Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24032052-900-time-to-break-academic-publishings-stranglehold-on-research/

by joeyespo • 8 years ago

697 287 8 years ago

newscientist.com

Latteland• 8 years ago

This would be great, many people support this idea. You'll need generational change to get there.

FlyMoreRockets• 8 years ago

"Truth never triumphs—its opponents just die out." - Max Planck

rasengan• 8 years ago

From the article:

the business of publishing tax-funded research and then selling it to tax-funded institutions has produced the most profitable industry in the world

How is this not illegal?

Jhsto• 8 years ago

I don't see why would it. You can submit papers without an affiliation, so the idea of publishing only tax-funded research is a generalization. That is, these organizations do work by being selective and then selling the collections of that selection process back.

killjoywashere• 8 years ago

Granted the publishers do work. Even PLoS does work. It's the lack of access that is the problem. $42.50 for an article one of my colleagues at my own US Government institution wrote (random example from this weekend's work, American Journal of Bioethics) is ridiculous.

buboard• 8 years ago

which part should be illegal, the selling of the subscriptions or the buying?

That statement is misleading. Pblishers sell participation badges to the article authors, the authors put these badges in their CV, and when the time comes to ask for money from the governmnet, the gal with the most badges on her chest wins it.

In addition, the authors have the right to upload a preprint (i.e. a copy identical in content) to a preprint server - virtually all journals allow it nowadays - although it doesn't happen.

So, there is in theory no reason why anyone should go to these websites to download a copy. In practice, it is convenient for the parties involved (researchers & funding agencies).

zhoujieyang• 8 years ago

Even outside of research, in most economies there's a lot of money flows that look like this. Visited Europe last year, it's crazy how many of them are both funded by government grants and provide services to the government. Unfortunately curbing that would involve even more regulation making everything worse perhaps.

justinpombrio• 8 years ago

For anyone who still doesn't know this: publishers do not pay paper authors, in any field. I am also not aware of a publisher paying peer reviewers.

(Lowly soon-to-be-postdoc here; a professor would be able to say more.)

Y7ZCQtNo394• 8 years ago

How do peer reviews happen, then, if nobody gets paid to do them? Does research money (that goes to the production of the paper) not also cover peer-reviews?

I wouldn't see any incentive for any work to be peer-reviewed, ever, then.

rsa40462• 8 years ago

The incentives are 1) professional responsibility; 2) the opportunity to participate in the direction of new research, stay abreast of the field, and maintain a high level of integrity; 3) young researchers joining the field benefit from the process, both as reviewers and authors.

ylmm6• 8 years ago

I've only worked with professors in economics and political science but I'm under the impression that this is true more generally of academia. Some people do it to help advance the state of the field. Career incentives and standing in the field also come into play. As the poster above mentioned, a professor would be able to say more.

To respond succinctly to your comments: money isn't the only incentive in life, so it seems weird to not see "any incentive" as soon as money is taken out of the picture.

impendia5• 8 years ago

I'm a math professor, I can answer this.

We tend to think of journals as being run by their editorial boards -- i.e., by scientists in our field. The publishers are in the background, not taking a very active role, simply skimming off truckloads of money in the process. In particular, peer-review requests tend to come from scientists whom we know at least by reputation, and often personally.

When I spend serious time peer-reviewing a paper, it will be on a quality paper on a subject that I enjoy reading about anyway. (If I get asked to peer-review a paper that looks uninteresting to me, or something outside my interests and expertise, I'll either decline the request or write a quick report recommending that the paper not be accepted.)

It's interesting work, it's important for the health of the field, it helps me support other researchers in my field (if I like their paper and give it a positive review), and it helps my own reputation (the journal editors are often bigshots). From this point of view, it's a win-win-win-win.

Finally, paying for peer review doesn't make much sense because the time required is highly variable. I might take between 20 minutes and 30+ hours to review a paper, and I wouldn't necessarily expect the editor to be able to predict how much (even within an order of magnitude) in advance.

However, I see no reason why high-profit publishers should be able to insert themselves as middlemen and engage in rent-seeking behavior. I hope we figure out a way to give them the boot, and then continue approximately as we have been doing.

TheSmiddy• 8 years ago

They are paid, just not by the journal, they're paid a salary by their university and one of their responsibilities is peer reviewing papers.

rsa40462• 8 years ago

In academia (at least the hard sciences), no faculty are ever paid for publishing in mainstream, peer-reviewed journals. No reviewers are ever paid either, although recently Elsevier has started to publish the names of its "star reviewers", presumably as a token for the large investment in time and expertise required to evaluate papers for publication and improve the field. Even book deals (or editorships) yield no real income, beyond some nominal amount (between $0 and $50). What's more, the lay public is hilariously misinformed about this, believing that faculty, researchers, etc., are paid royalties for journal papers. Where they got this idea, I don't know ...

impendia5• 8 years ago

No reviewers are ever paid either

That's almost true. Elsevier once surprised me with a $100 Amazon gift card, which they said was in recognition for a particularly good job of peer review that year.

I'd laugh at the prospect of Elsevier rewarding me with "recognition" -- certainly something I would not put on my CV -- although I did take their money.

Another time, the American Mathematical Society (which is non-profit, and perfectly ethical) asked me to do a book review, and then gave me $150 in bookstore credit afterwards -- again by surprise.

My understanding is that book authors can make a reasonable amount in royalties (a few thousand, anyway). For journal papers, as you say I've never heard of any author getting a royalty.

sgillen3• 8 years ago

I’ve actually heard of some Chinese universities awarding profs something like $150,000 for getting an article published in nature[1].

[1] https://www.economist.com/china/2018/11/17/tsinghua-universi...

int_19h• 8 years ago

Where they got this idea, I don't know ...

We get this idea from basic fairness within the rules of the larger system. Clearly, there are private companies that make money from publication of those papers. It follows that in a fair arrangement of some sort, they would have acquired the necessary rights from the original authors for some compensation or profit sharing agreement. That they don't actually do that is indication that arrangement is not fair.

WhitneyLand• 8 years ago

the lay public is hilariously misinformed about this

Ironic for a scientist to rail on anecdotally and off topic about a problem they play the much larger role in deciding the fate of.

Knowledge of science among the general public let alone of how this sausage factory works is however unfortunate, not the key to fixing the problem.

There are a handful of different key roles and interests competing to influence the outcome. Researchers, universities, publishers, for profit businesses, etc.

It’s not that complicated. There’s the logistics, economics, and best guess modeling of any proposed changes.

Then separate from these technicalities people everyday are making value judgements and prioritizing principles against personal interests.

I’m not trying to advocate my opinion here in a comment of what these stakeholders should do. Only that these individual decisions, judgements, and will to act on them play a far greater role than public knowledge of who gets paid to review a paper.

Fomite11• 8 years ago

I've been paid (in credit for more books) for two reviews of book proposals.

BurnGpuBurn2• 8 years ago

the lay public is hilariously misinformed

When I start thinking about what we lay public have been denied, in welfare, progress and life, just because scientists don't share the knowledge the lay public pays them to produce, the word hilarious isn't what's coming to mind.

peter3032• 8 years ago

'I scratch back, you scratch mine' Generous reciprocity of free service keeps the system going.

Fomite11• 8 years ago

Also this - I review for journals because in turn my submissions to those journals are reviewed.

pcurve• 8 years ago

I have half a dozen post doc friends in science. All of them are honest and exceedingly hard workers, but they became disillusioned after 10 years in academia. Despite their PHD and advanced degrees that they worked so hard to earn, they now work in completely different fields, most very low paying. I really hope you have better outcome.

ummonk• 8 years ago

But for open access journals, authors often do pay publishers.

icelancer4• 8 years ago

I've shelled out a few thousand dollars to publish my last two papers, and my editors / reviewers got none of it.

dompydumpy• 8 years ago

Yes, authors even pay for submissions themselves often

ms0134• 8 years ago

Nope. Nobody in the review or author role gets paid. And personally, that doesn’t bother me. I put in time to review papers with the understanding that someone else will put in time to review mine. My employer (I’m in industry) understands that this is a reasonable use of my time given that they see value in me being engaged in the academic world. Prior to industry when I was an academic, it was also part of my paid job. It’s usually called service. The trope that it’s all unpaid labor is a bit deceiving and not entirely accurate.

BlackFly2• 8 years ago

You've misunderstood the person you are replying to. The insinuation was not that the labor is unpaid, the insinuation is that the labor is paid for by someone other than the publisher.

The ultimate point being that the group that pays for the labor does not get the benefit of the labor: each member of the public must individually pay for access to the article. This situation is absurd: they have already paid for the article's production.

This is why the most powerful open access initiatives are being driven by grant agencies. They are in a position to unequivocally state that the research they are paying for must be open to the public since they grant the money on behalf of that very same public.

yqx• 8 years ago

I don't understand why academics seem so complacent in this. Sure I'm perfectly happy to do "service" for a community of researchers who run an open access journal or are organizing a conference. That's a beautiful system. When it's for a for-profit publisher that will charge those not working at a well funded academic institution extortionate fees to access my work , or the work I'm reviewing, it's a whole different story.

dhimes• 8 years ago

OT:

Lowly soon-to-be-postdoc here

Congratulations :)

avs73310• 8 years ago

Add in that the quality of the system is massively massively broken...peer review is about as accurate as the flip of a coin. It does not promote gorund breaking or novel research, it barely (arguably doesn't) even contribute to quality research. I had a colleague recently be told by a journal editor 'we don't publish critiques from junior scholars.' So much for the nature of peer review being entirely driven by the quality of the work.

As one of those academics...I keep getting requests to peer review, I respectfully make clear I don't review for non open source journals anymore. Same with publishing. I'm not tenure-track so am not primarily evaluated based on output.

Publishing is broken, but it is really just part of the broader and even more broken nature of academic research.

Angostura• 8 years ago

What would be a good alternative to peer-review though? Genuinely interested.

lumost• 8 years ago

It strikes me that the challenge of peer review is that it is non-transparent, and gate-keeping. It is impossible for one to read the peer review feedback related to a published paper, and it's similarly difficult to publish controversial pieces that break established norms.

Contrast this to the peer review culture of popular open source projects - major pull requests have extensive and transparent dialogue, and disagreements known. Meanwhile there is no barrier to releasing anything new.

smaddox• 8 years ago

Open publishing and commenting would be a good start---having a dialog, like is done at conferences. Older academic journal articles (pre 1900) read much more like discussions than like the hundred dollar word vomits of modern academic publishing. The broken incentives are at the core of this rotten fruit, though. Just making journals open isn't enough.

sgillen3• 8 years ago

I think the op is not saying that peer review as a concept is broken, more that the current peer review system is broken.

I think we could start fixing things by incentivizing good peer review. There’s a lot of ways to do this and I’d be interested in a discussion of different schemes. It will by no means be easy but I think that’s what needs to happen.

DrNuke2• 8 years ago

For many STEM fields, conference talks, presentations and written contributions are notably faster and better suited to non-tenured applied researchers than the journals route.

avs73310• 8 years ago

So the short answer is I don't know, and I don't think there is a single answer. Different types of scholarship need different standards and processes in my eyes. It isn't so much 'whats the alternative' to what is really a singular step as much as it is a rethink of how scholarship is performed, evaluated, rewarded, and considered. Otherwise the incentives across the playing field don't change enough to make meaningful change meaningful.

What would help? My opinions...

-FOSS publishing -Abandonment of journal metrics, they really serve no purpose besides trophy hunting at this point

-Stronger transparency initiatives

-Public review (c.f. Lim)

-better journal metadata (it affects citations)

-Greater shaming of misbehavior of ALL types

-Elimination of stupid policies like 'issue lengths' The article either should be or should not be published...saying there isn't space in a given issue is insane given that >>90% of article access is online.

-a hell of a lot of older faculty retiring out of the way of science.

ekianjo2• 8 years ago

What would be a good alternative to peer-review though? Genuinely interested.

Replicating researches? That's how we prove findings are not wrong or biased, usually.

avs73310• 8 years ago

Actually I came up with one...

The top 50 research universities could get together and decide to no longer give consideration to pay-walled articles. It wouldn't affect them AT ALL...the research they do is already treated as pretty much cannon no matter where it appears. Everyone else would follow, and the journals would quickly respond with change.

Yeah I know it's unlikely but they have enough social capital to actually have an impact.

KevinEldon• 8 years ago

ResearchOne(1) was founded to address the issues with peer review and the academic journal system.

“A platform for scholarly publishing and peer review that empowers researchers with the

Autonomy to pursue their passions,

Authority to develop and disseminate their work, and

Access to engage with the international community of scholars.”

Harry Crane, an Associate Professor of Statistics at Rutgers, is one of the founders and a good follow on Twitter.

1 - https://researchers.one/

qwerty4561272• 8 years ago

Why not just build a kind of a social network where people would post research papers, "like" interesting and high-quality papers and reference papers relevant to their research, post their comments and for every participant you would be able to see what papers they have published and reviewed? Sounds fairly simple. Why not?

barry-cotter• 8 years ago

A good alternative to the current system of pre-publication peer review would be post publication peer review. The former, or one pass editorial review, is how scientific publication worked almost universally pre WW2. There are many scientific disciplines where everything important happens in preprints and publication in a journal is for archival purposes more than communication. Economics, Physics, Mathematics, Political Science, Genetics and Genomics, every discipline with substantial coverage on SSRN or the arxiv works on post publication peer review.

icelancer4• 8 years ago

Peer-review is a good tool, but it is not the only tool that should be considered. And the problem is not peer-review specifically, but the implementation of the system and rent-seeking middlemen like Elsevier who do nothing but extract payment from taxpayers and researchers.

PeerJ and PLOS One are good starts, but until academia is no longer a slave to "impact factor," it will have limited effect.

scottlocklin• 8 years ago

This answer will not please the 'publish or perish' economy which has built up around this: editorial discretion (which is a sort of peer review) and about 10x fewer papers published per capita involved.

Its how science worked for most of its history. Really, Elsiever is responsible for the profusion of people publishing fluff to weak journals, subsidized by the government.

dunk0103• 8 years ago

How does the old saw go again? "Academic knowledge moves forward one funeral at a time". People have vested interests and if your research contradicts much of theirs, then they are going to be inclined to reject yours. You'd think that this would be all ivory towers / pursuit of knowledge, but in reality it's dirty and messy and grimy; just like everything else in the world.

RMarcus• 8 years ago

It's worth noting that the computer science community (at least in systems and machine learning) have already made some strides in this direction. Systems conferences like VLDB and CIDR post the proceedings online for free (and most ICDE and SIGMOD articles are available through the author's website). In machine learning, almost every conference paper is also available via arXiv.

When a paper is seemingly not available online, I've always gotten a free copy via an email to the author... And then there's sci-hub. It's not the way it should be (i.e. you shouldn't have to hunt around for publicly-funded research), but at least it's something.

eigenman• 8 years ago

There are many perverse incentives in this system, but one that tends to be overlooked is the incentive for faculty to publish in predatory journals. It's not that most want to publish there, but when even 3rd tier schools require their faculty to publish a certain number of articles a year under pain of not making tenure or an increased teaching load, submitting work to an undiscriminating journal is the easiest way to check that box.

jacknews• 8 years ago

According to the opposition open letter, Plan S includes "A prohibition on publishing in either subscription or “hybrid” (i.e. partially open access) journals,"

I don't see why that should be a requirement. So long as papers are made available for free, why should it matter if they are also available in a paid journal?

QML2• 8 years ago

Why don't people just publish through Arxiv? Is there not a discussion forum where people can post, discover, and comment on new papers?

If you know of one for CS, do comment.

avs73310• 8 years ago

because while that might make sense at the field level, it relies on scholars getting credit for that work, which few do.

QML2• 8 years ago

Could you elaborate on what you mean by scholars getting credit for their work?

tnecniv• 8 years ago

Why don't people just publish through Arxiv?

ArXiv is not peer reviewed.

ms0134• 8 years ago

Posting on arxiv is useful for making results available early, and to make published work available in some form that isn’t pay walled, but posting on arxiv on its own is not publishing as it isn’t peer reviewed.

peter3032• 8 years ago

Note several major research universities require faculty to place an online copy of their papers in an open university server within a year of publication. The problem may be subject-themed fashion like in a journal. Now and them an energetic individual might create a mirror TOC page of a joirnal. For example someone does this for SIIGRAPH's flahship journal Computer Graphics.

ekianjo2• 8 years ago

The answer is academic publishing. Its profit margins are vast, reportedly in the region of 40 per cent.

That's an extraordinary claim to make. I would seriously doubt the "best" profit margin cross-industries is capped at 40%.

sitkack3• 8 years ago

While we are at it, lets change the format from .pdf to .zip to include source, data and other information that a hypothesis and test and resulting analysis can encompass.

First step is to put the pdf into the zip and have existing tools be able to navigate the hierarchy. Could include notebooks, bibtex, tex, data, images, etc.

And semantic scholar is in exactly the right place to institute this evolution.

icelancer4• 8 years ago

The OA community - particularly PeerJ - has solved this problem by forcing you to upload supplementary data either to their website (if it's small enough) or to Figshare, which does not allow you to delete data once it is uploaded and paired to a research study. It works rather well.

elvinyung• 8 years ago

Here's a Twitter thread with a director at Elsevier (@mrgunn) making extremely snarky comments about why they think academia shouldn't be free and widely available: https://twitter.com/dgmacarthur/status/1028489457803161600

gboudrias• 8 years ago

Is this telling us anything we didn't already know?

Either way, I don't think he's helping the image issue.

icelancer4• 8 years ago

Absolutely disgusting. What a disgrace to science.

Alexandra Elbakyan has done and will do more for science than this rent-seeking asshole will ever do.

secabeen2• 8 years ago

He claims that digital distribution isn't cheaper than analog. I don't doubt that, given the amounts of money it probably costs to build effective DRM and paywall systems. Were all journals open-access, their costs would be a lot lower too.

Sci-Hub hosts 85% of the articles published in paywalled scholarly journals on a shoe-string.

ben_jones• 8 years ago

I think it should be acknowledged that there are likely a number of accessibility and similar requirements that at scale bear non-trivial costs. I.e. building a website with top of the line accessibility, providing resources for auditory and visually impared, etc.

I'm not saying current publishers are great at these things, just that they should not be forgotten and should be improved on if a new order was to take shape.

mirimir4• 8 years ago

    Shiran Pasternak

‏ @gingi0 Aug 13 Replying to @dgmacarthur

    What is a reasonable profit margin for a platform for communicating publicly
    funded research? Non-rhetorical question.

    mrgunn

‏ @mrgunn Aug 13

    For a publicly traded company, the answer is "what the market will bear".

Wow.

Krista Jamieson offers a great perspective.

blazespin• 8 years ago

The real problem is that these publishers actually provide real value that gives them leverage over the industry. If they didn't, it'd be pretty easy to destroy their grip over academia. The idea that after 23 years of internet they've maintained their position via smart deals is ludicrous. They've maintained it because of useful curation.

If there was a way to open source curation and not lose quality, I can't imagine anyone would disagree with that - even the people who work at these organisations.

Unfortunately, what you end up with is arxiv, while very useful for sure, has no curation.

Everyone just keeps bleeting - we want free! But they don't bother to think about how to do actually do it. How to ensure quality curation remains which is absolutely so critical to the advancement of science.

I've been fantasizing about free everything since forever. Who hasn't? But at some point we have to stop trying to fantasize our way to results.

This is like underpants gnomes logic - steal underpants .. .. .. .. quality curation!

Also, MrGunn is a moron commenting on that thread. Why not just hand out free subscriptions to rare disease patients? What a trivially cost less PR move.

mirimir4• 8 years ago

We had curation before we had commercial academic publishers. Professional societies handled it. Publishers just did the physical publishing, and didn't get copyright.

jamesrcole6• 8 years ago

these publishers actually provide real value ... If they didn't, it'd be pretty easy to destroy their grip over academia.

Your argument equates to "they have maintained their grip, therefore they're providing real value".

Their stranglehold seems to come primarily from academic incentives to publish in prestigious journals.

The idea that after 23 years of internet they've maintained their position via smart deals is ludicrous.

Perhaps someone has claimed that, but I don't recall ever seeing that argument.

mrhappyunhappy3• 8 years ago

Are we still talking about publicly funded research that’s being pay walled?

api• 8 years ago

I have to reluctantly agree. If there is one thing I've learned after 20 years on the open commercialized Internet its that any uncurated medium falls to spam, trolling, con artists, cranks, propaganda, and hoaxes. The bad stuff is easy to make and generally has better "viral" characteristics, so it drives out the good. The money is also very much on the side of quacks since absent regulation quackery is more profitable than real medicine. Hoaxes and tabloids are also more profitable than real news.

Science without curation will fall to corporate shills and propagandists with political axes to grind. It's already bad enough but with no gatekeepers at all it would be a total free for all. Tobacco would become good for you again, homeopathy would work, etc.

Curation can be democratic, but if so there must be a well thought out procedure for electing curators and a constitution or set of bylaws that is hard to amend. Science has a lot of power, so any scientific curation system is going to come under constant attack. We are living in the age of information warfare.

a3_nm2• 8 years ago

There are plenty of conferences and journals with curation (peer review) which are free for readers and free or almost free for authors. For computer science, see, e.g., http://pierre.senellart.com/travaux/open-access/

BlackFly2• 8 years ago

Nobody is asking for science to be done for free, most motivations for open access come from people that realize that the biggest stakeholder in all of this is the public.

Grant agencies receive money from taxes and those funds are devoted to science instead of other public projects. That the output of this work is not generally available to the public is the problem.

Most researchers will never feel this problem since their libraries will have access to the journals that they need. Publishers in general will just charge for access and not see the issue. It is only when you go out as a member of the general public and attempt to read some journal article, presumably funded by your taxes, that you will realize that you haven't had a voice in all of this.

mabbo• 8 years ago

What did you expect? I'm not saying that the guy is or isn't a horrible monster, but if he had ethical qualms with what Elsevier does or how it operates, he would have either changed it or left.

The same goes for everyone who works there. They have either found a way to justify that what they do is ethical and okay, or would quit. That's just human nature.

mrhappyunhappy3• 8 years ago

Holy shit! I guess in the age of trumpism nothing is a surprise anymore. Well, we have the brightest here on HN, how about someone make a go at a competitive solution?

sweezyjeezy3• 8 years ago

I will never know why CEOs wade into Twitter spats like this. So little to be gained, so much to lose. Maybe lack of control of ego leads to better decisions elsewhere, I don't know...

dempseye• 8 years ago

I suppose you don't have to worry about reputational damage when everybody already thinks you're a parasite.

dustycat• 8 years ago

People have been trying to set up web-based academic publishing for at least twenty years, and they've failed. The obvious explanation is that it does actually cost money to publish academic research.

panic2• 8 years ago

The most direct way to do this would be to legalize sites like Sci-Hub. It's hard to argue you're performing a valuable service when you have to use legal power to prevent others from doing that service for free.

8bitsrule• 8 years ago

If publishing can't come up with a solution to limit cost and open up access, there are already online models for open publishing.

An online taxpayer-funded archive could be created/designated by statute. It would require that such articles be published there (before and after reviews). Publishers would pay to have access; their prices would reflect that cost and a cost-plus profit. Privately-funded org's could decide which game they prefer.

Make a fine memorial for Aaron Swartz.

thoughtexplorer• 8 years ago

HERE is a trivia question for you: what is the most profitable business in the world? You might think oil, or maybe banking. You would be wrong. The answer is academic publishing. Its profit margins are vast, reportedly in the region of 40 per cent.

Interesting. Does anyone know what the volume is like?

Aelius2• 8 years ago

This comment is more directed at hn commenters than the article itself. I'm led to believe that free journals aren't successful precisely because they don't have standards. They don't have standards because they can't fund people to do basic vetting (this is not the same as peer review), or otherwise are eager to accept whatever comes their way- which are usually papers that have been rejected by the reputable journals.

Assuming there is no money driven agenda, even the reputable journals have the issue where much of the content doesn't get peer reviewed. The findings are far from concrete.

But money driven agendas definitely exist too, and without basic vetting a journal finds itself hosting bs lobbyist material with sloppy "science" finding favorable results for anti-GMO, alternative medicines, organic farming, anti-vaccine, etc. The problem also exists that these entities are effectively funding their own journals to buy "legitimacy"- and they certainly would pose a threat to any journal that doesn't have high vetting standards.

As of yet, free access journals aren't reputable or actually desirable because they don't have adequate quality control. Free access to information is a worthy and noble goal, but we can't render the information useless in the process.

mrhappyunhappy3• 8 years ago

What’s wrong with organic farming? It’s the only kind of produce I want to eat.

NateEag• 8 years ago

Organic farming does not mean farming without weedkillers or pesticides. It means farming with weedkillers and pesticides that are largely unstudied, compared with known quantities like Monsanto's products (whose positive and negative effects are well documented and widely understood).

The 'organic' products may be better on balance, but we don't actually know that, because the body of knowledge isn't nearly as developed yet.

That's my layperson's understanding, anyway. I could be wrong.

Aelius2• 8 years ago

It's entirely marketing, there is no actual data supporting the claim that it's healthier for you. It succeeds by the "appeal to nature" fallacy, which causes a bunch of problems and gets decidedly anti-science in a few ways.

Using only "natural" pesticides because they are "healthier". This is unsubstantiated, again it's just an appeal to nature. It can become problematic because natural pesticides often aren't as effective, thus certain farms/crops require using an excessive amount- way more than they would if they used the more effective synthetic pesticides. The synthetic pesticides are of course accused of being unhealthy (because unnatural)- though this is generally untrue. Furthermore, even the natural pesticides cause pollution problems, and overusing them isn't good.

Because the organic lobby succeeds by the appeal to nature, they are also anti-gmo. Which is a big problem.

While there are entirely organic farms, a lot of organic products are really not even what they advertise themselves to be, as many organic farmers don't actually run organic farms: they run normal farms with a section of it that adheres to organic standards. These standards are pretty arbitrary, except for the fact that organic farming is a significantly less efficient use of farmland, which is going to become a problem within the next century. We need to be making efficient use of our arable land, as we don't actually have much left on the planet unless we start turning national parks + protected areas into farmland.

Largely, organic farming is a faux luxury built on anti-scientific ideas that does nothing except waste valuable land resources, sold to relatively privileged people who are willing to pay a premium to feel better about what they eat.

sweezyjeezy3• 8 years ago

There are some good free/non-profit journals, I just don't think you hear about them so much. There's a really good one in Number Theory called Algebra and Number Theory that has been around for about 10 years now. It was started by first-rate mathematicians and their standards, and reject rate have always been really high.

Teodolfo• 8 years ago

There are plenty of free, open access journals that are reputable.

JMLR http://www.jmlr.org/ is quite successful. There are some fields, such as machine learning, that are not dominated by for-profit journals. Why is this possible in some fields and not others? My answer would be that it is possible in all fields, but incumbency advantages can be very strong and coordination across academic volunteers can be more difficult when they are individually less secure.

dougmccune14• 8 years ago

Academic publishing is a favorite recurring topic on HN, and it's one I've occasionally dipped into discussing, although these discussions are typically 99% one-sided and void of nuance or reasoned arguments. It's like discussing politics online.

I'm a shareholder and board member of a large privately-held, family-owned academic publishing company. If anyone is interested in trying to understand what makes the industry work, why it's so hard to disrupt it, etc. I'd love to engage or put you in touch with people within the industry smarter than me - my email is in my profile.

I know the industry is particularly frustrating to the HN crowd. We want to think it's a technology problem - that distributing PDFs is a solved problem (which it obviously is). But the root of the problems (of which there are many) are all cultural and much harder to change. If you're going to jump in and try to "fix" the industry or put publishers out of business, I highly encourage you to engage with folks in the industry with an open mind and really try to understand why things work the way they work. You're not going to have any success unless you truly understand the incentive structure of academia and the social and cultural aspects of inertia that are at play. If you go in thinking you can build a better "publishing" mousetrap you will fail. You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business. And when you start peeling back the onion of how academics are assessed, given jobs, given tenure, etc you start seeing how hard changing behavior can be.

colordrops2• 8 years ago

Sorry if my reply seems trite, but the same sorts of things could be said about the cab, bookstore, and music industries. They were entrenched and difficult to take down, but most are better for it.

dougmccune14• 8 years ago

Sure, I wasn't saying it's not possible to disrupt publishers, and I'm not discouraging anyone from trying. I'm simply saying that to do so you're absolutely going to have to understand what makes the industry work the way it does. If you don't understand your users (in this case academics, tenure committees, universities, grant funding bodies, etc) then you're not going to make a dent in the status quo. I'm more just trying to counter the argument that there's no reason for publishers to exist, therefore it should be easy to make them obsolete. There are tons of reasons publishers and the entire system as it is exists, and if you want to change it you need to understand it.

ibuildthings• 8 years ago

While agreeing to the general principle, incentive structures are wired quiet differently in academia vs end consumer oriented gig/service industries.

Publications ( number, when, where, citations) is the primary currency/value in which one is judged within the peers in academia, and reputation outside the immediate academic community has a much lower weight. Whereas for online market places solid revune is the first priority and then comes reputation ( which is a means for the higher reveune). In academia it is the reverse, with reputation ( in a small clique) being the primary motivator, and funding being the means to gather it.

dunk0103• 8 years ago

Just FYI although the music industry has changed (much lower profit margins now), it's still a cartel of companies who actually own the vast majority of the content, and extract a pound of flesh. Perhaps you think that Spotify "disrupted" the industry (and Last.fm / others before it), but everyone still pays the piper - the majors (and given that they own the content, they can choose how much to charge for it whenever their contracts renew, which they make sure is frequently).

mmcwilliams• 8 years ago

“Disruption” in those three industries you listed meant that large global monopolies or duopolies were created which captured the majority of the market.

Do you think it’s easier or harder today vs. 10 years ago for an outsider or upstart to create a cab or ride sharing company? How about starting a book selling company?

I’m not sure how those industries are better off except for the deeply-entrenched players that took over their respective markets.

esfandia• 8 years ago

You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business.

That's right, and that's also why the prestigious researchers and universities, those with an already established reputation, have a responsibility: collectively leave the editorial boards of for-profit publishers, set up alternative venues with the help of university libraries. Share the archival, indexing and discovery effort among universities via peer-to-peer digital library federation.

All the tools are there. The same way that places like Stanford, Berkeley and MIT made MOOCs a thing, they can revolutionize scientific publishing.

There's already such venues such as JAIR for AI research (and that was set up looong ago without all the tech we have today), so it's certainly possible. It just needs to become the norm rather than the exception.

a3_nm2• 8 years ago

The problem is that the vast majority of established researchers do not care that the system is broken. Why work against the system once you're at the top? Most of them haven't ever thought about it, and the ones who know usually don't do much, because, hey, that's the way it was always done, they are used to the current journals and conferences being prestigious, and they don't want to bother with the unglamorous work of setting up HotCRP or coordinating reviews. Plus they usually want to push their career further and they know perfectly well that fighting against established venues isn't the right way to do that.

As a young tenured academic I have been systematically refusing to do reviews for non-open-access journals. (I'm certainly not senior enough to create a new journal and be taken seriously.) I hoped that this might give some ideas to my peers but it's seen at best as a weird quirk, at worst as a selfish move (because "the community" needs my help to review papers). Usually the answer is some variation of "yeah the system is not perfect".

The only argument I have seen which motivates researchers to care about open access is when it's mandated by funding agencies (e.g., in Europe, the ERC). Researchers really want to get these grants, so when these agencies talk about open access, they listen very carefully. It both makes me somewhat optimistic and quite cynical that the only way to move towards open-access seems to be via funding agencies (as opposed to researchers caring about the problem). Plus, for many agencies, "open access" here means "gold open access", i.e., continuing to work with the usual publishers, who make the articles available online, but move the "costs" (and huge margin) to the authors, with "article processing charges" of $1000-$2000.

ForHackernews• 8 years ago

MOOCs don't compete against traditional university education.

You're talking about eliminating, or at least sidelining traditional academic publishing. It's a completely different proposal.

panic2• 8 years ago

You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business.

Everyone realizes this. The problem is that you're abusing your position in this reputation system for profit. Do you think $40 is a fair price to read a paper from 1987? https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/109434208700100...

dougmccune14• 8 years ago

Nope. I'd be in favor of shorter copyright terms in general. The truth about $40 prices are that they aren't intended really to be the fair price of a good. They're there simply to allow the subscription business model to work. So no, I don't like the fact that we charge $40 for a 31 year-old paper. And I'm a huge proponent of shifting to a non-subscription business model. And the publishers are shifting, albeit slowly and only because they're being forced to. But they are shifting, at least in STM fields, and I'd guess that this $40 byproduct of the subscription model will indeed die out when the subscription model shifts to the open access author pays model (which, of course, we can also debate for a long time).

mirimir4• 8 years ago

I'd say, instead, that they've taken over the reputation business, and are burning it down, converting legitimacy into money.

Vinnl5• 8 years ago

Everyone realizes this.

They absolutely don't. Every time this subject comes up, there are plenty of people wondering how expensive it can be to host a PDF. It's not; the price they're asking is not for the service of hosting a PDF, but for granting you the privilege of using their brand. A publisher has a monopoly on its brands, which means that there's almost no downwards price pressure.

pjc50• 8 years ago

I'm not sure people are trying to fix academic publishing so much as burn Elsevier to the ground. Whether or how they are replaced is a separate question.

https://www.talyarkoni.org/blog/2016/12/12/why-i-still-wont-...

Topolomancer• 8 years ago

Well, Elsevier is maybe for some people the worst of the bunch (cannot speak from experience, though).

Springer, for example, has very relaxed and open copyright transfers. You basically retain the right to have copies on your website, on archives, etc., provided that they contain a link to the 'definitive version' of your paper. Elsevier does that to some extent as well, but Springer _also_ invests money to 'cross-fund' (if that is a word) books in fields that do not attract so many readers and that otherwise could not be published. So in that sense, Springer is giving back to the community and people are appreciating that more.

I agree, however, that there seems to be generic and unspecified hatred against Elsevier; having not reviewed for them or published with them, I do not have a properly-formed opinion here.

C1sc0cat• 8 years ago

When I worked for RELEX (reed elsiveer) New Scientist was one of their "vanity" publications.

dougmccune14• 8 years ago

Totally fair. You can definitely take the stance that without knowing what a substitute is for publishers it's still worth trying to destroy them, and have faith that something will rise up to fill the void. My argument would be that you need to be careful to not underestimate the publishers, particularly Elsevier. The shift to OA hasn't yet harmed the publishers. In fact, all the major publishers are among the largest publishers of OA articles. Elsevier is full of incredibly smart people who can adapt. So if your goal is to put them out of business, you need more than just a strategy to burn their business model (although if you could figure out how to remove money entirely from the process you'd succeed I suppose).

em-bee6• 8 years ago

You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business. And when you start peeling back the onion of how academics are assessed, given jobs, given tenure, etc you start seeing how hard changing behavior can be.

there is no doubt about that. but maybe it's time to question how science is done in general.

in the end the goal is to advance our knowledge and bring humanity forward.

but instead of everyone cooperating to do just that, they are competing with each other, and try to outdo each other. a lot of energy is wasted in preventing others from stealing your research ideas and being the first to publish on a particular topic. instead of looking at the benefits of the research published in a paper, and whether the results can be reproduced, instead what matters more is how many citations the paper can get.

reputation has become more important than producing actual results. academics and academic institutions are measured not in the quality of their research, but in the amount of papers and citations they can produce, to the point that researchers who can't dedicate their life to their work, because they have family, or worse, are a single parent, can't get a job, let alone tenure, because they can't put in the time required even though they may well put in more effort than others into the time they do have.

so yes, i acknowledge that changing this is going to be extremely hard. but it looks to me like changing the way papers are published will be the easiest step, because the components that actually matter are distribution, which is technology, and reviewers, which are academics.

the only thing that i see publishers doing is to edit the journals and decide what to publish. but shouldn't exactly that, also be done by academics?

how about a model like stackoverflow? papers are published like questions, and reviews are the answers. readers upvote good papers and good reviews, so that the most upvoted and most reviewed papers float to the top. the citation count can be included in the score too.

greetings, eMBee.

im3w1l2• 8 years ago

which is technology, and reviewers, which are academics.

There is another factor to consider - the outsiders. They need to know which research is good and which isn't and independent journals giving a stamp of approval to create "branded" science helps.

dooglius• 8 years ago

readers upvote good papers and good reviews, so that the most upvoted and most reviewed papers float to the top

I suspect such a system would devolve into clickbait and politics very quickly

notyourday2• 8 years ago

in the end the goal is to advance our knowledge and bring humanity forward.

That's not true. The end goal of scientists is to get get grants to they can get paid. As they climb higher, they get more money for less work. Soon they get to attach their name ( sometimes in the first position ) to academic papers when they did no work on it what so ever. To do that they means they need to generate papers and publish papers.

Publishers are exploiting this.

the only thing that i see publishers doing is to edit the journals and decide what to publish. but shouldn't exactly that, also be done by academics?

Academics do not have any interest in this. My wife was a PE at a major STEM publisher with a portfolio of dozens journals and supervisory responsibility for about a hundred. Academia's technological adaption ( which is necessary for efficient editing/producing workflow ) is terrifying. Corrections are done by hand. Proofs are faxed. Dropbox blows people mind. Papers that are accepted by EICs are unreadable -- EICs simply kick the paper to publisher to get it "produced".

If academics are not going to do publishers' job then publishers are going to control the process and decide what to charge.

jasode• 8 years ago

how about a model like stackoverflow? papers are published like questions, and reviews are the answers. readers upvote good papers and good reviews, so that the most upvoted and most reviewed papers float to the top.

The problem is that long-form works that require substantial analysis by experts (such as scientific papers read by competent scientists) don't work for a voting system like Stackoverflow. Internet voting works on things like comments of HN but not for 20000 word papers.

(I made previous comments about the limitations of voting systems to vet academic papers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15269673)

Basically, scientists are humans and human nature says they won't log into a system to upvote/downvote papers. Instead, they want a stronger signal than karma points before they spend (or potentially waste) their precious time on analyzing the merits of a long paper. That stronger signal is another respectable scientists that asks them to look at it.

randomsearch7• 8 years ago

Allow me to turn the tables a little:

- why don’t publishers pay reviewers for the extensive time they spend reviewing the paper?

- why don’t publishers pay academics who edit journals, another time consuming task?

- why don’t publishers pay academics or institutions for a product they sell?

I can’t comment on your company, but the above is the status quo for most of academia.

Do you think this business model is ethical?

chrisseaton8• 8 years ago

Because those people are already being paid anyway - their full time jobs, whether that’s PhD student, lecturer, professor, or industrial researcher, includes the job of reviewing and editing for publications.

It’s a society. You publish papers which get reviews, and you also work to review other people’s papers. Everyone contributes to make it work.

michaelt2• 8 years ago

  why don’t publishers pay

Why buy a cow when you can get milk for free?

randomsearch7• 8 years ago

As the parent didn't reply, I will fill in:

People trying to change or improve the publishing process _do_ understand academia - most of them work or have worked in academia.

The reason they're not engaging with you is likely that that your model is so obviously broken, and arguably unethical, that they don't want to help you or work with you - they want to put you out of business. Personally, I think that is an entirely reasonable response to the behaviour of academic publishers. Publishers have had more than enough time to reform.

dunk0103• 8 years ago

I did a research masters and got VERY frustrated by how publishing worked. But I came to your conclusion, too. I'd put it like this: an academic's career prospects are controlled entirely by the journals and the journals' impact factors, so breaking the cycle a chicken-and-egg problem. There are some great strides towards something better though; like PLOS ONE, or university-specific ventures such as https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2018/jan/ucl-launches-open-access....

FabHK3• 8 years ago

so breaking the cycle a chicken-and-egg problem.

Absolutely, huge coordination problem (prisoner's dilemma). Let's see what this cOAlition S can do about it.

Vinnl5• 8 years ago

You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business.

Exactly. The name "publishers" makes people think that their primary business is publishing, but the main source of income is seeking rent on the use of their brand names.

YeGoblynQueenne2• 8 years ago

One upvote is not from agreement, but from interest to see replies to your comment (which upvoting it makes more likely).

Personally, I do think the matter is complex. However, if you're trying to protect the current model by arguing that building a reputation costs money, you will not convince those who, quite reasonably, believe it should be earned by contributions to knowledge, instead.

simonh• 8 years ago

Do you think the current legacy model of journals and the peer review of articles isn't contributing to knowledge?

idiot900• 8 years ago

I agree, the solution is not a technical one, it's about money. If funding agencies require, as they should, day one free and open access, the problem will solve itself. Not without a good deal of temporary pain, but it will be solved. (I am an early career professor who has to worry about promotion - and am happy to bear the pain of such a transition.)

dougmccune14• 8 years ago

One thing to think about is what happens to academic fields that are not well funded? Plan S makes sense for funded research in STM disciplines. If we accept that publishing does cost some amount of money then it seems reasonable to have the funding of the research also cover that cost. Obviously we can argue about what a reasonable cost is ($100? $500? $5,000?), but it's certainly non-zero (even though yes, you can find specific examples of zero-cost publishing, but not on a scale that works for the system as a whole).

But what about the humanities and social sciences, which are typically not funded by government or foundation grants? We currently have a system in which the expectation of the academics is that they can publish for free because the universities pay for that cost via subscriptions. Changing to an author-pays model, which Plan S seems to push the industry toward, doesn't work for a lot of academic fields. There are certainly alternatives, like university libraries converting some of the funding they currently use for subscriptions to cover publication costs, or entire governments covering all publication costs for every academic within their borders. But it's not as easy to see exactly how the non-zero cost of publishing is covered outside well-funded disciplines.

jamesrcole6• 8 years ago

I know the industry is particularly frustrating to the HN crowd. We want to think it's a technology problem - that distributing PDFs is a solved problem (which it obviously is).

That's not at all my impression of these discussions. If people thought it was just a technical problem, then they'd think it would be easy to change the current setup. If people thought it was just a technical problem they wouldn't have such a strong dislike for the publishers.

dougmccune14• 8 years ago

I certainly made a broad generalization, but in this HN discussion you can find people asking why we can't just have a simple HN or Stack Overflow-like site for upvotes and downvotes instead of the existing peer review system (implying that it would be trivial to apply the tech used for social discourse online to academic publishing) and another comment about spinning up a peer-to-peer BitTorrent approach to distributing digitally signed data. And in every discussion of the topic on HN that I've read someone always asks the same type of question about why this is still a problem when it should be trivial to apply software tech toward a solution. My intent wasn't to discourage folks brainstorming technical improvements for the system, it was only to point out for anyone who isn't entrenched in the intricacies that there's a lot of reasons for the dysfunctional system to both exist and persist.

mfukar• 8 years ago

the root of the problems (of which there are many) are all cultural

Yes, thank you for restating the obvious. Research should be open, that is what we want. Off to do useful things now.

iicc• 8 years ago

It's frustrating because it isn't a technology problem, it's a tragedy of the commons.

PurpleBoxDragon• 8 years ago

If I peel back the onion further, I find the root of the problem is how to measure someone who is good at science. How should we measure scientific output to determine compensation (not just monetary or tenure, reputation itself can be considered a form of compensation)? That the way we reward scientist means that few are pushing to reform academic publishing is barely a footnote compared to some of the problems produced by our current model. Look at the lack of replication that occurs because replication is far less rewarded than new research even when the new research fails replication (once someone does eventually get around to it). The way to fix this is to find a method to measure good science that works better than the current method, but given that us tech people can't even figure out a decent way to measure proficiency in our own field, the outlook isn't hopeful for our ability to disrupt science.

dougmccune14• 8 years ago

Yes, at the core of the problem is how we measure good science. If you want to try to crack that nut I absolutely salute you. Improvements here could pay massive positive dividends for society as a whole. Meta[1], which was bought by Chan Zuckerberg[2], is sort of trying to do this (in addition to trying to tackle better discovery of the literature) by using an AI model to try to identify important research trends earlier in the process.

[1] https://meta.org/ [2] https://www.chanzuckerberg.com/science

WhompingWindows• 8 years ago

Can you write a more full-length post with more details and put it on here? I find your post intriguing but you left most of the problems in the background, vague and undefined. Let's hear what they are, please!

specialist• 8 years ago

"I'm a shareholder and board member of a large privately-held, family-owned academic publishing company. ... You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business."

Prove it. Get out ahead of these issues. Add value. Progress marches on. Lead the way.

Let's assume (for scope of this comment) the replication crisis is the biggest threat to everyone's reputation.

What would a solution look like?

More access & transparency & accountability.

Imagine a scholarly clearing house that facilitated the existing processes and workflows.

Something like github.com for warehousing all the data. Something like a collaborative editor. Something like scholar.google.com to better find & forage for stuff. Something like linkedin.com for researchers to connect and share their thoughts.

Maybe even a brokerage for grants, connecting funders with applicants, help administrate the administrivia.

Publishers would still publish journals. The cream rises to the top. aka curation. As Scott Galloway likes to say "Information wants to be expensive."

TL;DR: Innovate to add value in a changing world, instead using the status quo to continue rent seeking.

"It's like discussing politics online."

For policy work (vs electoral politics), I very much agree. Policy work has it's own replication crisis.

bargl• 8 years ago

This is similar to what I've seen from numerous Non-Govt orgs that try to help in other countries.

A very specific example. In the US, there was a research team building a (post earthquake) hut that could be built with only plywood and also was built to be "tightened down" to resist earthquakes and hurricane force winds. It had anchors and was a really cool technology. I went to Haiti and the people there would rather live in tents temporarily and move into a concrete house because that's how you build a house. Compare this to Paul Farmer, who was on the ground and built a network of medical facilities by including the people he wanted to help. He's been (by my standards) wildly successful.

It's easy to see a change that seems obvious from the outside, but if you don't get in and work on the ground floor to disrupt with people and change culture you're making your job way harder. Get in and talk to people, figure out why, and remember that people are just that people. Politics / Culture are unavoidable. Sometimes the easy part is the technology and that a'int easy.

sytelus• 8 years ago

HERE is a trivia question for you: what is the most profitable business in the world? You might think oil, or maybe banking. You would be wrong. The answer is academic publishing. Its profit margins are vast, reportedly in the region of 40 per cent.

40% are very normal and consider healthy margins for many businesses. The business with largest possible profit margins I know of is political donations. For mere $100K, one can own vast public land for mining and selling resources worth billions for many generations. That's 1000000% margin for you.

Vinnl5• 8 years ago

Consistent 40% margins, year over year, for decades, are rarely seen in other industries. For example, Apple's brand is very strong, so it can ask a very steep markup on their products. Nevertheless, its profit margins are lower than those of the big five publishers, usually.

ailideex• 8 years ago

Please give the name of a mining company with more than 40% profit margin.

shrimpx4• 8 years ago

The trouble here is that the entire academic structure is extremely difficult to question and change. Disrupting academia is kind of like disrupting the Catholic Church. It's so entrenched in its assumptions and rituals that trying to bring revolutionary change to it is pretty hopeless. Professors gained their status in this archaic structure and will resist challenging it. I mean, your PhD advisor will make sure you never challenge the research status quo with your thesis topic, let alone partaking in the academic publishing structure being fundamentally restructured.

Fomite11• 8 years ago

I mean, your PhD advisor will make sure you never challenge the research status quo with your thesis topic

This will come as a surprise to both my PhD advisor and my current advisee

ms0134• 8 years ago

Same for my PhD advisor and current/past students. Unfortunately, this HN post seems to be full of the usual cohort of passionately opinionated HN readers who don’t have a deep understanding about that which they’re passionately opinionated about.

shrimpx4• 8 years ago

You should elaborate. In my experience academia is largely a status structure where people are groomed to be hirable at schools X, Y, Z and publish regularly in conferences/journals A, B, C. You're saying this is fertile ground for hardcore innovation? No way. The extreme majority of the work is incremental and predictable; small low-impact results. (Disclaimer: My experience is in CS.)

known• 8 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_to_know though I do not endorse it for academic research

eecc3• 8 years ago

Academics, I have a proposal/question and was curious if such a system would work for you. Here it goes:

Take a P2P program similar to Kazaa or BitTorrent to share paper pdfs and datasets.

Next to these files also share indexes, derived data for searching.

Next to that, also share user generated review comments and endorsements to implement peer review and quality filtering.

Finally, digitally sign all these data to guarantee provenance and credibility of the data found on the network.

Let me know what you think of it. I’ve been loosely working on a prototype application that does all that for a while.

sweezyjeezy3• 8 years ago

Not sure that user generated review comments are a good idea - it would be to hard to convince people (me included), that they'd be a good replacement for peer-review. You don't know the user's expertise, you have no guarantee that they have read the paper. Granted that last one is sometimes not true in real world publishing either - but at least the social pressure is there. It could also lead to gaming, asking your colleagues to give good reviews, or worse, companies that are paid to write good reviews, same as what has happened with Amazon etc.

Academia is largely a social construct, that's why it's hard to replace with 100% technology.

eecc3• 8 years ago

Well the UGC I was thinking of is like http://www.openannotation.org mainly used to link to other papers and/or comment of draft papers. Also simple “Reviewed” tags, and other classification items.

Since any derived data would be signed and linked to the identity of its author a default filter removes anything that is not transitively included in your academic network.

Reviewed articles would just be “review count > N and reviewers in fieldNet”

ms0134• 8 years ago

The problem isn’t technical. The current flaws in the publishing system are not due to lack of indexing, data distribution, provenance, or filtering. And please, please, please, don’t turn reviews into some user driven drivel like amazon product reviews or other systems that are easily gamed or prone to the whims of the masses. We already have problems with gaming and personal agendas making reviews less than impartial: don’t make something that makes it 10x worse. (CS academic publishing and refereeing for 20+ years here).

eecc3• 8 years ago

I understand, please see clarifications in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18537122

gigatexal2• 8 years ago

How about this: after 1 year peer reviewed publications get released under a BSD license? Because this research needs to be available to all and this would give publishing shops enough time to sell to universities and people who want it now.

chrisseaton8• 8 years ago

BSD is a licence for software. Papers are literature. How’s that going to work?

gigatexal2• 8 years ago

A community open free to the world license then. The exact license isn’t the point but that the research is not locked away behind a paywall but free to benefit society and not let a few pocket and profit from the research often done by public institutions like universities and such.

aj7• 8 years ago

If you think about the insurance business, it’s only economic value added is fraud detection and minimization. Someone needs to have an incentive to prevent fraudulent claims. The economic value of publishing is orderly and dispassionate administration of intellectual property ownership. Successfully publishing a paper entitles the author to permanent ownership of the work. The author name never changes. A paper that leads to tenure at a major research university has a discounted value of more than 7 figures (USD or Euros.) This is why the academic beneficiaries of this system, who further control research, are not eager for alternative methods, or they could bring it down rapidly.

gandalfian• 8 years ago

This remarkable article explains how it all came to be this way; https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...

(The good stuff starts where Robert Maxwell appears)

neilwilson• 8 years ago

Surely the system should be like ... Hacker News.

We publish here, and the stuff that is good rises to the top with upvotes from our peers, and it is all subject to review in the comments where many an interesting discussion is had.

We all gain by sharing ideas as widely as possible. We just need a way for that to happen.

chaosite2• 8 years ago

Or, maybe not.

An academic article is not a blog post. Also, only the most popular posts get discussed here -- tons of stuff is lost if it's not initially popular. Timing your submission allows for gaming the system.

All scholarly articles need to go through peer review and receive honest, constructive feedback -- especially the bad ones, and Hacker News (and Reddit and Slashdot and any system like that which doesn't assign reviewers to articles) isn't very good at that.

vanderZwan• 8 years ago

All scholarly articles need to go through peer review and receive honest, constructive feedback

Which is also a system that can be gamed, by the way. For example, by the reviewers:

- "Oh dammit, we got scooped... better use the insights from here to help us past our hurdles, while stating this work is not original enough to be published so we can quickly submit our own and get published earlier after all!"

- "I see that this paper belongs to Camp A with regards to these two competing hypotheses explaining unexplained phenomenon X, I am in Camp B. Therefore, I will consider this paper rubbish by definition."

- "I am an old researcher who does not believe in some of the newer findings that contradict longstanding assumptions that I "grew up with", and therefore will never allow this paper to pass."

- "I am a very insulated researcher who cannot make sense of this multidisciplinary work, therefore reject the parts that lie outside of my field as rubbish."

- "This paper is a by a researcher competing for the same position/grant/etc. as me. Better make sure they don't get too much credit."

- "I'm not sexist/racist/etc but... totally clearly biased in my judgement of this paper because..."

Now, I'm obviously describing worst-case scenarios here. But my point is: it's human politics all the way down.

tomlu• 8 years ago

You definitely do not want that. Vetted science should not go through a pipeline of what amounts to a low brow popularity contest. Hacker news might be somewhat better than reddit in this respect, but there's no way you want to subject it to that kind of process.

fifnir• 8 years ago

Upvote/downvote lists a horrible way to publish science. Simple silly example: big group publishes, everyone gets online and upvotes the post in the early stages so it floats to the top.

mschuetz• 8 years ago

Considering the popularity of homeopathy and other junk science, that's probably not a good idea.

gjm11• 8 years ago

Systems like HN and Reddit work (when they do, and to the extent that they do) mostly because they _don't matter_.

If you tried to use them for things that people care more intensely about, like determining what gets to be part of The Academic Literature, then they would instantly become the subject of concerted efforts at manipulation. Even now, HN has to deal with voting rings and the like; it would be much, much worse if people's careers were riding on it.

It's Goodhart's law: as soon as a measure becomes a _target_ it rapidly stops being a good measure.

BurnGpuBurn2• 8 years ago

I've always wondered why scientists, arguably the smartest people around, would fall for this blatantly obvious racket. And why they keep going back to the racketeer for years on end too, wasting millions in tax money while keeping the valuables behind lock and key for most of us.

It's so obvious you're being ripped off. What the heck scientists?

No wonder people believe in conspiracy theories, with a bunch of scientists denying them the knowledge while a bunch of business suits hoard the cash.

dalore• 8 years ago

Because of the prestige of being in a journal.

unixhero• 8 years ago

Welp. It already has been broken up. Scihub is going strong and so is the push and emphasis on open journals such as Arxiv and others

Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research

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