weighted as heavily as a journal publication when applying for tenure, journals will not be replaced. Working towards replacing journals may be nice, but the parts aren't in place today.
- marincounty 11y ago
  "Working towards replacing journals may be nice, but the parts aren't in place today." You're right! Why do I feel these Institutions(including higher education) want us to debate this to death? They know "the system" has made them rich. They know we don't have the power to change. We can debate, argue, cry--they will still charge whatever they can get away with- I just watched a speaking event at BookExpo America, the publishing industry’s annual trade show, about the use of data in the publishing world--and other topics. Speaker Scott Galloway(NYU professor, and founder of L2) talked about the price of text books, and tuition at his university. I could tell he felt completely hopeless, and demoralized over just how much money they are charging. He said, 'twenty years ago my students were taking the same marketing class they are taking today; Same information, but instead of paying 6 grand to listen to him lecture; they are now paying 65 grand!' He didn't have an answer to the problems, but he said certain industries are ripe for Change. (I don't think he was being melodramatic, nor acting--he literally seemed shocked at the current pricing. It is beyond money--it's on a moral plane now, and they are getting away with it. So this Dutch University decided to buck the system. They just said no to this overpriced journal. They are taking a risk, but at least they are taking a stand. Anyways, I'll give the link to the lecture, and pay attention to Scott Galloway's statements(particularly at around 01:04:37). The hopeless that emanated from this professor was chilling. The other speakers were very polite, and professional, but Scott was the most believable. (http://www.c-span.org/video/?326179-1/bookexpo-discussion-innovation-publishing http://www.c-span.org/video/?326179-1/bookexpo-discussion-in...)

Fomite 11y ago

Beyond that, journals can help financially support their attendant society if they're a society journal, and while it gets dismissed, having a copy editor and a layout person improves papers.

dougmccune 11y ago
Thanks for pointing this out. The revenue to scholarly societies is another big aspect that people often overlook. One side effect of killing off paywall journals is that a lot of scholarly societies will need to figure out different ways to make money to survive. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I can get behind the idea that a society should not base it's financial existence on revenue from a paywall journal. But that's a reality of today's situation.
- benbreen 11y ago
  That's a good point - although based on anecdotal evidence from a couple editors of scholarly society affiliated journals I've talked to, the societies have largely already lost this revenue stream due to steep declines in subscriptions over the past decade. I'm very much in favor of disrupting the existing model of how academic publishing works (and applaud any efforts to cut out exploitative companies like Elsevier) but for anyone reading this who is working on something along those lines, please remember the scholarly societies and ordinary journal editors! If a new system emerges which allows them to be fairly compensated for the work they do but which cuts out the current corporate intermediaries like Elsevier and Brill, I think the current status quo will rapidly shift in a positive direction.

viraptor 11y ago

> having to constantly worry about the next year's impact factor I'm confused by this bit. Isn't impact factor just a complex indicator of the amount of citations, so really an indicator of the quality of the journal? Why is it "worrying about impact factor", rather than "worrying about publication quality"? This reminds me of the pleasing the shareholders vs. trying to run a successful company disconnect.

dougmccune 11y ago
Your analogy is spot on. It's a perverse incentive system. It doesn't make any rational sense, but that's the way it is. Even more ironically, the impact factor of open access journals matters even more than for paywall journals. Once a paywall journal is established it's fairly stable. If it loses its impact factor that's bad, but doesn't mean the death of the journal. But with an OA journal if you have an impact factor and then lose it, your submissions drop off a cliff, which directly ties into your revenue, and that will often be the actual death of the journal.

return0 11y ago

These publishers added value back in the days when they actually enabled communication via printing. They should have been abandoned the day after WWW was invented. The "established" publishers literally suck the blood of academia and taxpayer money nowadays. First, they appropriate other people's work in all stages (writing, review, corrections, illustations etc etc.). Then they stymie the development of open-access journals by keeping every good scientist busy reviewing their papers for free (coddling them, showering them with "prestige"). Then they keep the copyrights of work they didn't pay for, they make it impossible for data scientists to collect the experimental data, they hide the papers behind paywalls and they don't even add a comment section where readers can post legitimate q&a's, comments etc. And on top of that they require to be paid for all this free work. If that is not insane, i don't know what is. The entire reasons you mention have nothing absolutely nothing to do with the value of science. Selling "prestige" in 2015 is a ridiculous thought. Lastly, consider this. My institution can only afford to pay subscriptions to the most widely read journals, so I find myself using some obscure russian proxy to download them illegally. Apparently there is a need for that, and there are entire websites dedicated to that. This is outrageous. The HARD thing that need to change is actually simple: it's laziness, and fear, powered heavily by lobbying publishers. Scientists are smart people, all they need is a kick in the butt.

dougmccune 11y ago
I'm not going to argue with all the reasons you think publishers are insane. However, I will argue with the comment that "selling prestige in 2015 is a ridiculous thought." Offering prestige in 2015 is even more valuable than it has ever been. There is more research published than there has ever been, from all around the world. The amount of research information is increasing dramatically, just like it is with all information (blog posts, videos published, etc). The value of curation increases with the increase in content, it doesn't decrease. I don't know what the future holds when it comes to how curation is going to be done and how prestige will be awarded, but I'm certain that there will be some mechanism for separating good research from bad research and bestowing prestige. That isn't decreasing in value - on the contrary, it's increasing.
- 11y ago

elektromekatron 11y ago

you are acknowledging the fact that your field values the prestige awarded by that journal. That's what you're getting, the prestige. If that is what your field is betting on, then it is utterly doomed. Ephemera such as prestige is mobile.

dougmccune 11y ago
Trust me, the idea that the prestige currently offered by today's journals might move to an entirely different venue is a top concern. I'm not convinced that betting your business on the idea of curation (ie prestige) is a bad one, although I suppose I'd agree that betting a business on the idea of paywall journals as the mechanism of that prestige bestowment isn't wise.
- elektromekatron 11y ago
  Prestige isn't curation. Curation is a genuine functional benefit, but it is one that is getting cheaper year on year. Prestige is really just the upmarket term for cool, and cool is flightly. edit - another way of putting it, is if curation is what is being relied upon, then they seriously run the risk of being popcornTimed
  - dougmccune 11y ago
    I'm curious what your view of what academic publishing being "popcornTimed" would look like. PopcornTime isn't really the mechanism for curation, it's merely one avenue to show the result of a highly complicated curation process that's always occurring. The curation of movies involves big-budget advertising, box-office results (which feed news reports which feed box office results), websites like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, and of course some level of purely "viral" spreading of what's good and bad (social recommendation). PopcornTime/BitTorrent itself is just easier distribution that sits on top of and feed off that curation process. So if you can only make money off the distribution, I agree you're going to have trouble. But if you can shift your business model to be based on the business of curation I think you're fairly safe. You mention the price of curation decreases year on year, but in the case of something as highly specialized and expertise-based as academic research I'm not totally sure the analogy with pop-culture movies holds. "The crowd" can relatively easily curate movies (which says nothing about its ability to select high vs low quality actually), but I'm not convinced "the crowd" can effectively curate academic research without large changes to the overall system (see publons.com for a way that might change if peer reviews are rewarded and open).

jhallenworld 11y ago

I would say that the real value of your work could be measured with something like pagerank: basically if your work is eventually cited, it's prestigious. What the journals maybe provide is prestige before your work has been widely cited, plus publicity. Even if the article is on arxiv, more people will take a look if you say it will soon be published in, say, Cell. Maybe they shouldn't even bother publishing- just have a list of articles which they would publish if they actually bothered to do so.

dougmccune 11y ago
You're spot on in that citations are largely the pagerank metric and that's really what "counts", but there's a need for having an earlier metric. Journal impact factor is a computation based on historical citation count of articles in a journal. The leap of faith is then that if you publish in a journal that has a history of publishing highly cited work, that means your work is good and likely to be highly cited. There's any number of ways to argue against that logic, but that's the way it works. So yes, what journals typically provide is a leading indicator of quality that you can get before waiting for citations to come in. There's a definite demand for such a leading indicator, and I certainly believe there's an opportunity to replace the journal with something else.
- tprice7 11y ago
  That makes sense. I'm curious what you think about variants on the PageRank idea that address the slowness problem you point out. You state in an earlier comment “so if there was a committee that provided that evaluation entirely outside of the publishing ecosystem, that would be great”. You could theoretically have a PageRank-like system where some nodes are papers, some nodes are committees, and (maybe) some nodes are individuals. Then there could be different types of edges, expressing relations like “has cited this paper” or “deems this to be a quality paper” or “recognizes the competence/authority/prestige/whatever of this person/committee”. Then run PageRank on the whole mess.
  - dougmccune 11y ago

choppaface 11y ago

Prestige only has value if the community upholds it with integrity and warrant. The journals are fundamentally looking to protect their business model and their attachment to the community. Thus the journals' prestige becomes significantly diluted (and with warrant). Publication prestige originated in the publication's crucial role as a discovery mechanism before the Internet. Now there's a much better discovery mechanism, and the community is adapting well to it. If publications had the community in mind foremost, they'd similarly adapt.

jacquesm 11y ago

Prestige is a cornerstone of circular reasoning.