9 ms·

Making Journals Free

158 points by panic 4y ago

s1mon 4y ago
Seems like this should really link to the .pdf of the paper named in the title of the post. Instead, it's a link to a download page with several files and it's not immediately obvious that the paper is the focus of this post. That said, a quick skim of the paper shows a breakdown of the market and profit margins of the big publishers of academic research (Elsevier et. al.) and how detrimental these parasites are. No big surprise to this audience, but nice to see the research.
- jltsiren 4y ago
  > Seems like this should really link to the .pdf of the paper named in the title of the post. Instead, it's a link to a download page with several files and it's not immediately obvious that the paper is the focus of this post. That's the standard practice in the academia. Instead of linking directly to the pdf, you link to a landing page that shows the context the article was published in. You can then use the reputation of the publication venue to judge whether the article is what it claims to be and whether it's worth skimming/reading.
ketzu 4y ago
Hm... I mostly read the introduction and have little interest in the rest of the work, as the introduction was a massive letdown. Especially the section on parasites of academic research. (Not only but partially because of the aggressive wording, making it read as an opinion piece masquerading as semi-scientific work.) The analysis mentions the prestige of the journals as a (figurative) side note, but personally I believe that is the main part they sell to authors. It is also the reason why breaking the stranglehold is so hard and why the "just put it online" proposals/solutions I heard so often over the years didn't just magically dissolve publishers The other part is the failure of an analysis in spoilage of public money. Comparing the margins to "giants like Google, Apple or Amazon" is meaningless, unless there is a reason to assume those giants have large margins for some reasons. First google result on high profit margin companies [1] goes from 42.9% up to 55% for the top 10, so even in a larger context the up to "close to 40%" is quite high. Although I am not sure how many of those top 10 are monopolies, which is implied by the conclusion from the 40%. They also imply publishers don't really do anything anymore, while discussing those high margins. So what are they spending those 60% on? Don't get me wrong, I am not a fan of expensive publishing and subscribing for scientific journals and I think every author should use their rights to publish their works on arxiv and their personal and university website. I think the current system is a waste of time for many scientists in many ways (god did I hate rewriting the same paper for multiple conference tempaltes/lengths because of minor issue-rejections) and to some degree also money! I was in the "favorable" situation of not having to care about my scientific career in the final years of my phd, so I could publish in places without much regards to their prestige. But I believe the discourse does need a different direction. The later sections might address these issues and some have already been put into action. Journals have a 'monopoly' on Prestige: Scientist hurt themselves by not going for reputable journals. Big funding agencies must require open publications or arxiv use or whatever to force journals to make exceptions on copyright transfer and scientists from being too lazy to use their rights to make their papers available. (Something I heard from many researchers.) Some copyright transfers already have exceptions because US public funding requires something similar to this (at least that is what I got from reading the copyright form, I never worked with US public funding). So there is leverage that works. If you want me to hate publishers for wasting public money, don't just tell me their profit margin is oh-so-high and they don't do anything because they no longer perform lectoring and type checking. Tell me what they do do with the remaining money and then, if you can, convince me that it is not worth anything or why it should not be handled by a private institution. [1] https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry-trends/industries-highest-profit-margin/ https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry-trends/indu... edit: after reading some more, especially the recommendations, I still feel mostly let down. The recommendations seem to me, to consist mostly of wishful thinking and pushing on the wrong end or simplified so much that they become worthless. If you bury the important parts in the middle of a sea of unhelpful ones, they will get lost. The state of things did not just happen to be that way because people hate open knowledge. Project based positions and time limited contracts are a huge problem created through the whole structure of academia and its financing and will not be changed by "try to create more long term positions". Even the good recommendations suffer from these problems. E.g. "For universities, research institutions, research funders, demand the results of research to be published in diamond open-access journals." I believe only one of those groups has the actual power to demand this in a meaningful way. Finally the one recommendation I hate the most: "For internet service providers who are forced to block Sci-Hub, block in return the publishers who have sued Sci-Hub" no please don't. I believe ISPs should only restrict access when required to by law or courts and not insert their personal feelings about what those laws should be. But especially not as retalliation for lawsuits.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > So what are they spending those 60% on? Salaries.
  - Ultimatt 4y ago
    Share holder dividends. RELX is 2.21% Not sure why everyone forgot capitalism in this.
    - ketzu 4y ago
      I don't know much about accounting, but as far as I know, dividends are not expenses in any way and therefore are part of the profit margin, not the remaining 60%.
  - ketzu 4y ago
    Unfortunately, for my point of understanding what journals do provide this is unhelpful, as salaries could still be spent on useful things. I belive that blog posts like this focus on the wrong part to be convincing: What do journals provide and why do they have expenses that are this high? If we ran journals as non profits, should we expect cost to come down by the 27-39% (for the three publishers chosen in the blog post)? If they want to be convincing for me, I believe they should focus on those remaining 61-73%, and why I, as a reader, should believe a different organization would reduce that in a meaningful way and how that should be financed. Making researchers do even more of the jounral busywork is a bad solution as well, even though it provides implicit financing, as it wastes even more time of researchers. Not that I actually need convincing that an open knowledge model is better, I just prefer hearing good arguments on my side instead of infinite repeating of bad ones.
sour-taste 4y ago
At work we're starting a project that can literally reduce deaths (if it goes well, if people use it etc). It's a well studied field but half the papers are behind paywalls for journals we don't pay for. We pay for some of these journals but not all. I recognize people may not have a lot of sympathy in this case since my employer can just pay, but for, say, small startups trying to build on top of research these paywalls can be detrimental. In some cases crippling. I legitimately feel it slows the pace of human innovation: what's the point of doing research if only other researchers can view it? Don't you need industry to also build on top of the research? Sometimes people complain that if public money paid for the research then it should be freely available. I think that's only a partial solution. While researchers are judged by which journals they get their research into this will stay a problem. We need to develop alternative ways of measuring research significance divorced for big name journals.
anothernewdude 4y ago
I seriously think that research that isn't openly published should be viewed with more suspicion.
photochemsyn 4y ago
The real issue for the publishers isn't a few people on the web linking to archived versions of papers published in their journals, it's when major institutions start dropping subscriptions, which likely add up to tens of thousands of dollars per publisher per university. Any decent research institution's library will have archived paper copies of journals bound into books dating back 100 years or more, and that's basically the model for the future as well. Going 100% digital isn't such a great idea, due to bitrot and so on, it's still best to have paper archives stored somewhere. Then, someone has to pay for the print runs on real paper, the work of organizing and publishing each issue, etc. So, how much does that cost per issue, what's the average size of a print run, how many staff have to be paid full time to keep the journals coming off the presses, what kind of profit margins are the publishers extracting from the copyrights, etc., how much do those glossy images on high-quality paper suitable for archiving for decades really cost, etc. The overall benefits to human civilization of having all the information in research articles available to anyone with a terminal, however, that seems to outweight the other considerations. Maybe some kind of state-subsidized publication system is the answer? It's hardly a competitive market after all.
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
  Bitrot? You talk as if it’s an unsolveable problem..
  - foobarbecue 4y ago
    Indeed. Store it all on some high-to-low blu-ray, and the media is good for 10000 years. Way less rot than paper.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      Until you don't have a machine that can easily read that media. I thought a bit like this until I married a historian and learned a bit more about how archives work. I assumed that digitizing everything would be a huge boon for the maintainability of the archive. But after now speaking with a bunch of archivists it seems like digital archives have a lot more problems than I originally expected and are way more underfunded than I expected.
2Gkashmiri 4y ago
Journal pricing DOES NOT MAKE SENSE to third world countries. That is why scihub is a gift. Last week I came across some random weird article that had a jounrla doi. $40 I was told. Fine but in India, minimum wage is ₹500 and $40 is ₹3360 which is like 7 days of minimum wage for a single article. Absurd. We have "universities" paying through the nose for a "subscription" but as a commoner who is not an academic and would like access to 'something', this is bad. And the argument of "poor authors" doest even come up in this discussion so I am all for violating the "intellectual property of publishers", regardless of that making me a criminal or not. Sue my pauper ass. Scihub is magic. Doi paste, boom. Read.
- dartharva 4y ago
  Completely agree with your assessment, but "minimum wage" doesn't mean the same thing in India as it does in the West - minimum-wage earners are not typically students here.
  - 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
    minimum wage is just an example. you pay $40 for what? 5 hours of minimum wage work time while in india that is 7 days? cost of "admission", that sort of thing. this is just a reference point. Sure, any student who wants to do research "probably" already has access to "some" journals through their universities who pay through the nose for "institutional subscription", again, money that these third world institutions would rather use for actual work, as opposed to paying for elsevier. If instead of paying for a subscription, the university funds the research of a poor student? would that make more sense?
    - dartharva 4y ago
      Yeah, like I said I completely agree. In fact it's not even convenient to wade through half a dozen publisher portals trying to find what you're looking for - my high-tier college had a subscription to all those journals but I still found myself using Sci-hub more often than not because of its sheer ease-of-use.
- 4y ago
acomjean 4y ago
I get added to paper as a supporting author for the work our group does. We’re NIH (national institute of Health) funded so anything we publish has to be public and free. Which is great. Pubmed is pretty great. I get that people hate paying for non free journal articles and they are way to expensive. Even if you have access through your institution the process is clunky and terrible. The review process has given us good feedback. Of course my bosses are on the hook have to review others. even though our articles are free to read, the journals still make money as we have to pay the journals for the free access.
mikewarot 4y ago
We need to nationalize Elsevier and the other big publishers. Then we can make the accumulated knowledge of mankind available to all for free. After all, tax money funded almost all of the research anyway.
- whatyesaid 4y ago
  Is there any history of companies that can easily move internationally being nationalised? Because it's not some national physical infrastructure like railways or electrical grids. After all their operations are international and detached from their actual countries. One interesting line would be to amend copyright laws, such that all publicly funded research (government grants or accredited universities) no longer has any copyright applicable, ex post facto. Private companies and private research institutions would still have copyright protection if they really want it (most I've read don't, I think they'd patent rather than charge for access). Then sites like SciHub can not be blocked and even better ones can be built (UX wise) that rely on open source, donations for hosting etc without fear of extradition or anything. It could start out in one country and expand as others catch up in legislation. I wonder how the response would be though from publishers. But realistically, if the public was informed that individual institutions are paying millions for simply prestige where journal editors are unpaid yet they make billions in net profit annually, funded by their tution fees and taxpayer money, I think people wouldn't stand for this. Especially as we've gone all digital, these publishers are selling journal names.
  - bmelton 4y ago
    I don't know the full history of asset forfeiture, but of the two portable franchises I can remember that were being threatened with seizure under eminent domain, both of them easily sidestepped it by ... moving. The first was the Baltimore Colts. After 6 losing seasons and extremely questionable management by owner Jim Irsay, attendance plummeted. Irsay had been considering moving the franchise in a bid to try and get financing for a newer, better stadium, and in exchange Baltimore threatened eminent domain seizure, and easily passed the measure in the legislature. Colts moved to Indianapolis before the seizure could become effective and left (literally) overnight. The other was also in Maryland. The Netflix show House of Cards, which is of course "set" in DC, filmed quite a bit in neighboring locales of Virginia and Maryland because of DC's size and weird shape. The show was trying to angle for more tax breaks for filming, and the state responded with threat of seizure. The show briefly quit filming in Maryland in lieu of VA and DC scenes before the measure died in the general assembly. There was another, relating to the LA Raiders, but I know that the California Supreme Court ultimately ruled against the state's efforts (despite finding that providing sporting entertainment was a legitimate function of government) and that's about all I know of that one.
matrix_overload 4y ago
As much as I hate the current situation with academic publishers, they have one very valid point - prioritization. They impose an artificial bottleneck on how many articles can get published, so "published in XXX" means "one of the top X papers in the area according to a reasonable metric". We have all surely noticed how journalism turned to shit when we moved from printed physical copies (with bandwidth limit) to limitless clickbait-ridden "portals". Real decent journalism just cannot compete for readers' attention anymore. There could be a reasonable middle ground - like mandated free access to individuals, or free access after a 3-year period or so, but completely killing the publishers would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
- nine_k 4y ago
  A publisher per se may be not needed. Upload some PDF. But a curator and a reviewer are pretty important roles. One for selecting and surfacing the important and high-quality, the other fir checking soundness and weeding out poorly done stuff. Those are the actual paid services of, say, Elsevier. The rest us cruft and rent-seeking. Now the question: how well are these services rendered by the publishers? Can this be done more efficiently, with higher quality? If so, how? Are there examples?
  - signaru 4y ago
    One problem is poorly done reviews. Especially since many reviewers are not being paid anything for their time and have the incentive to ward off competing researchers while being protected by anonymity. It seems hopeless since who else would the publisher go to to assess the quality of supposedly new pursuits of expertise knowledge? I've had experienced many strawman rejections back in the day that I just stopped trusting the publishing system. I'd rather just upload a PDF and let the readers judge its credibility and let (positive) citations be the benchmark instead on trusting a handful of elite critics with unclear incentives.
    - UncleMeat 4y ago
      And, as you say, the expensive publishing houses don't do anything to ensure high quality reviews. In grad school I had a paper rejected by a prestigious outlet because one reviewer thought that the experimental setup I used was too difficult and therefore they didn't trust that I was being honest about my results. They stopped just a step short of calling me a fraud. I was baffled that this was accepted by the publisher. It was only later when I was tasked with performing reviews that I realized that almost exactly zero work is done by the publishers. It is just "well there's one Strong Reject so see-ya."
pelasaco 4y ago
January, 11, 2013 is the 10th years anniversary of Aaron Schwartz's death[1] and there's still a long way to get rid of such parasites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._Aaron_Swartz_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._...
- dredmorbius 4y ago
  ITYM 2023, for the anniversary.
  - pelasaco 4y ago
    yes, you are right. Unfortunately, I cannot edit my post anymore :(
    - dredmorbius 4y ago
      No worries.
lacker 4y ago
Scientific publishers are basically the outsourced HR department of universities. Modern academic fields are too sprawling for professors to understand everything that's going on in their field. The members of a hiring committee or even a tenure committee often just don't really understand the work of the people they are evaluating. So they have to rely on journals, and metrics like how many popular publications people have. It's a valuable service to do this evaluation work for academics. It's just a shame that the way we pay for it is to lock up research behind a paywall. But "publishing a PDF" is just not a very hard problem to solve at all. That isn't the difficult problem that Elsevier is solving. They are solving the difficult problem of filtering out which academics to hire.
- dariosalvi78 4y ago
  Yes, thanks to the hard work of unpaid editors and reviewers. Excellent business model.
mr_gibbins 4y ago
I favour a centralised approach for record-keeping, but a decentralised approach for paper storage, if that makes any sense. E.g. if I were Emperor and could tear it all down and start again, we'd have either some kind of peer-to-peer network that maintained the paper bodies, and a centralised, institution-funded library of links (like SCOPUS/WoK/Google Scholar/ResearchGate but singular and funded by institution subscription) that is a central go-to for finding papers. Then the links from that link library go to the P2P solution. For P2P, along the lines of Napster/TPB - torrents essentially, with nodes hosted by volunteers, universities etc. We could potentially host copies of our own papers instead - I do, and be damned to the copyright etc - but as a sibling comment suggests, this is going to be unreliable and not sustainable in the long-term as sites die etc. In terms of centralised tools, Google are doing a good job with Scholar but issues I've found are an absence of many older papers (pre-60s is a nightmare to find) and of course Google being Google, they're apt to set light to it all on a whim. They aren't reliable long-term custodians.
- mr_gibbins 4y ago
  I just want to add that this wouldn't preclude conferences and journals either - these can continue to exist under this model, but their research output gets added to the central link library and the torrent added to P2P. Attendees to conferences already pay fees - these can remain, which keeps conferences economically viable - and many journals charge too, and can keep the peer-review up so when a paper does hit the P2P solution it's tagged as coming from a particular journal and therefore is worthy of trust. Papers <- Journals <- P2P/library.
- ynbkc 4y ago
  Technology can shift the costs and mentality around record keeping. This is exciting and certainly part of the story. A specific concern about distributed / decentralized storage and network technology —- it shifts. When it does, it is not as simple as one centralized org doing an upgrade or migration or transition. So WRT decentralized tech, what will it take to keep it accessible and maintained under realistic futures? For long-term archival, technology choices are insufficient. They matter, like I said above, in the sense they shape the usage patterns and benefits and costs. But for permanence (or something approaching it), decades-long sustained support and resources are needed. Some options include: a government program, a governmental funding stream, or some kind endowment. All can ensure a stream of resources into the future, with various tradeoffs. Are there better alternatives? (What exists now at the US federal level? / What combination of organizations might make an endowment happen?) Volunteers are nice supplements to institutional support, but cannot be expected to be the backbone. What is the Library of Congress doing in this area? The National Archives? Presidential libraries? Those old ’boring’ agencies and institutions tend to have a good number of folks that work towards better ways. It may be slow, but when the shift happens, it isn’t subject to the whims of capital markets or herd-following investors.
floppydisc 4y ago
Even further. Can we ditch the goddamn pdf format. It's such a stupid limit to put on papers. I hope the future of journals and articles will become interactive much like Jupyter Notebooks. Jupyter Journal/Article pls.
- bondarchuk 4y ago
  A pdf is basically a digital sheet of paper and I like that. Download a pdf, you have it, you can print it (or not), and you can still look at it 50 years later. Download an interactive journal article: good luck downloading it in the first place. You can't print it. 10 years later you won't be able to open it.
- ynbkc 4y ago
  > Can we ditch the <deity-referencing-expletive> pdf format. It's such a stupid limit to put on papers. I hope the future of journals and articles will become interactive much like Jupyter Notebooks. Jupyter Journal/Article pls. How do you want this change to come about? Are you promoting a mandate? Incentives? A change in expectations? Better technologies or formats? Something else?
apepe 4y ago
The report seems to be mostly concerned with the market economy nature of scientific publishing, which is fair. That said, I find that obsession with publisher profit margins and boycotts is not constructive. On the one hand, the important roles of journals (evaluation, archival, dissemination, etc) come at a cost (and are crucial to science). Running a journal costs time and money. That money must come from somewhere. Publishers don't have to be for profit, but if they are, they will naturally attempt to maximize margins. That is just capitalism. But, it doesn't have to be that way. Alternative, non-capitalistic business models for publishing science are possible. They should emerge and compete with for-profit models (1). On the other hand, boycotts and illegal solutions (e.g. Sci-hub) are non constructive simply because they offer no solution. Sci-hub is made of 88 million published articles, "published", indeed, by those same publishers it is fighting against. What is the end goal? I personally support an open, innovative, and transparent publishing infrastructure, but one that is sustainable in the long term and solution-driven. My two cents! (1) Note: just being non-profit is not enough, if you don't have a scalable and sustainable solution. Also... if you are non-profit and your business plan is to be funded by charitable foundations created by billionaires via capitalistic means, what is the whole point of changing the system?

158 points by panic 4y ago

Seems like this should really link to the .pdf of the paper named in the title of the post. Instead, it's a link to a download page with several files and it's not immediately obvious that the paper is the focus of this post. That said, a quick skim of the paper shows a breakdown of the market and profit margins of the big publishers of academic research (Elsevier et. al.) and how detrimental these parasites are. No big surprise to this audience, but nice to see the research.

jltsiren 4y ago
> Seems like this should really link to the .pdf of the paper named in the title of the post. Instead, it's a link to a download page with several files and it's not immediately obvious that the paper is the focus of this post. That's the standard practice in the academia. Instead of linking directly to the pdf, you link to a landing page that shows the context the article was published in. You can then use the reputation of the publication venue to judge whether the article is what it claims to be and whether it's worth skimming/reading.

ketzu 4y ago

Hm... I mostly read the introduction and have little interest in the rest of the work, as the introduction was a massive letdown. Especially the section on parasites of academic research. (Not only but partially because of the aggressive wording, making it read as an opinion piece masquerading as semi-scientific work.) The analysis mentions the prestige of the journals as a (figurative) side note, but personally I believe that is the main part they sell to authors. It is also the reason why breaking the stranglehold is so hard and why the "just put it online" proposals/solutions I heard so often over the years didn't just magically dissolve publishers The other part is the failure of an analysis in spoilage of public money. Comparing the margins to "giants like Google, Apple or Amazon" is meaningless, unless there is a reason to assume those giants have large margins for some reasons. First google result on high profit margin companies [1] goes from 42.9% up to 55% for the top 10, so even in a larger context the up to "close to 40%" is quite high. Although I am not sure how many of those top 10 are monopolies, which is implied by the conclusion from the 40%. They also imply publishers don't really do anything anymore, while discussing those high margins. So what are they spending those 60% on? Don't get me wrong, I am not a fan of expensive publishing and subscribing for scientific journals and I think every author should use their rights to publish their works on arxiv and their personal and university website. I think the current system is a waste of time for many scientists in many ways (god did I hate rewriting the same paper for multiple conference tempaltes/lengths because of minor issue-rejections) and to some degree also money! I was in the "favorable" situation of not having to care about my scientific career in the final years of my phd, so I could publish in places without much regards to their prestige. But I believe the discourse does need a different direction. The later sections might address these issues and some have already been put into action. Journals have a 'monopoly' on Prestige: Scientist hurt themselves by not going for reputable journals. Big funding agencies must require open publications or arxiv use or whatever to force journals to make exceptions on copyright transfer and scientists from being too lazy to use their rights to make their papers available. (Something I heard from many researchers.) Some copyright transfers already have exceptions because US public funding requires something similar to this (at least that is what I got from reading the copyright form, I never worked with US public funding). So there is leverage that works. If you want me to hate publishers for wasting public money, don't just tell me their profit margin is oh-so-high and they don't do anything because they no longer perform lectoring and type checking. Tell me what they do do with the remaining money and then, if you can, convince me that it is not worth anything or why it should not be handled by a private institution. [1] https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry-trends/industries-highest-profit-margin/ https://www.ibisworld.com/united-states/industry-trends/indu... edit: after reading some more, especially the recommendations, I still feel mostly let down. The recommendations seem to me, to consist mostly of wishful thinking and pushing on the wrong end or simplified so much that they become worthless. If you bury the important parts in the middle of a sea of unhelpful ones, they will get lost. The state of things did not just happen to be that way because people hate open knowledge. Project based positions and time limited contracts are a huge problem created through the whole structure of academia and its financing and will not be changed by "try to create more long term positions". Even the good recommendations suffer from these problems. E.g. "For universities, research institutions, research funders, demand the results of research to be published in diamond open-access journals." I believe only one of those groups has the actual power to demand this in a meaningful way. Finally the one recommendation I hate the most: "For internet service providers who are forced to block Sci-Hub, block in return the publishers who have sued Sci-Hub" no please don't. I believe ISPs should only restrict access when required to by law or courts and not insert their personal feelings about what those laws should be. But especially not as retalliation for lawsuits.

pessimizer 4y ago
> So what are they spending those 60% on? Salaries.
- Ultimatt 4y ago
  Share holder dividends. RELX is 2.21% Not sure why everyone forgot capitalism in this.
  - ketzu 4y ago
    I don't know much about accounting, but as far as I know, dividends are not expenses in any way and therefore are part of the profit margin, not the remaining 60%.
- ketzu 4y ago
  Unfortunately, for my point of understanding what journals do provide this is unhelpful, as salaries could still be spent on useful things. I belive that blog posts like this focus on the wrong part to be convincing: What do journals provide and why do they have expenses that are this high? If we ran journals as non profits, should we expect cost to come down by the 27-39% (for the three publishers chosen in the blog post)? If they want to be convincing for me, I believe they should focus on those remaining 61-73%, and why I, as a reader, should believe a different organization would reduce that in a meaningful way and how that should be financed. Making researchers do even more of the jounral busywork is a bad solution as well, even though it provides implicit financing, as it wastes even more time of researchers. Not that I actually need convincing that an open knowledge model is better, I just prefer hearing good arguments on my side instead of infinite repeating of bad ones.

sour-taste 4y ago

At work we're starting a project that can literally reduce deaths (if it goes well, if people use it etc). It's a well studied field but half the papers are behind paywalls for journals we don't pay for. We pay for some of these journals but not all. I recognize people may not have a lot of sympathy in this case since my employer can just pay, but for, say, small startups trying to build on top of research these paywalls can be detrimental. In some cases crippling. I legitimately feel it slows the pace of human innovation: what's the point of doing research if only other researchers can view it? Don't you need industry to also build on top of the research? Sometimes people complain that if public money paid for the research then it should be freely available. I think that's only a partial solution. While researchers are judged by which journals they get their research into this will stay a problem. We need to develop alternative ways of measuring research significance divorced for big name journals.

anothernewdude 4y ago

I seriously think that research that isn't openly published should be viewed with more suspicion.

photochemsyn 4y ago

The real issue for the publishers isn't a few people on the web linking to archived versions of papers published in their journals, it's when major institutions start dropping subscriptions, which likely add up to tens of thousands of dollars per publisher per university. Any decent research institution's library will have archived paper copies of journals bound into books dating back 100 years or more, and that's basically the model for the future as well. Going 100% digital isn't such a great idea, due to bitrot and so on, it's still best to have paper archives stored somewhere. Then, someone has to pay for the print runs on real paper, the work of organizing and publishing each issue, etc. So, how much does that cost per issue, what's the average size of a print run, how many staff have to be paid full time to keep the journals coming off the presses, what kind of profit margins are the publishers extracting from the copyrights, etc., how much do those glossy images on high-quality paper suitable for archiving for decades really cost, etc. The overall benefits to human civilization of having all the information in research articles available to anyone with a terminal, however, that seems to outweight the other considerations. Maybe some kind of state-subsidized publication system is the answer? It's hardly a competitive market after all.

hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
Bitrot? You talk as if it’s an unsolveable problem..
- foobarbecue 4y ago
  Indeed. Store it all on some high-to-low blu-ray, and the media is good for 10000 years. Way less rot than paper.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    Until you don't have a machine that can easily read that media. I thought a bit like this until I married a historian and learned a bit more about how archives work. I assumed that digitizing everything would be a huge boon for the maintainability of the archive. But after now speaking with a bunch of archivists it seems like digital archives have a lot more problems than I originally expected and are way more underfunded than I expected.

2Gkashmiri 4y ago

Journal pricing DOES NOT MAKE SENSE to third world countries. That is why scihub is a gift. Last week I came across some random weird article that had a jounrla doi. $40 I was told. Fine but in India, minimum wage is ₹500 and $40 is ₹3360 which is like 7 days of minimum wage for a single article. Absurd. We have "universities" paying through the nose for a "subscription" but as a commoner who is not an academic and would like access to 'something', this is bad. And the argument of "poor authors" doest even come up in this discussion so I am all for violating the "intellectual property of publishers", regardless of that making me a criminal or not. Sue my pauper ass. Scihub is magic. Doi paste, boom. Read.

dartharva 4y ago
Completely agree with your assessment, but "minimum wage" doesn't mean the same thing in India as it does in the West - minimum-wage earners are not typically students here.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  minimum wage is just an example. you pay $40 for what? 5 hours of minimum wage work time while in india that is 7 days? cost of "admission", that sort of thing. this is just a reference point. Sure, any student who wants to do research "probably" already has access to "some" journals through their universities who pay through the nose for "institutional subscription", again, money that these third world institutions would rather use for actual work, as opposed to paying for elsevier. If instead of paying for a subscription, the university funds the research of a poor student? would that make more sense?
  - dartharva 4y ago
    Yeah, like I said I completely agree. In fact it's not even convenient to wade through half a dozen publisher portals trying to find what you're looking for - my high-tier college had a subscription to all those journals but I still found myself using Sci-hub more often than not because of its sheer ease-of-use.
4y ago

acomjean 4y ago

I get added to paper as a supporting author for the work our group does. We’re NIH (national institute of Health) funded so anything we publish has to be public and free. Which is great. Pubmed is pretty great. I get that people hate paying for non free journal articles and they are way to expensive. Even if you have access through your institution the process is clunky and terrible. The review process has given us good feedback. Of course my bosses are on the hook have to review others. even though our articles are free to read, the journals still make money as we have to pay the journals for the free access.

mikewarot 4y ago

We need to nationalize Elsevier and the other big publishers. Then we can make the accumulated knowledge of mankind available to all for free. After all, tax money funded almost all of the research anyway.

whatyesaid 4y ago
Is there any history of companies that can easily move internationally being nationalised? Because it's not some national physical infrastructure like railways or electrical grids. After all their operations are international and detached from their actual countries. One interesting line would be to amend copyright laws, such that all publicly funded research (government grants or accredited universities) no longer has any copyright applicable, ex post facto. Private companies and private research institutions would still have copyright protection if they really want it (most I've read don't, I think they'd patent rather than charge for access). Then sites like SciHub can not be blocked and even better ones can be built (UX wise) that rely on open source, donations for hosting etc without fear of extradition or anything. It could start out in one country and expand as others catch up in legislation. I wonder how the response would be though from publishers. But realistically, if the public was informed that individual institutions are paying millions for simply prestige where journal editors are unpaid yet they make billions in net profit annually, funded by their tution fees and taxpayer money, I think people wouldn't stand for this. Especially as we've gone all digital, these publishers are selling journal names.
- bmelton 4y ago
  I don't know the full history of asset forfeiture, but of the two portable franchises I can remember that were being threatened with seizure under eminent domain, both of them easily sidestepped it by ... moving. The first was the Baltimore Colts. After 6 losing seasons and extremely questionable management by owner Jim Irsay, attendance plummeted. Irsay had been considering moving the franchise in a bid to try and get financing for a newer, better stadium, and in exchange Baltimore threatened eminent domain seizure, and easily passed the measure in the legislature. Colts moved to Indianapolis before the seizure could become effective and left (literally) overnight. The other was also in Maryland. The Netflix show House of Cards, which is of course "set" in DC, filmed quite a bit in neighboring locales of Virginia and Maryland because of DC's size and weird shape. The show was trying to angle for more tax breaks for filming, and the state responded with threat of seizure. The show briefly quit filming in Maryland in lieu of VA and DC scenes before the measure died in the general assembly. There was another, relating to the LA Raiders, but I know that the California Supreme Court ultimately ruled against the state's efforts (despite finding that providing sporting entertainment was a legitimate function of government) and that's about all I know of that one.

matrix_overload 4y ago

As much as I hate the current situation with academic publishers, they have one very valid point - prioritization. They impose an artificial bottleneck on how many articles can get published, so "published in XXX" means "one of the top X papers in the area according to a reasonable metric". We have all surely noticed how journalism turned to shit when we moved from printed physical copies (with bandwidth limit) to limitless clickbait-ridden "portals". Real decent journalism just cannot compete for readers' attention anymore. There could be a reasonable middle ground - like mandated free access to individuals, or free access after a 3-year period or so, but completely killing the publishers would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

nine_k 4y ago
A publisher per se may be not needed. Upload some PDF. But a curator and a reviewer are pretty important roles. One for selecting and surfacing the important and high-quality, the other fir checking soundness and weeding out poorly done stuff. Those are the actual paid services of, say, Elsevier. The rest us cruft and rent-seeking. Now the question: how well are these services rendered by the publishers? Can this be done more efficiently, with higher quality? If so, how? Are there examples?
- signaru 4y ago
  One problem is poorly done reviews. Especially since many reviewers are not being paid anything for their time and have the incentive to ward off competing researchers while being protected by anonymity. It seems hopeless since who else would the publisher go to to assess the quality of supposedly new pursuits of expertise knowledge? I've had experienced many strawman rejections back in the day that I just stopped trusting the publishing system. I'd rather just upload a PDF and let the readers judge its credibility and let (positive) citations be the benchmark instead on trusting a handful of elite critics with unclear incentives.
  - UncleMeat 4y ago
    And, as you say, the expensive publishing houses don't do anything to ensure high quality reviews. In grad school I had a paper rejected by a prestigious outlet because one reviewer thought that the experimental setup I used was too difficult and therefore they didn't trust that I was being honest about my results. They stopped just a step short of calling me a fraud. I was baffled that this was accepted by the publisher. It was only later when I was tasked with performing reviews that I realized that almost exactly zero work is done by the publishers. It is just "well there's one Strong Reject so see-ya."

pelasaco 4y ago

January, 11, 2013 is the 10th years anniversary of Aaron Schwartz's death[1] and there's still a long way to get rid of such parasites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._Aaron_Swartz_case https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#United_States_v._...

dredmorbius 4y ago
ITYM 2023, for the anniversary.
- pelasaco 4y ago
  yes, you are right. Unfortunately, I cannot edit my post anymore :(
  - dredmorbius 4y ago
    No worries.

lacker 4y ago

Scientific publishers are basically the outsourced HR department of universities. Modern academic fields are too sprawling for professors to understand everything that's going on in their field. The members of a hiring committee or even a tenure committee often just don't really understand the work of the people they are evaluating. So they have to rely on journals, and metrics like how many popular publications people have. It's a valuable service to do this evaluation work for academics. It's just a shame that the way we pay for it is to lock up research behind a paywall. But "publishing a PDF" is just not a very hard problem to solve at all. That isn't the difficult problem that Elsevier is solving. They are solving the difficult problem of filtering out which academics to hire.

dariosalvi78 4y ago
Yes, thanks to the hard work of unpaid editors and reviewers. Excellent business model.

mr_gibbins 4y ago

I favour a centralised approach for record-keeping, but a decentralised approach for paper storage, if that makes any sense. E.g. if I were Emperor and could tear it all down and start again, we'd have either some kind of peer-to-peer network that maintained the paper bodies, and a centralised, institution-funded library of links (like SCOPUS/WoK/Google Scholar/ResearchGate but singular and funded by institution subscription) that is a central go-to for finding papers. Then the links from that link library go to the P2P solution. For P2P, along the lines of Napster/TPB - torrents essentially, with nodes hosted by volunteers, universities etc. We could potentially host copies of our own papers instead - I do, and be damned to the copyright etc - but as a sibling comment suggests, this is going to be unreliable and not sustainable in the long-term as sites die etc. In terms of centralised tools, Google are doing a good job with Scholar but issues I've found are an absence of many older papers (pre-60s is a nightmare to find) and of course Google being Google, they're apt to set light to it all on a whim. They aren't reliable long-term custodians.

mr_gibbins 4y ago
I just want to add that this wouldn't preclude conferences and journals either - these can continue to exist under this model, but their research output gets added to the central link library and the torrent added to P2P. Attendees to conferences already pay fees - these can remain, which keeps conferences economically viable - and many journals charge too, and can keep the peer-review up so when a paper does hit the P2P solution it's tagged as coming from a particular journal and therefore is worthy of trust. Papers <- Journals <- P2P/library.
ynbkc 4y ago
Technology can shift the costs and mentality around record keeping. This is exciting and certainly part of the story. A specific concern about distributed / decentralized storage and network technology —- it shifts. When it does, it is not as simple as one centralized org doing an upgrade or migration or transition. So WRT decentralized tech, what will it take to keep it accessible and maintained under realistic futures? For long-term archival, technology choices are insufficient. They matter, like I said above, in the sense they shape the usage patterns and benefits and costs. But for permanence (or something approaching it), decades-long sustained support and resources are needed. Some options include: a government program, a governmental funding stream, or some kind endowment. All can ensure a stream of resources into the future, with various tradeoffs. Are there better alternatives? (What exists now at the US federal level? / What combination of organizations might make an endowment happen?) Volunteers are nice supplements to institutional support, but cannot be expected to be the backbone. What is the Library of Congress doing in this area? The National Archives? Presidential libraries? Those old ’boring’ agencies and institutions tend to have a good number of folks that work towards better ways. It may be slow, but when the shift happens, it isn’t subject to the whims of capital markets or herd-following investors.

floppydisc 4y ago

Even further. Can we ditch the goddamn pdf format. It's such a stupid limit to put on papers. I hope the future of journals and articles will become interactive much like Jupyter Notebooks. Jupyter Journal/Article pls.

bondarchuk 4y ago
A pdf is basically a digital sheet of paper and I like that. Download a pdf, you have it, you can print it (or not), and you can still look at it 50 years later. Download an interactive journal article: good luck downloading it in the first place. You can't print it. 10 years later you won't be able to open it.
ynbkc 4y ago
> Can we ditch the <deity-referencing-expletive> pdf format. It's such a stupid limit to put on papers. I hope the future of journals and articles will become interactive much like Jupyter Notebooks. Jupyter Journal/Article pls. How do you want this change to come about? Are you promoting a mandate? Incentives? A change in expectations? Better technologies or formats? Something else?

apepe 4y ago

The report seems to be mostly concerned with the market economy nature of scientific publishing, which is fair. That said, I find that obsession with publisher profit margins and boycotts is not constructive. On the one hand, the important roles of journals (evaluation, archival, dissemination, etc) come at a cost (and are crucial to science). Running a journal costs time and money. That money must come from somewhere. Publishers don't have to be for profit, but if they are, they will naturally attempt to maximize margins. That is just capitalism. But, it doesn't have to be that way. Alternative, non-capitalistic business models for publishing science are possible. They should emerge and compete with for-profit models (1). On the other hand, boycotts and illegal solutions (e.g. Sci-hub) are non constructive simply because they offer no solution. Sci-hub is made of 88 million published articles, "published", indeed, by those same publishers it is fighting against. What is the end goal? I personally support an open, innovative, and transparent publishing infrastructure, but one that is sustainable in the long term and solution-driven. My two cents! (1) Note: just being non-profit is not enough, if you don't have a scalable and sustainable solution. Also... if you are non-profit and your business plan is to be funded by charitable foundations created by billionaires via capitalistic means, what is the whole point of changing the system?