MIT can honor Aaron Swartz by fighting to make journals open to everyone

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/01/aaron_swartz_jstor_mit_can_honor_the_internet_activist_by_fighting_to_make.single.html

by RyanMcGreal • 13 years ago

219 58 13 years ago

slate.com

drharris• 13 years ago

They can further honor him by putting some reins on their legal team.

sp3324• 13 years ago

Well he did sneak into a closet and cause JSTOR to threaten to cut MIT's access. After things settled down, MIT dropped all charges. I think that was pretty reasonable.

waterlesscloud• 13 years ago

Where have you seen that they dropped charges? Everything I've read has indicated exactly the opposite.

pekk• 13 years ago

It wasn't JSTOR's fault, and it wasn't MIT's fault.

Why, it can only be the government's fault!

jhuni• 13 years ago

He was fighting against the commodification of academic journals. MIT should have given him a medal.

czr80• 13 years ago

"are giving their work away to journals for free"

You know, the funny thing is that this pretty much describes the business model for all websites with user-generated content.

hect0r4• 13 years ago

It is also a fallacy that they are giving it away. They must be deriving some non-monetary value from doing it else they would not do it since they are free to decide not to publish or select a particular outlet. The fact is that authors are paid with the prestige that comes from being published in a journal.

betterunix6• 13 years ago

In theory, researchers publish their work in order to make their knowledge available to others. In theory, the more people who read a published paper, the better, regardless of whether or not the researcher who wrote it is even alive. In theory, the only reason researchers put their name, affiliation, and contact information on published papers is so that they can answer questions other people might have after reading the paper. It's a great theory...

In practice, researchers publish their work because their jobs and livelihoods depend on it. In practice, researchers publish the same paper with minor tweaks in multiple journals because they need to pad their CV. In practice, most of humanity cannot read journal articles anyway so researchers are only really communicating with each other when they publish -- and they already know how to contact each other.

So that is the value researchers derive from publishing their work: failure to publish means failure to advance one's career. It makes no difference what a researcher publishes, and so researchers tend to gravitate towards problems that do not seem very hard (but they make it sound very exciting in the titles and abstracts of their papers, because the people with hiring/firing power usually can't get through the introduction).

gm• 13 years ago

I say screw the existing journals and encourage publishing academic work on new, free journals.

There's nothing that says "existing journals must change or we have no other option"

thirdstation6• 13 years ago

The new journals will lack the prestige and career-boosting qualities of the established, old-guard journals.

It will take longer than just providing another avenue to publication.

The incentives for publishing need to be addressed adequately. It's relatively easy nowadays to figure out how to produce articles for publication cheaply.

rotskoff• 13 years ago

More than that, high quality academic journals provide a source of well-reviewed, thoroughly edited content. The arXiv, for example, is a great resource, but it can be overwhelming to have to filter through everything. As of yet, we don't have a freely available alternative to serious peer review in the 'prestigious' journals.

grecy• 13 years ago

> The new journals will lack the prestige and career-boosting qualities of the established, old-guard journals.

True, just like Wikipedia lacks prestige and "credibility" now.

I'm willing to wait +/- 20 years until all those old folks die off or become irrelevant and today's late teens can't remember a world without Wikipedia and have never seen a printed encyclopedia.

ef4• 13 years ago

It requires leadership from the people who already hold the prestige, which is why an institution like MIT could make a big difference.

An example of this already starting to happen for mathematics: http://www.nature.com/news/mathematicians-aim-to-take-publis...

impendia2• 13 years ago

> Third, MIT should instruct its deans and other officials to no longer look favorably upon the mere fact of publication in a “prestigious” journal when making hiring and tenure decisions. Instead, promotions should be based on the quality of a person’s work, wherever it’s been published. (This sounds obvious, but most people in academia will tell you that where you publish is just as important as what you publish.)

I wish I liked this article, but it seems that Manjoo has failed to appreciate why this problem is difficult, and therefore, why it has not been solved already.

pseut4• 13 years ago

Yeah, the casual suggestion that MIT should try to badly damage the careers of most of its faculty (presumably causing them to leave) suggests that he hasn't thought about this problem very long or talked about it with many people. As much as I dislike academic publishing, the last thing I want is to have deans and their staff evaluate the merits of research on a case by case basis. It sounds nice in theory, I guess, but they're people with agendas and biases too, and even setting that aside, they don't have the time or the training to do it. (as an, I hope, neutral example: could a dean trained as an economist really evaluate the relative merits of 15 different experimental physics papers? Could a trained physicist really evaluate the contributions of 15 different economics papers?) (note that this all applies to deans at other universities. The deans at my university are of course exceptional and above reproach).

So, on the one hand, even MIT probably can't unilaterally make a lot of progress on this issue. On the other hand... almost every recent paper I've ever been interested in is available from the author's webpage (making this quote: "much of the work produced in academia is never seen by anyone outside that cloistered world, because everyone who’s not affiliated with a university is cut off from access" ring hollow to me), all of the work to produce the journals is done for free or nearly free by researchers, and (anecdotally) everyone prefers electronic copies of the journal articles anyway. It seems like open access publication is almost inevitable.

A more manageable (but less sexy) step might be for MIT and other universities to defray the admin costs for some of these flagship journals that want to go open-access. The article mentions the American Historical Review as having annual (editorial) costs of about $500k [1], which is tiny for a university.

[1] From this post: http://blog.historians.org/news/1734/aha-statement-on-schola...

RichardPrice• 13 years ago

You're right that the central challenge here is helping academics evaluate each other's work without relying so heavily on journal titles, closed access journals or otherwise. There is some movement here. Increasingly hiring committees are taking other reputation metrics into account when evaluating work (inbound citation counts, readership metrics, follower counts - anything that may make the job of an evaluation committee a little bit easier).

The fact that papers you are looking for tend to be available on author's webpages is atypical. A very small percentage of the 2 million papers published each year is available online for free. Institutions pay $8 billion a year to subscribe to journals, and they would be only too glad to cancel those subscriptions if they could.

btilly2• 13 years ago

The problem is that the quality of work in a related field can be hard to judge. However researchers generally try to get papers into the most prestigious journal that they think they can, and journals work hard to try to maintain consistent standards. Therefore the journal it got published in is a reasonable proxy for article quality.

jpdoctor• 13 years ago

> MIT should instruct its deans and other officials to no longer look favorably upon the mere fact of publication in a “prestigious” journal when making hiring and tenure decisions. Instead, promotions should be based on the quality of a person’s work, wherever it’s been published. (This sounds obvious, but most people in academia will tell you that where you publish is just as important as what you publish.)

This is an author that is confusing "most people in academia" with MIT.

Mere publication is not the path to tenure at MIT, and the tenure committees are well-versed in the difference between impact and the # of pubs.

tylerneylon3• 13 years ago

Why is this the top-rated comment? I could literally use it as a generic I-know-more-than-the-author comment on any article about a problem (replacing the quote and author's name of course). It provides no more information than that the commenter thinks there's something wrong with the quote that's pulled out of the article.

A good comment would at least say why you think it's a difficult problem (that the author has supposedly missed).

As far as hiring or giving tenure based on merit instead of journal prestige, this is achievable. It's hard because traditionally journal names are extremely important. But it's doable. When I was a grad student, I was personally aware of the process of hiring people in my field. The problem right now is that one person could say, "X is good but candidate Y has two articles in Awesome Journal, so Y seems better." That statement implies Y has good work, but we need to make room for the reply, "Yes, but X has done better work and avoided Awesome J. because it's closed access." It's an attitude shift, which is hard, but doable.

impendia2• 13 years ago

You objected to the upvotes, but do you actually disagree with me? I do not disagree with your claims. In your last paragraph, are you claiming that your suggestion is not only "achievable" and "doable", but simple enough to implement that the challenges don't bear mention in an argument for reforming academic publishing?

For elaboration, I endorse and agree with pseut's comment, he said more or less what I would say.

I recently served on a hiring committee in my own mathematics department. It is extraordinarily difficult to evaluate the work even of other mathematicians. In areas other than my own, I can distinguish bogus work from good work, but I find it difficult to distinguish good work from excellent work. Although we rely principally on letters of recommendation, and interviews (although we must of course first narrow our search down to a shortlist), we find that quality of journals is a good barometer for quality of work.

I would like to see publishing change as much as anyone, and I am a signatory to the Elsevier boycott (see www.thecostofknowledge.com). I believe we stand the best chance of effecting change if we seriously consider the obstacles standing in our way.

snowwrestler• 13 years ago

I'm not a fan of linking major cultural or ideological issues to specific tragedies in this way. If open access is a good idea on the merits, then the merits are where the battle will be won or lost.

The article points out one reason to not provide open access: the difficulty of financing peer-reviewed publishing if subscriptions are free. If there is not a good solution for that problem, the emotional appeal of "do it for Aaron" will not be enough to win--especially because the people who feel the greatest emotional attachment to Aaron are the people who already agreed with him.

The rallying cry "do it for [person]" is usually only effective at rallying the troops who are already on your side, not convincing the other side.

tehwalrus• 13 years ago

    | the difficulty of financing peer-reviewed publishing if subscriptions are free

note, though, that scientists are not paid to edit journals nor peer-review articles in them; the publishers collect their cut simply for hosting the article on a website (and printing physical copies, but basically nobody uses them anymore.)

If the publishers were more honest, and allowed people to download papers for the cost of the bandwidth plus a small contribution towards a sysadmin's salary, say 20 cents, and charged the full $10 wack for physical subscriptions/prints, we would have app-store economics and much, much less of a problem.

Of course, people with a monopoly don't tend to reduce their prices voluntarily (apart from Amazon..) and full, free, open access (at least for publicly funded research) is a very reasonable demand.

pseut4• 13 years ago

This doesn't affect your argument at all, but academics are sometimes paid a small amount to edit journals; not enough though (AFAIK) to affect their decisionmaking.

illuminate• 13 years ago

"merits are where the battle will be won or lost"

We do not live in a society where merits are often where battles are won or lost, though. Certainly not in entrenched systems.

rflrob• 13 years ago

> The rallying cry "do it for [person]" is usually only effective at rallying the troops who are already on your side, not convincing the other side.

As it turns out, there's not just your side and the other side. There's also the side of people who are largely undecided, and don't realize just how broken the system is. "Do it for [person]" lets them know there's a problem.

InvisibleCities• 13 years ago

> the difficulty of financing peer-reviewed publishing if subscriptions are free.

Nope. Peer reviewing is performed largely for free; in the few cases where the reviewer is paid, their fee is paltry. This is even more ridiculous when you consider that it often costs scientists hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars to even submit their article to the journal in the first place. You might say, "Well, what about editing? That must be expensive, right?" Wrong. Scientific journals do not edit the content of articles they publish. I've met many professors who learned that the hard way when they encountered typos in their own published journal articles. The whole system is a corrupt, monopolistic joke, and the sooner that everyone who works at Elsevier/JSTOR/wherever is out of a job, the better.

tylerneylon3• 13 years ago

Sometimes good changes need a (possibly emotionally-inspired) boost to make them possible. A small-scale example is a kickstarter campaign. A larger example is support for a bill that's bad for corporations but good for individuals.

The case of academic publishing is particularly strange. The following parties want articles to be freely available: the authors, universities, funding agencies, and the taxpayers who pay for some funding agencies. The flow of money is so perverse, and the culture of tradition so strong, that no one has a good immediate incentive to switch to open access, though.

This is an important problem because 99% of the world has no access to research that essentially everyone involved, except the publisher, wanted to be free. Or, if you think money is more important than access to research, consider that in 2011, Reed Elsevier made more money than any of these: Verizon, Nike, Mastercard, FedEx, Bank of America, Delta, or Amazon.com. And their huge profit margins come from a strongly inelastic, broken system that funnels money from our universities and taxpayers.

hect0r4• 13 years ago

I don't think there is a moral argument for "freeing" existing content since all parties to the "paid journal" business model, including the paper authors, seem to have entered into these arrangements with coercion. The authors of papers are, in fact, paid; they are paid with the prestige that comes from being published in such a journal and do so willingly and fully aware that someone else will make money from the work via selling subscriptions etc

A better idea would be to invest the effort and money in building free alternatives based on alternative business models and working out how to incent authors to use them. This doesn't involve the breaking of any contracts or dishonouring agreements and is actually addressing the root cause rather than engaging in journal by journal skirmishes.

betterunix6• 13 years ago

"I don't think there is a moral argument for "freeing" existing content"

Well I guess that depends on what you base your morality on. I am of the view that it is inherently immoral to base a person's access to education on their wealth, because it ensures that wealthier people will have an easier time remaining wealthy and that poor people will have a harder time becoming wealthy. That applies equally to grade-school mathematics and reading texts as it does to academic journals.

"all parties to the "paid journal" business model, including the paper authors, seem to have entered into these arrangements with coercion."

Failure to publish means losing your job as a researcher; how is that not coercive?

"The authors of papers are, in fact, paid; they are paid with the prestige that comes from being published in such a journal"

Which is detrimental to the quality of research, and by extension harmful to society. By making publishing so prestigious, we have encouraged researchers to tackle only smaller, safer problems, to avoid questioning the validity of commonly used research techniques, and to waste resources by publishing minute variations on a single idea over and over again. Since copyright itself exists "to promote the progress of science," it would seem that correcting those problems would be of paramount importance -- and the prestige associated with publishing in a "big name" journal is one of the factors that created this situation.

hect0r4• 13 years ago

On your first point about access to education being based on wealth: education and knowledge are products just like any other and cost money to produce. Hence, it is perfectly moral to charge for access and indeed it is necessary to ensure that others invest the time and incur the opportunity cost of doing things that further human knowledge. If we make education and all knowledge free, how do you propose that the costs of producing this knowledge are offset? Taxes? Personally, I would rather that research and knowledge is entirely funded by private money and the private sector than by government fiat.

With regards to your second point, failure to publish may mean losing your job but then that is because publish is part and parcel of your job. Failure to teach, turn up in the morning, wear decent clothes and a plethora of other things could likewise cost one their job but this still doesn't constitute coercion because the person is still free to work elsewhere.

As for your last point, I fail to see why this is an issue. Publishing is prestigious because it is a proxy for the endorsement of ones peers and a form of validation in an "industry" where there are few objective measures of a person's relative performance as a researcher. Maybe the issue isn't publishing per se but rather that journals are not exclusive enough and hence accept lower grade research. Maybe there is a market then for a journal to be even more selective -- and therefore even more prestigious than its competitors -- and by doing so incent a higher level of research.

clicks• 13 years ago

Well, some people are already on it, whether or not MIT chooses to do anything about it: http://aaronsw.archiveteam.org/

SagelyGuru• 13 years ago

MIT is far more likely to come up with an exonerating report rather than an excoriating one.

hakaaaaak• 13 years ago

Not to be insensitive to Aaron, but even if this could be pulled off, which it wouldn't, this might encourage copycat suicides to produce change. Suicide should not be encouraged. Often change can happen without any harm to self or others. Sacrificing oneself because there is no other option is one thing; but suicide to make journals available was probably not Aaron's intent.

slacka• 13 years ago

I strongly believe that publicly funded research should freely available to the general public. I use the http://aaronsw.archiveteam.org/ daily to help continue Aaron's fight.

Could someone please explain what is stopping arXiv from filling the role discussed in this article?

MIT can honor Aaron Swartz by fighting to make journals open to everyone

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