Elsevier is far from the only offender in the academic publishing space. This price gouging is rampant, and it affects everyone you could call a "customer." The only variable is who gets stuck with the bill.
When I was in grad school, I easily went through 1000+ articles via my institution's library, most of which were dead ends. My school even had to drop the subscription of a journal I was actively using because the price was unaffordable.
For unaffiliated readers, such as those doing industry R&D or individuals researching a medical condition, there are no circumstances under which $30-$50 price per article is affordable, let alone justifiable. This is more expensive than many books, and it's just to read a 10-page PDF which may or may not even provide sufficient context to answer the reader's question. Sci-hub is a literal life-saver for this audience.
"Open access" alleviates the price problem for the reader, but just pushes another unaffordable burden onto the researcher. My group could not afford the multi-thousand dollar "processing charge," and those that could were paying for it with taxpayer money anyway.
So no matter what, someone is getting gouged, be it the reader, the University, the PI, or the public. Prices need to come down by at least an order of magnitude before I would even consider the for-profit academic publishing industry to be anything other than a predatory anachronism.
What I read in this is that sci-hub is only a third of the solution of cutting out the middle man. The another third is a credible place for researchers to publish to. The current publishers are trying to retain a dead model. We don't really need a publisher anymore. What they do provide that I haven't seed a good solution for is visibility among peers.
Sci-hub is great to grab a paper when you already know the DOI. If you are looking for papers in a specific field you will usually end up on a publisher's site using their search engine.
If researchers could easily browse papers relevant to them I think they would dump publishers all together. The expense of prestige can't hold up over time against a more efficient model that costs way less.
They don't provide a good solution for filtered/ranked paper discovery, one where someone else sorts the papers so you have to skim through less garbage. For paper discovery the main problem is the overabundance of noise, not the ability to find everything (which is indeed solved already). There are excellent papers both on Arxiv as well as in (for example) NeurIPS proceedings, and there is is trash both on Arxiv as well as in NeurIPS proceedings; but the signal-to-noise ratio is vastly different. And the effect of the 25%-ish acceptance rate in many publication venues is not just cutting out 75% of the papers, because for each rejected paper there's probably two (or a dozen?) more which don't even get submitted there because the authors know it'll get rejected, so such a filter removes 90% or more of papers in a manner that's correlated (definitely imperfectly, but still meaningfully) to whether you'd want to read or skim them.
> If researchers could easily browse papers relevant to them I think they would dump publishers all together. The expense of prestige can't hold up over time against a more efficient model that costs way less.
arXiv is an emerging solution. The peer review bit is missing.
It would be good if arxiv somehow standardised how to capture methodology. E.g. population size, sample size, sample selection method, computed values to demonstrate outcome, etc etc, to make review as easy as possible. And then if the computed values are successfully challenged, they can be updated and the trust in the paper's conclusions adjusted.
Also missing are viable costs. If arXiv didn't have the support of some nonprofit societies and grants from foundations, it would be in significant trouble.
The closest analogy I can think of is a highway billboard. Say there’s a really good spot with lots of traffic, and you want drivers to see your ad. The billboard company provides a venue for you to put up the ad, and takes care of the printing and real estate. Other than that, the rest of the process of making that ad poster is up to you, your company and any partners you rely on.
The publisher is like the billboard company in that they provide the venue, maybe with good visibility, handle the printing and hosting, and connect you with unpaid peer reviewers.
The only one making money off of all this is the publisher. The benefit you get is that someone else gets to read your work, and maybe you got a “good billboard spot” to get the most impact.
The extra part of this is that academic researchers are a captive market, similar to users who have only one ISP to choose from like Comcast. You have to publish on That Specific Billboard or you risk career suicide. If you were the billboard owner, you have a strong incentive to charge outrageous prices because you know that your customers rely on you, and have nowhere else to go.
I wonder how much of the journal bureaucracy, such as peer-review, actually adds value. Do we really need vetted journals? Are pre-print upload sites with the ability to comment good enough?
Peer reviewers are fellow academics who are not paid. Peer review does not add any cost to publishing. The cost all goes to for-profit companies making record profits.
Peer review absolutely add costs. Finding a reviewer who's qualified, free and willing takes time and effort, and that's increasing by the day. Frankly, I think peer review is doomed. There's now a flood of AI-generated papers that journals need to weed out, and even 99% success is not good enough for peer-reviewers' workload and continued respect. On top of that, natural demographics, the cuts to university funding in the West and the improvement of education in Africa, Asia and South America mean there is a greater and greater proportion of young researchers to experienced, overburdened researchers, and that's just too much load to bear.
As soon as you pay reviewers, you now have to deal with people pretending to be academics and pretending to review a paper just to earn money, which adds additional cost. Not to mention that money can introduce biases even if the reviewer is genuine.
Depending on the discipline, there are plenty of people with PhDs who are adjuncting for low wages. And for other disciplines, plenty of people with PhDs who work in industry. And plenty of people without PhDs who know enough to find errors in papers (I've found conclusion breaking errors in two so far).
Reviewers are paid by not having to pay for reviews of their own papers. To be sure, many reviews are not worth the time to read them, but the good ones have been invaluable to increasing the quality of my work.
The need for a journal in the first place is, in small part, to coordinate peer-review. Eliminate pre-publication peer review and you eliminate, in a small part, the need for a journal.
The fact that a coordinator like a publisher exists isn’t necessarily in dispute. Sometimes it’s necessary to have a 3rd party coordinate reviewers, maintain quality standards, and settle plagiarism disputes. The issue is the price. It’s wholly unreasonable to charge $30 to read a paper, to charge a PI upwards of $2k-$7k to remove the $30 reader charge, or to charge whatever ungodly amount they charge libraries to offer free access to researchers.
Like I said, I’d value the service I get at a factor of 10-20x less than what they charge.
The journals don't actually do peer review. They are really only an expensive distribution network with limited reach due to cost expense on the reader side.
By watching the vintage TV show Miami Vice I learned that many people make a living out of selling an image (one of the cornerstones of Sonny Crockett's policing philosophy). TED comes to mind. Or WEF in Davos. They are all basically just marketing operations. (TED sells the hip/green young futurists and WEF plays the conspiracy angle.) Same with this science stuff here. Of course the professional scientists love the prestige that comes from such a publication, but that's the reason why they are gamed by these publishers in the first place.
This is one case where it’s not just being hip though. Publishing in Nature Science Cell is pretty much a minimum requirement if you want to get tenure track in any top university. I’m out of academia by a few years so not sure if eLife/PLOS Biology is starting to make inroads as acceptable top tier or not. You’re also betting your long term reputation on the reputability of the journal. The best bet is that more of the top scientists commit to only publishing in fully open journals and bury NSC.
Of course national politics would be represented by the media as vicious and high-stakes: the media needs vicious and high-stakes messages to keep up viewership as its lifeline. Not even academics are interested in academic politics beyond their own immediate purview of the next publication or deadline.
Students are shackled to dead-end projects, uprooted from their communities by careerist mentors, and generally fucked over - in at least one case, literally - by their PIs. Scooping - having work similar to yours get published by another party - is a pervasive enough fear that reviewers can block publications to guard their own moats.
Publication venues choose arbitrary selectiveness criteria, e.g. conference acceptance rates around 24.3%, to maintain an aura of high quality despite most papers being useless apart from bolstering citation metrics.
Large projects that require many person-years of effort can only be done by already-established hype-leading "paper mill" labs where several grad students rotate who gets first author credit - the main measure for graduating.
All of this accumulates into student depression and academic burnout that leaves academics alienated from each other, let alone other departments.
As my advisor put it, academia is a pyramid scheme.
I appreciate your strife, but at the same time this doesn’t really speak to your original assertion, that academic politics are particularly “vicious”. Moreover, you haven’t linked the purported viciousness to the stakes being low. Actually, your post seems to argue the opposite; that academics hold in their hands the lives and futures of students. How are the stakes low?
I’m not sure that strife is something to “appreciate,” but, thanks(?)
Peer-to-peer politics is vicious because of the incentive to compete for citations in a publish-or-perish milieu were big players block little players with few alternatives apart from favor currying.
Mentor-mentee politics is vicious because the institutional power dynamics are skewed overwhelmingly towards the former with little recourse for the latter.
The stakes - publications read by and impacting very small fractions of very small research fields and whose individual contributions are further diluted by the modern diarrhea of least-publishable units - are low.
Again, you are making conclusory statements. You haven’t brought anything to back your statements.
The original claim was that:
"Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."
First, you haven’t shown academic politics are more vicious and bitter than other forms of politics, let alone the most. I’ve already shown that national politics in America is violent in another thread, so to show that academic politics is a more vicious form, I think you need to demonstrate it is at least as violent. Your examples of “viciousness” in academia seem more like pettiness. Maybe you could argue it’s more bitter, but you’re not arguing that.
The second part of your original claim was that the politics are this way because the stakes are low. Insofar that you think the stakes are low, you still haven’t linked the two casually. There are other alternative explanations for viciousness, like the stakes being high, a position which you’ve accidentally argued in your prior post.
Finally, I believe your perspective is colored by your former status as a PhD student; there’s a lot more to academic politics than paper politics, and I understand maybe you don’t have the full picture.
Nonetheless, you still should have the tools to argue your position cogently, and you haven’t yet provided such an argument. Can you make a better one?
The statement isn't mine [1] and employs the literary device of hyperbole (noun - extravagant exaggeration) in the use of "most."
Definitions of key words from the original statement from Merriam-Webster:
- politics (noun) - ...; the art or science concerned with winning and holding control over a government; political actions, practices, or policies
- vicious (adjective) - dangerously aggressive; marked by violence or ferocity
- bitter (adjective) - ...; distasteful or distressing to the mind
- stake (noun) - ...; something that is staked for gain or loss
The primary _stake_ (something gained or lost) in academics is not the individual academics' wellbeing, but publication and research output, which is often only relevant to very few within siloed fields.
The politics (actions, practices, policies) behind this process - e.g. papers that receive positive reviews but are rejected to protect research moats, or otherwise receive undeservedly _vicious_ (aggressive) comments because peer review operates on a volunteer system that overworks at best and nepotistically gatkeeps at worst - are _bitter_ (distressing to the mind) to the authors who receive mixed feedback as the process is out of their locus of control, yet it is the measure by which academics advance (e.g. graduation, promotion).
In (anti-)academic fashion, I'll bow out of this conversation because the stakes are so low.
> The statement isn't mine [1] and employs the literary device of hyperbole (noun - extravagant exaggeration) in the use of "most."
Even still, you said you vibed with it, and then credulously defended its essence. You could have easily noted that you were just being cheeky, but instead you launched into a defense of the core idea of the quote. So you're a little late to disavow it.
> The primary _stake_ (something gained or lost) in academics is not the individual academics' wellbeing, but publication and research output, which is often only relevant to very few within siloed fields.
You've identified low stakes, but as I said earlier, your position as a Ph.D. student has precluded you from high stakes discussions that occur in academia. Just because you're only familiar with the low stakes, does not mean there aren't high stake discussions and politics surrounding those that occur in academia. In many cases, the stakes can be as high as the continued longevity of institutions that have existed for over 100 years, with hundreds of millions to billions in assets, that serve as a homes and communities to tens of thousands of people, and are cornerstones of their local communities. Those seem like high stakes to me.
> or otherwise receive undeservedly _vicious_ (aggressive)
The definition you provided is "dangerously aggressive; marked by violence or ferocity". You can't just leave out key aspects of the definition to make it fit your narrative (and again, that's all your providing here is a narrative, no proof or evidence). How is anything you've noted "dangerous"? How is it "marked by violence or ferocity"?
> are _bitter_ (distressing to the mind) to the authors who receive mixed feedback as the process is out of their locus of control
To me, this really just gives the impression that you couldn't make it in academia. Not a dig, not everyone can. Congrats on your Ph.D., sounds like you had a bad experience, but that's not a reason to smear all academics with smarmy quips you can't substantiate.
> The definition you provided is "dangerously aggressive; marked by violence or ferocity". You can't just leave out key aspects of the definition to make it fit your narrative (and again, that's all your providing here is a narrative, no proof or evidence). How is anything you've noted "dangerous"? How is it "marked by violence or ferocity"?
As said in an earlier response, dangerous aggression comes in the form of the mentor-mentee power imbalance that uproots and fucks (again, in one case I personally knew of, literally) over students. Here are some sources - evidence in papers - to fit this definition [1,2,3,4,5], assuming mental distress counts as dangerous.
> ... the stakes can be as high as...
Yet very little of this trickles into broader societal impact - the stakes implied by the original quip. The institutional gatekeeping discussed in TFA is complicit in this lowering of stakes.
> To me, this really just gives the impression that you couldn't make it in academia.
Thanks for the ad hominem. I had the most first- and only-author publications in my group, which was enough for me to bow out.
> As said in an earlier response, dangerous aggression comes in the form of the mentor-mentee power imbalance that uproots and fucks (again, in one case I personally knew of, literally) over students. Here are some sources - evidence in papers - to fit this definition [1,2,3,4,5], assuming mental distress counts as dangerous.
You seem to be arguing again that the stakes are quite high. From one of your links: "increasing quantitative evidence that there is a mental health crisis in doctoral education". A mental health crisis in the upper ranks of the education system sounds high stakes with societal implications to me.
> Yet very little of this trickles into broader societal impact - the stakes implied by the original quip. The institutional gatekeeping discussed in TFA is complicit in this lowering of stakes.
That's a pretty tough position to argue, given that more than any other nation, people from around the world come to America for higher learning. We have the best universities in the world. Student loans are national issue in front of the Supreme Court right now, due to an executive action from POTUS. Discussions related to setting tuition are definitely part of vigorous political discourse in academic departments. I realize you've never been a part of those discussions, so you wouldn't know, but again, that doesn't mean they aren't happening.
>Thanks for the ad hominem.
I mean, this discussion started with a non-argument ad hominem against all of academia, suggesting academics are by and large petty and vicious, which seems to be largely based on your unstated personal experience in your PhD program. I think it's a bit late to preclude ad hominem arguments.
> I had the most first- and only-author publications in my group, which was enough for me to bow out.
It's great that you had publications, but that's pretty much the entry point for academia and earning a Ph.D., which is an entry-level rank in terms of academia generally. Making it in academia means finding success especially when the process is out of your locus of control. That's the whole thing. If that makes you uncomfortable or bitter, then you're not cut out to be an academic, and that's fine. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. But I'm saying that maybe actually you're the bitter one in all of this, not academics writ large.
> You seem to be arguing again that the stakes are quite high.
The sources I provided regarding mental health are barely within the last decade. The original quote is from several decades ago. The stakes referred to refer to research output and outcomes, not researchers. Any politics or discussion on mental health is belated band-aiding that only concerns higher-ups when output is at stake.
> We have the best universities in the world. Student loans are national issue in front of the Supreme Court right now,
"Best" is a useless superlative when without an adjective. Ironically, US institutions are definitely the "best" at indebting their students.
> I realize you've never been a part of those discussions, so you wouldn't know...
Another ad hominem and appeal to an authority (yours) that you haven't disclosed.
> I mean, this discussion started with a non-argument ad hominem against all of academia...
"Ad hominem" = "to the person." Politics involve but are not people. The only remarks "to the person" have been yours to me.
I thought you were done with this discussion two posts ago.
> The original quote is from several decades ago.
Yet you are saying it is relevant today. I’m not concerned with the original quote; I’m concerned with your endorsement of it.
> "Best" is a useless superlative when without an adjective. Ironically, US institutions are definitely the "best" at indebting their students.
Is it now your argument that the US universities aren’t ranked at the top in the world?
Either way, you’ve again argued the stakes are high, as student debt is a national, generational problem in the US.
> Another ad hominem and appeal to an authority (yours) that you haven't disclosed.
Since you haven’t actually argued a consistent, coherent position, we are left comparing experience to explain your inconsistency. You have brought a lot of your personal baggage to the discussion, relating to your experience and that of your friends. Had you stuck to actual arguments instead of conclusory statements borne from your experience as a PhD student, maybe I would not be focused on your own credentials. But since you have only brought to bear your perspective as a PhD student in order to indict all of academia, your personal perspective is quite relevant. That you have no experience in academia beyond being a student is relevant when you’re making blanket statements as you are.
> "Ad hominem" = "to the person." Politics involve but are not people. The only remarks "to the person" have been yours to me.
That’s not how I see it. This entire conversation you’ve made conclusory statements that people like me are vicious and bitter and petty. I don’t think I’ve said anything even close to as disparaging as that about you. If you are not bringing evidence and arguments to the discussion, how is your position not ad hominem? You are making statements about academics as people. Do you not see how your position could be interpreted in a negative way by the very people you intend to malign?
> Do you not see how your position could be interpreted in a negative way by the very people you intend to malign?
Again, politics aren't people; I can hate the game but not the players [1], who are also human beings with their own lives and issues. How personally you're taking this says more about you than me or the argument, which I'd recommend you reflect on as we both go touch some grass.
The claim was that national politics is less vicious, e.g. personal attacks are less common. I don't know if that's still people's experience, but it was felt to be true at the time.
I feel like this depends on the field. Newer / “hotter” fields (e.g. evo psych) tend to be dominated by rockstars while traditional / staid fields (e.g. linear algebra) have mostly solid and competent practitioners.
It's funded by its members. So they basically pay to meet and promote their business to invited leaders and politicians. I guess you can make an argument that the more exclusive and mythical you can make it, the more likely are businesses to pay to participate.
Honestly if even $1 of public money goes toward research, the work, data, journal, etc should all be public domain. End of story. That should be a basic requirement of taking public funds.
The NIH indeed requires all work published under their grants to be made available open-access. Problem is publishers figured out that meant they could charge EVEN MORE for submissions to be made open access than they charged for standard closed publishing. Wiley charged me $2,975 last year for an accepted submission to Human Brain Mapping.
And why did you pay if i may ask? I would guess it's because if you don't your career will be in trouble because that's what employers value.
The current state of affair isn't a random thing. It's because the global policy of employment in public research and the definition of success is completely stupid and based on metrics (i don't care which metrics, the sole fact that we try to quantify everything just makes this kind of situations possible).
Publish or perish my friend, you've hit the nail on the head. There is not currently a widely accepted avenue for free open publication in neuroscience because the preprint system (and its lack of peer review) are distrusted, and the A-tier journals know their status and can set their prices based on demand. I, on the other hand, am effectively required to show a regular pattern of publishing in A- and B-tier journals to even be considered competitive for a potential tenure-track position, let alone land one and earn tenure.
This is a major reason I am evaluating alternative career options.
They probably paid because, as the grandparent post suggested, taking public funds from NIH imposes a requirement to publish the research results in this manner, so for the research team it's an unavoidable part of the expenses related to the grant - and so it's not the researchers' money nor their decision; NIH defined what they want and so they're paying publishers a significant portion of their funding for that.
Indeed, most likely the question of paying or not wasn't even asked properly and this is just the norm.. In any case my point is that the problem of this capture from some scientific publishers is much deeper than just a problem of how publishing is setup. Its one of the many symptoms of how current research institutions are governed.
I know in the UK, all publicly funded STEM research must be published as open-access.
The problem is in this case, researchers have to pay a further premium to journals (>£4,000 per paper). So this funnels further public funds to the journals
The national Dutch funding agency that effectively funds all research in the Netherlands requires this. Buy considers it sufficient for you to publish in a closed journal and then deposit a copy in an open repository. The French also have a similar system I believe.
I agree to a large extent. At the same time, we have a problem in this country where scientists are paid a pittance for their fundamental work, which downstream is capitalized by corporations, paywalled, patented, and sold for a huge profit.
One thing that many scientists do is start businesses using their research, which serves as an incentive in the face of meager salaries. If not for the prospect of commercializing their work, many people might not even go into the field. In our capitalist system, this is unfortunately how things work.
So if you want to make scientific work all public domain, then as a society we need to make real investments into science to properly fund it. We also need to close the loop, such that large corporations who profit off this publicly funded work are forced to pay back into the system at a proportional rate. No more 0% corporate taxes, which cause money to pool at the top.
I don't see how scientists starting businesses and making the articles public domain are connected.
Having the articles freely available is good for encouraging discovery, communication and learning.
I don't see how that would significantly change the equation for protecting your business, as we assume the article was already available for 30 dollars.
If a 30 dollars fee is the only thing that stops someone from stealing your idea, it is either a bad idea, or your competitors don't realize it's a good one.
I was told onsite at a major pharm research house in California, that "science publishing in Japan is controlled by their mafia" .. with "Reed-Elsevier" as the Dutch version of that. historical note: the Dutch worked with Japan before many other Western nations, long ago.
Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing?
First off, if the only publisher you have a problem with is Elsevier, you have already shown your hand. A half dozen other publishers are more expensive, but you can only name Elsevier. That means you're just repeating a meme that started on forums like this one. So take a moment and ask yourself why any of these publishers shouldn't take the same flak?
The "value" expensive publishers provide is clearly real, as customers are willing to pay for it. And there is clearly no monopoly; dozens of other publishers could make a similar journal at a lower price. Large publishers like Elsevier have thousands of journals, which isn't easy to replicate. But their profit is still in gold toilet territory. So why isn't a competitor able to take their business at lower profit? Answer: Prestige.
Louis Vouitton sells a handbag for $2k. Is it worth $2k? You could say no, that any other bag would be just as useful. But value isn't utility alone. People find that the bag is worth the price because of the prestige that the brand imbues the owner with.
Expensive publishers are still getting business because their customers still find value. Can you do it cheaper? Of course. Can you charge less profit? Of course. But will customers pay for it anyway? Of course. Because they're not paying for utility. They're paying for prestige.
Academic research is addicted to publishing in prestigious journals. Their entire system of grants and research positions is completely dependent on it. They simply have no alternative system. It's the industry dirty secret: prestigious journals are like coca cola with real coca leaf extract. You pay for it largely because you're dependent on it.
Of course, the customers complain about the price, so the question is, why not just buy something cheaper? Because that would defeat the whole point, which is to buy prestige. You can't just pay a kid in high school to run a web server for PDFs and say you have a prestigious journal. You have to have a brand that carries prestige, like that Louis Vouitton bag.
Until academic research no longer depends on prestige, no amount of walk-out stunts or individual universities walking out of deals will change anything. People still buy Louis Vouitton even though there are knockoffs. Because prestige is what they're buying, not a handbag.
> Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing?
Because people can have opinions on industries they don’t work in?
I don’t work in hospitality, and I have never cooked for a living. I can still confidently tell you when my food is burnt. A chef then can crawl out of the kitchen and explain the complicated process which resulted in me getting burnt food and I won’t care a bit.
My tax money paid a researcher to study long years, then my tax money paid for the equipment the researcher used to research and my tax money paid for the researcher’s time too. And then the researcher writes up what they found and pays a third party also from my tax money and that third party does everything in their power to hide the paper away from me. That is burnt food. I don’t have to work in the industry to recognise it.
Nothing wrong with having an opinion, but having a strong opinion ("the solution is so obvious, i can solve this in 5 minutes") about an industry of which you known nothing of the inner workings come across as rather ignorant.
Your example of "I can tell when my food is burnt" is a poor one. Can you tell a quality scientific paper? Do you know what's required to get tenure? To get scientific funding? All of those are relevant as to why the scientific publishing system works as it does today. If you don't know those things, then you don't know how to solve the problem.
Journal publishers don’t weigh in on tenure or grant decisions. While they provide a conduit for materials that impact such things (the researchers papers), they have no say in anything (including, incidentally, sometimes what gets published)
A publisher provided distribution. That’s it. They aren’t even the chef in this analogy: they’re FOH staff.
Journal editors are faculty at academic institutions. They may or may not be paid a small fee by the publisher for their efforts but it’s typically not significant. Reviewers are unpaid volunteers.
Journal publishers historically charged money because they managed the printing and distribution of print journals. Some also facilitated distribution of drafts. That’s it. The bulk of the intellectual labor was done for free by academics.
As you can imagine, in the age of the internet, this entire process can be replaced by a CMS solution hosted in the cloud.
throwawaaarrgh argues that they provide prestige, too.
I agree. Certainly, I can’t see that publishers only provide distribution, as that should be almost trivial to replicate, and lead to a race to the bottom, price-wise, and the entire process would long have been “replaced by a CMS solution hosted in the cloud”.
You are absolutely correct. I have made a tool that suggests the most suitable journal for a particular paper to publish. Fewer than 50% researchers care; they all want to be in Nature, price be damned. Academia is not wrong to say publishers make too much profit, but is entirely unwilling to change the way it works too. And how much is Nature supposed to charge when they need 600 highly qualified people to pick the best handful of papers amongst thousands?
That prestige exists because of its editors and its history in a specific field of study. There’s no “value” being created by the publisher itself in this respect.
I worked in the kitchen and know how the soup is made. If you insist on calling it stone soup, then it's granite - unglamourous, lots of skilled but drudge work to process, but valuable then.
> Your example of "I can tell when my food is burnt" is a poor one. Can you tell a quality scientific paper?
Think of it in these terms: don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. The science isn’t the issue. The money is.
Academic publishing is much like the US healthcare system, bond rating companies and various other interests, industries and organizations in that through quirks of the path of history they find themselves in a position to extract rents either through regulation, historic convention, effective monopoly and/or misplaced incentives.
When the current state is shown to be obviously deficient, these rent seekers among other strategies will say it’s much too complicated and there are you simple solutions. If you dream that there might be you simply don’t understand the problem.
The replication crisis is much worse in fields without open publishing.
Computer science/physics/etc. (arxiv), economics (NBER) and other fields with freely available papers tend to have much better replication numbers than fields that are closed-off.
This is even better when data and code are publicly available.
scite (where I work) makes understanding reproducibility much easier -- we have access to full text articles with agreements from publishers and are able to show you the statements from papers where each reference was used in text with the textual context, section, and a classification, so you can see if newer research indicated a difference in empirical findings, etc. Might be of interest for you is the only reason I'm bringing it up- https://scite.ai/home
Nothing wrong with having an opinion, but having a strong opinion ("the solution is so obvious, i can solve this in 5 minutes") about an industry of which you known nothing of the inner workings come across as rather ignorant.
If I’m paying for the whole thing, it behooves those in the game to either fix it quickly themselves or at least be polite while I’m offering my half baked solution.
> Can you tell a quality scientific paper? Do you know what's required to get tenure? To get scientific funding? All of those are relevant as to why the scientific publishing system works as it does today.
Knowing these things is also not required to be an academic publisher. All you need is cash. You've mistaken the boss for the expert.
Why can't we just move the journals themselves inside the taxpayer-funded sphere?
Set up a few journals like "Physics, presented by the Department of Energy" or "DHHS Intestinal Virus Fanbook", and hire on some editors and curators at a modest GS wage.
Either the editors do a great job and the journals eventually get same pride-of-placement as showing up in an esteemed private publication, or they do a middling job and they're still cheaper than pay-for-play open-access publications.
>Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident,
It's because the outsider's mental model of "academic journals publishing" is dominated by seeing the artifacts of publishing: the pdf files.
With pdf files then driving the intuition about "what I think the publishing industry is", it makes people conclude that Elsevier is just a "glorified pdf server". (E.g. Scihub can host a bunch of pdf files for free... so academic journals hosting pdf files are not doing anything value-added.)
And then to add to the pdf mental model, you have the repeated comments about unpaid volunteer peer reviewers. So the outsiders' intuition follows the same path, if the peer reviewers cost the journal nothing, there is no need for paid academic journals to exist. (E.g. a site like Stackoverflow has unpaid volunteers answering questions and users of that site don't have to pay any subscriptions.)
If one over-simplifies academic journals to "a bunch of pdf files by unpaid peer reviewers" -- then one will always be confused as to why scientists keep submitting their papers to them and why libraries keep paying for subscriptions.
The real issue is journals like Elsevier charge too much money.
This is not true for all fields. Computer science (specifically machine learning) is possibly the most lucrative area to work in right now and comparatively few people publish in journals. Computer vision has been this way for a long time even with journals like IEEE PAMI.
Our equivalent is highly competitive conferences that have sloppy/inconsistent peer review and (as a result of the format) limited submissions. You have to submit a full paper and acceptance rates are low. Researchers plan and structure entire projects around deadlines for big venues. Inconsistent peer review is somewhat made up for by community validation (most of the time, since publishing code is strongly correlated with citations). Really big papers often turn up as preprints first because speed is important (if you wait 6 months to go through review, someone will beat you).
Or you have fields like astrophysics where everyone cross-publishes in Arxiv when they submit to a journal.
It would be pretty interesting if Louis Vuitton items were designed, manufactured, quality controlled, etc entirely by customers who then hand them over to Louis Vuitton to have a logo stamped and have put in a box and sold without any of the proceeds returning to suppliers.
Having said that Shifting the prices to authors with free access for all is generally seen as pretty fair.
Open access publishing has always been expensive and NeuroImage is on the cheaper end and on par with PLOS.
Anticipated publication fees get incorporated into grant budgets and in the grand scheme of a grant budget it's a nothingburger.
Some journals are associated with societies (peer reviewed by members and made available to society members for a very discounted rate or free but non-members pay for access). Many of those also are ad-supported, though.
> It would be pretty interesting if Louis Vuitton items were designed, manufactured, quality controlled, etc entirely by customers who then hand them over to Louis Vuitton to have a logo stamped and have put in a box and sold without any of the proceeds returning to suppliers.
And that Louis Vuitton charged the customers for the right to have their work sold.
> Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing?
It's pretty simple. Most of us here are used to just downloading "preprints" pdfs from arxiv for basically any CS/AI paper. If all papers were available on arxiv or an equivalent website for free and without forms, probably nobody here would care or complain about Elsevier et. al.
Want to in addition to publishing on arxiv, publish on Nature? Sure go ahead.
Want to only read papers after they've been peer reviewed on Nature. Go ahead.
HN is subject to all the trials and tribulations of any social media, it just hides some of it better through excellent moderation and consisting mainly of identical people.
If I compare this to Reddit, there are subreddits for different topics with people of different mindset frequenting those subreddits.
That at least offers you a space to discuss something which might not be popular with most readers.
With HN you if your comment is completely against the thinking of a certain demographic ( identical people as you put it), it's downvoted heavily.
No chance for constructive comments or discussion like on subreddits.
Same issue here, could be a topic that I have 10 years of experience in both academically and professionally. The instant contrarianism without any experiene is quite astounding.
> So take a moment and ask yourself why any of these publishers shouldn't take the same flak?
It's reasonable to focus on one example of a general problem and try to solve the sub-problem first.
> Of course, the customers complain about the price, so the question is, why not just buy something cheaper? Because that would defeat the whole point, which is to buy prestige. You can't just pay a kid in high school to run a web server for PDFs and say you have a prestigious journal. You have to have a brand that carries prestige, like that Louis Vouitton bag.
This is conflating two things. A Louis Vuitton bag is a Veblen good because people pay more for it because paying more for it demonstrates that they have a lot of money. Publishing in an Elsevier journal is not a Veblen good, because the researcher wants the prestige of producing research of sufficient quality to appear in an Elsevier journal. They don't want the prestige of paying a high publication fee.
Anyway, I'm a computer science researcher. Every paper I've ever written is on Arxiv, and most of them also appeared in archival conferences. Paywall journals are an anti-signal for paper quality in my field. I wrote one paper that appeared in a journal, and that publishing/editing process was nothing but a waste of time to get the material into the journal's format. The publisher added nothing. The continued existence of publishers is a historical accident specific to fields that started when they served a purpose (distributing a hard-copy journal) and have lacked respected senior researchers with enough entrepreneurial vim to set up their own open-access alternatives.
The reviewing process and name recognition is the thing keeping those publishers alive. None of that is provided by the publisher, it's provided by the researchers who work inside it. Earlier I wrote "the researcher wants the prestige of producing research of sufficient quality to appear in an Elsevier journal". That's not really true, they want "the prestige of producing research of sufficient quality to [be accepted by the kinds of reviewers who would reviewer for an] Elsevier journal". ML research has sort of solved this problem via conferences, which are imperfect, but seem substantially better than the journal review process I can see my peers in other fields navigating.
Free markets are cool and all, but sometimes they screw up, especially when they interact with governments and institutions. Publishers currently live in this sweet spot, but science really doesn't need them to.
Terrence Tao once said he will not publish or edit for Elsevier. But he still said he will referee as scientists without tenure do not have that freedom.
I like your point but let's dive another layer down the rabbithole.
Why do researchers need to buy prestige in the first place? Academic research should be done for the sake of advancement of knowledge and of course the people doing it should make a good living out of it. How does buying prestige come into play here? (just asking)
The people who need to evaluate academics (both individuals and institutions) for purposes of funding, promotions, tracking goals, etc, can't really do it well on their own (you need to have domain-specific knowledge to be able to pass independent judgement, you can't have domain-specific knowledge in all the disciplines you need to manage, and you can't/don't trust self-evaluations) so they need some independents oracle that gives any metrics that are at least roughly correlated with output and quality even if they inevitably get gamed; and it needs to be something that can be independently evaluated cheaply and simply, so that it can be written into some formal criteria and there won't be a legal dispute whether a research outcome is "sufficiently good" or not, or whether applicant A has "more points" than applicant B on some objective scale that doesn't put the burden of personally proving that on some official who realistically can't do that anyway.
Publishers, prestige of publication venue (including their ranking in citation metrics), indexes like Web of Science/Scopus/etc all provide this function to the administrators of scientific funding, who want (and need) to evaluate academic prestige.
The other need is for a filter to allow a researcher to not access most of what is published. There is generally a problem of too much "research-like work" that is impossible to read all of what gets written, so researchers want a filter system where someone else throws out at least some of the crap (or forces the crap to be re-written to be better) so that there's a better signal-to-noise ratio. In the current system where there's motivation to publish in "better places", if something is published in a "worse place" that's some evidence that the paper is weak (because if the authors could have published it in a better place, why didn't they?) and thus perhaps can be discarded without reading, or deprioritized to read only after you've read all of the better-ranked stuff.
Evaluating candidates is really hard so employers rely on the prestige of their colleges. Evaluating professors is really hard so colleges rely on the prestige of their publications. Evaluating papers from post docs is really hard, so referees rely on the prestige of their advisors/institutions. Graduate admissions is really hard so admissions officers rely on the prestige of authors of letters of recommendation. Undergrad admissions is really hard so admissions officers rely on SAT and diversity factors.
Consider you are another researcher (not the one who has just published).
You may want to keep up to date with your field. This is good to do and it helps foster new ideas for now and for future proposals. There will be a selection of journals that are relevant to you and they will publish work that, generally, will be tiered by either the scope or impact of the journal. Journal A publishes a lot of papers you find very insightful or useful, journal B publishes some work that is good to know but not profound. If you have maybe 20 minutes, maybe you will read one paper that catches your eye from Journal A.
The truest metric of how good the work you do is, at a surface level, is how well cited it is. How much do people read it, and then do they care once they put it down. It is not necessarily the case that putting your paper in a high impact journal gets a lot of citations, but its a lot of exposure and it maximises those chances.
Maybe I am wrong here, but shouldn't the quality metric be whether it acts as a basis for practical applications? As far as I understand, research is supposed to give theoretical answers and frameworks. X works like this. Y doesn't work like that. This knowledge should then be applied to the real world and will be prooved wrong or right. Maybe a silly thought, but I suppose pre 1800 science didn't have to pay such fees to proove the quality of their work, they just applied it.
(I understand not all papers can be immediatelly applied, but is that the majotity of the work? And if so, is that a good thing?)
As a society, we want to have a "portfolio" of research. We want short-term research with tangible results, moderate-term research that builds on the current state of the art and advances it, and long-term research that might pay off decades from now. You also want to mix in "moonshot" research that likely won't pay off, but if it did would be revolutionary. The proportion you invest in each is up for debate.
Generally, as the time horizon increases, risk increases, and it becomes less and less likely any particular research direction will pay off, but you still need to do it or you won't have anything after all the current directions have dried up, matured, or otherwise run their course.
I think the error people make is to assume academia is supposed to cover all three. Largely, academia covers long-term and maybe some moderate-term and moonshot. Short term is better handled by industry where there is a more direct measure of applicability ($$). But business is generally not interested in the longer term stuff because it is too risky.
So academia as a whole is about forming the bricks that industry uses to build useful things. While any particular paper is not going to be useful to society anytime soon (if at all), the aggregate knowledge will likely be useful at some point in the future.
Unpublished science for practical applications of course exists but that is called R&D and is not generally made public cause it’s corporate IP. If that’s what you mean.
Most scientific research has no practical applications (or at least, not within the lifetime of the people doing it). Consider e.g. cosmology. The quality of research in cosmology varies, as in any other discipline, but even the very best research in cosmology has few if any immediate practical applications.
You need some kind of ranking. Anyone who have tried to write a scientific paper know how much junk there is being published through the "pay to publish" channels and it will just get worse with the technical development of chatGPT. Journals with high prestige tend to work as a barrier for junk.
More generally, curation has value (see web search or even hardware like an iPhone). And to your point, curation value is increasing because the volume of stuff needing to be curated is growing at what feels like an exponential rate.
The analogy you made using Louis Vuitton handbags is fairly weak.
Louis Vouitton handbags are prestigious because they're expensive. If the time comes where Louis Vuitton handbags are given free of charge to any Tom, Dick, or Harry, Louis Vuitton loses its prestige.
On the other hand, successfully publishing in a prestigious journal, would still be prestigious even if it was done for free.
Why are you so confident people don't know what they are talking about when you are in a forum with a lot of people that clearly work on that industry and a lot that clearly noped out of it after experiencing all the bullshit?
If you graduate from an Ivy League college (or publish in a prestigious journal) others view that as a signal of your qualifications and that can open up careers that require that the box be checked.
As such, people are willing to pay a lot of money to go to an Ivy League college (or publish in Nature). And the "system" has a vested interest in keeping that gateway in place, because the people that passed that gateway years before you, don't want to see it go away as it would reduce their own status.
The comparison between publications and handbags is cute... but yes, it falls apart for exactly the reason you mention. A prestigious journal would still be prestigious if they made publication free.
Being published in X journal doesn't make the work any better, but its apparent value is immediately increased by association. Academic institutions openly talk about this as why they use specific journals. They give positions/grants to people who have had more prestigious published articles, not to people who have done better work. The demand for a given researcher increases as their published work in increasingly prestigious journals increases.
It's not exactly the same as Veblen goods because what the academic institution is paying for is access to journals. But they need to pay for these expensive journals because they're prestigious, and they need the prestige to decide who gets the money/job, and the prestigious journals know this so they mark up the price.
If prestige wasn't what they were paying for, law of supply and demand (and healthy competition - there are many competitors in the market) would make the price dirt cheap. But it's the opposite.
We academics pay for Impact Factor (IF). The problem here is that Elsevier is buying IF left, right and center, in a tactic very close (if not equal) to Microsoft Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. If there is a small publisher that has a nice IF built over the last 50 years, and charges $1,000 per paper, Elsevier would buy the entire business or magazine and hike the prices to $2,500 the next day. E.g. The Lancet, founded in 1823, was bought by Elsevier in 1991. Elsevier did nothing to get The Lancet to the top, it was already at the top. Of course, the other big publishers try do the same when they can, but Elsevier is the worst offender.
The problem we authors have is that nobody who has the knowledge has time to start a publishing business (and it's way less rewarding than science itself), and in the end we don't pay for publishing, but the grant (i.e. all of you) do. We authors are funneling money from the tax payer to publishers like Elsevier without asking questions, because all of our incentives are publish on the highest IF you could get, or leave academy. Also, in the hypothetical that somebody started a promising cheap journal, they would get an irresistible offer from Elsevier, Thompson, MDPI or Springer and that would be the end of it.
I've been in talks were people tells you "publish at whatever IF you want, if your research is good, people will notice". Yet, each and every time you apply to anything, they value the IF. If your paper has been cited by 7,000 Q1 papers, but was published in a Q4 journal, it worths much, much less than a paper published in Q1 journal cited by no one. The value of your paper is not made by association, but by a flawed metric that values mainly the journal.
But make no mistake: as an author I don't have to care how much a journal charges to publish, because I will get the money from you. All I care is the journal is a Q1. At Q1 level it's an oligopoly, they all charge about the same, and grants already includes the money to publish, so I don't need to compare prices. My monthly wage will be the same and my CV will get better. The publishers know this, and they prey on you... through me.
> Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing?
To rephrase the question and make it less interesting: Why is it that none of the people who think that academic publishing is a scam are academic publishers?
It's like asking why abolitionists never seem to own slaves, or to show any understanding of a slaveholder's overhead.
> Louis Vouitton sells a handbag for $2k. Is it worth $2k? You could say no, that any other bag would be just as useful. But value isn't utility alone. People find that the bag is worth the price because of the prestige that the brand imbues the owner with.
Change the analogy so that the customers design and mostly manufacture the bag.
There’s quite an interesting model by which the editors of a prestigious closed journal leave en masse and set up a new open-access one, hopefully transferring the prestige of the former one. Gowers wrote about it here (https://gowers.wordpress.com/2018/06/04/a-new-journal-in-com...). I’d claim that it’s mostly inertia that’s the problem. Prestige doesn’t require profit.
> Of course, the customers complain about the price, so the question is, why not just buy something cheaper? Because that would defeat the whole point, which is to buy prestige.
You're basing your whole argumentation on the fact that only money can provide prestige which is upside down. The community provides prestige. History provides prestige. They just happen to have captured it and monetized it.
In fields like compsci -- at least in the subfield of programming languages which i know about -- the most prestigious journals and conferences are being run by independent (non-profit) institutions, charge pennies and publish open access. They are still prestigious.
You’ve pretty much nailed it. I anticipate you’ll be downvoted for it.
Academic research (one of the big complainers about the cost) could fix this easily - stop rewarding scientists for publishing in those journals!
Pick other, less expensive, prestigious enough journals, and academics will publish in those.
But the system can’t be broken easily. The prestige of many journals has been developed over decades or in some cases centuries. Saying “my paper got published in the same journal that published the first structure of DNA” buys a lot of street cred.
There is a level of snobbery to have published in top journals. The ones that got to their position publishing in those journals, aren’t going to be happy being told “those journals aren’t really much better than an open source journal”.
So the system continues - scientists keep reviewing papers for these journals, libraries pay the fees, and scientists send their papers there. Nobody has the balls (understandably) to step outside because their personal career will suffer.
When people want Elsevier to drop their fees, they just want the current system in place (exclusive, prestigious journals) but not have to pay for it.
> Academic research (one of the big complainers about the cost) could fix this easily - stop rewarding scientists for publishing in those journals!
From what I know, it's the politicians that rewards scientists for publishing in those journals. At least here in Norway, universities have been competing for funding[1], and publishing in higher-impact ("more prestigious") journals counts for more compared to lower-impact journals.
Generally the committees that make funding decisions are staffed by scientists. It shouldn't be surprising at all that scientists who got where they were by publishing in prestigious journals, look for the same when making funding decisions.
Fundamentally, changing the academic journal system is "just" about fundamentally changing how academics are recognized, rewarded, and promoted to something that no one really has a blueprint for. (And publish everything and the cream will somehow rise to the top isn't it.)
I also suspect that a lot of people complaining the loudest would also be unhappy if their recognition, reward, and promotion system was changed to something even more arbitrary and subjective than it already is.
Your points are correct and thoughtful, but you're overlooking something important: a quasi-natural monopoly forms here. When something becomes more valuable by virtue of its popularity, it takes on its own gravity. It is popular because it is popular, and quickly overshadows everything else. This applies to lots of things like social media platforms, MMOs and publishers. Sure, you can publish on the PDF web server of the high-school kid, but no one will ever see it. You don't HAVE to have your website indexed by Google, but in practice, it'll become invisible because of Google's quasi-natural monopoly.
- Do you suppose these kinds of quasi-natural monopolies ought to be regulated?
- If it is about prestige as you assert, how would you go around changing this dependence in academia (not a trap; genuinely interested)?
The big difference here is that prestige has nothing to do with cost, unlike your Louis Voutton comparison. Prestige is entirely based on the perception of the journals among scientists and on the prestige of the papers themselves that are published in them.
And the scientists individually don't have a choice unless they are closer to the end of their career. Intentionally publishing in less prestigious journals will sabotage your career, period.
And there are certainly aspect here that people without any more in-depth knowledge can criticize, e.g. the overall issue that publicly-funded research is put behind paywalls or that a very large part of the work gets done by reviewers that are not even paid by the publishers but mostly by the public.
> And the scientists individually don't have a choice unless they are closer to the end of their career. Intentionally publishing in less prestigious journals will sabotage your career, period.
I think it would be helpful if corporate scientists published more. They too value prestige for bragging rights, or whatever, but a corporate career is more about patents and blockbuster products than about publication. So corporate scientists could sabotage the prestige of publications.
Many corporations could also afford to hire editors and self-publish their own journals. For students looking for jobs in industry, or for PIs who want to place their students in industry, publishing in the corporate journals would be better than publishing in tier 1 journals.
> The big difference here is that prestige has nothing to do with cost, unlike your Louis Voutton comparison.
Yep, usually it's the opposite. You pay more money to get published through easy to get into conferences. If you're not in academia or don't have some membership, you pay way more to get into conferences. You pay thousands more to get published in low quality open access journals because your paper is not good enough. Etc. (Also no one pays $50 to read a single article, you get it for free through the university library.)
Agreed it's not just Elsivier. Agree that some of it is about "prestige", although I think it's somewhat more complicated than that. But let's just take your model, sure.
Where does the prestige come from? The editors of the journal, recognizing that they are pretty much solely responsible for the rigor/quality of the content (well, plus the authors of course), believe they can take their prestige with them.
Are they wrong? I'm not sure. If so, why?
Getting into it -- which I agree requires some knowledge of the actual business and market -- I think will lead you to the conclusion that it's not that nothing will change until "research no longer depends on prestige". The difficulty in changing things with individual walk-outs is real, but it's more about nothing will change until the entire economics of how the publishing system is funded changes.
The University of California's battle with Elsevier was more market-shaking than an individual journal editorial board walk-out. The UC did eventually go back to Elsevier. I think they called Elsevier's bluff though. They went two years without an Elsevier contract, and my guess is that Elsevier was worried that the longer they went without it, the more negotiating power they'd have, rather than the more desperation. They wound up with a contract that provided much more open access than ever before, at similar prices to what they had previously been paying for much less open access.
The basic mismatch is that much (true, not all) of the value is provided by government and university funding (for the salaries of the faculty who do the research, write the articles, serve on the editorial board or referee articles (unpaid by the journals)) -- but the massive profits are all captured by the publisher (who, yes, provide some of the value). While paywalling the product from the citizens of the government who pay for much of it, or residents of the world that the authors who do the research would be happy to share it with. This is a weird situation, and it's not to me obvious that "relying on prestige" requires it to continue like this. But it's an economic/market problem, that will require major changes to the economic arrangements to change, and which the publishers of course won't cooperate with changing, they'll fight it tooth and nail. The UC Elsevier deal may be one model.
From the UC press release:
> We refer to these agreements as transformative open access agreements because they convert subscription payments into payments for open access publishing (with reading provided for free). It is a new approach we helped develop with other leading institutions a few years ago, in large part through the OA2020 initiative.
Elsevier trying to raise prices for publishing (at least for those not covered by blanket contracts from institutions with more negotiating power, like UC) is their attempt to preserve their super-profits against this attempt at changing the market. It's an economic battle, I don't think it's outcome is certain just based on the nature of "prestige" in academic careers.
I gather you do work in publishing? But don't want to reveal how? At a major academic publisher? I don't work in publishing, but do work in librarianship, although I don't work in acquisitions at a university, the vicinity gives me some view of the market and industry. Of course, the interests of librarians and those of commercial academic publishers currently seem to be opposed, or perceived as opposed.
> They wound up with a contract that provided much more open access than ever before
Elsevier wanted them to buy more open access. That's one of its main long term goals for its journal business: switch everyone to open access. That's guaranteed money, compared to if everyone just started using a preprint server. (I believe it's on some page of their website, they say they want to move their journals more towards open access)
The consensus seems to be that they needed to change their model because all the negative press about their profits was threatening future revenues (in case academia actually got off its ass and found a new way to do research other than based on who published in Journal X). Open Access is the simple way for them to retain the same business and just get paid slightly differently. As they move more to Open Access their profit may decrease, but they're always acquiring new companies and diversifying the business, so by the time most of the business is Open Access they'll have made up for any profit loss. Or at least that seems like a rational view of the change, based on the fact that they're very clearly trying to get into more Open Access sooner than later.
And if "negative press about profits" can lead to a threat to their revenues in some way, then it would appear something other than "research no longer depending on prestige" can do so, right?
I would guess US federal (and other) government mandates for open access when receiving publishing are part of it -- and the increasing general "public" discussion of the market ("negative press about profits" if you like) has something to do with those government mandates, sure.
But yes, there is currently a bit of a battle going on, where the universities that largely pay for the journals are trying to change the way the market works -- while trying not to disrupt publishing and promotion too much -- while the major publishers try to find a way to counter-move that preserves or increases their huge profit margins anyway.
Absolutely. I think we basically agree. Except I don't see why you'd describe this changing situation as "so nothing will change as long as academic careers depend on prestige".
I gather you work for a major publisher, which perhaps makes you sympathetic to their position? (And yes, I already revealed I am a librarian, which makes me sympathetic to the position of those paying the subscription bills).
I'm not so much sympathetic to publishers as I'm a reformed populist. I had formerly held the usual HN view, that Elsevier is the only journal publisher, that they act differently than anyone else, that somehow they have cornered a market or tricked people onto paying too much money.
Imagine my surprise when I found out, actually academia only uses them because prestigious journal publication is the only real metric it used to assign research positions. They literally don't need to use these publishers, but they won't stop because otherwise they'd have to find another way to decide who gets to do the research. Elsevier just puts its hand out and asks for whatever it wants and gets it because academia doesn't want the system to change, it just wants a bigger budget and this is a politically tenable way to pressure for a discount.
From seeing the purchasing side of academic journals, I definitely don't think that Elseiver is the only journal publisher, or that they act differently than anyone else, and I agree that popular discussion often thinks they are more special than they are.
But what they are is indeed the biggest one. And, from the purchasing side, one thing that gives them is the ability to get universities into these giant package deals. (I also wouldn't be surprised if they have bigger profit margins than their competitors -- but of course their for-profit competitors would love to be as profitable and are doing their best).
Mostly I think it's much more complicated than "as long as universities use prestige of journals published in to decide tenure, journal publishers will be able to extract enormous profits from universities."
For reasons I've tried to touch upon.
I think while you are perhaps a reformed populist, you are perhaps still as interested in over-simplified one-factor explanations as you used to be, you've just flipped em.
Why shouldn't this editorial board be able to take their "prestige" with them to the new journal they are founding, with the purpose of being more affordable? (I agree there are reasons this is probably not going to lead to widespread changes in the market, but I don't think it's because they can't take the journal's prestige with them in this individual case, I don't see any reason why not).
What about fields like computer science where tenure decisions, while still based on publication, are not generally based on publication in for-profit journals from Elsevier or anyone else?
Another thing to look at in the market is the transition from print to electronic that happened over the past honestly not much more than 20 years, in which I believe it could be shown that % of university acquisitions budgets spent on journals as well as profit margins of publishers have skyrocketed -- but I don't believe academic's interest in "prestige" used to be a lot less.
I agree that tenure and promotion processes are pretty broken, I'm not trying to defend them. I just don't think they are a one-note explanation of the academic publishing market.
But I certainly identify with being really frustrated with academia and how it works. It's a mess.
I'm still curious if you work for a journal publisher or used to.
Good. I hope their alternative journal takes off. Scientists want to be published in these journals for the prestige that it brings. Hopefully a cost recovery priced journal with high standards of peer review can be successful in attracting papers.
In the age of Github/Gitlab, federated database systems & search, plus social media, and many other advances... we need to move off the old model of publishing research. I offer to the HN community that modern research 'publishing' should include:
- providing all raw data
- provided a timestamped electronic lab notebook that documented what you and when you did it... if applicable.
- working code for your data analysis and all figures/graphs.
- a write up of your work that can be commented on by the public (questions, critique, supporting information, etc.). Markdown or Latex rendered online would be great. The ability to continue updating the same 'publication' in place with new information would be really helpful; for one, this would make review articles much more useful over a longer duration [ if they were maintained regularly].
- supporting pictures, video, audio. e.g. a video walk-through of your experimental setup.
- a means for other folks in the field of study to endorse or critique your work, like "weighted Github" stars.
We need a Github for science. Benefits:
- free access for everyone. more people having access and participating will hopefully increased pace of development.
- better feedback over time on the quality of research as each 'article' or body of research would have issues raised, people commenting whether or not they we are able to duplicate the findings, revisions over time to deal with comments/issues, etc.
- Potentially easier to search and find relevant research through knowledge graphs of inter-related work, meta tags, and the "awesome X" type of publications/sites that would pop up to aggregate solid research in a particular area of study.
- Low or no barrier to publishing research, scientific community bias will not stop work from publication.
- will encourage and make it easy to publish null results: i.e. "I tried this... didn't work? Here why I think it didn't work...anyone got ideas?" Null results are very important and seldom published.
- may reduce fraud. No Science or Nature... just publish your work, if it is awesome, it will get lots of views and stars. All data and code needing to be available will limit ability to get away with stuff.
Exploitative publishing is not a technical problem. Publishing a journal isn't very hard and in particular in the academic world where writing stuff and organizing committees is something that people do all the time. Tons of artifacts are already available on various software and data repositories, either public or institutional.
The problem is that through some hoops of history a couple companies hold quite firmly the political control of important (and less important) journals and publications. To attack this there is no other way than to organize and move the journals to either an alternative administrative "host" entity (university, association, ...) or setup a new one. Which takes time, lots of emails, solid reputation and some luck in convincing people that have a say. And it's not like the academic world is particularly well currently, with everybody having tons of time to bootstrap such things.
Just calling for change and starting your "github for research" won't do anything (semantic scholar exists, tons of startup exist in this space). Anyone a bit serious studying what's happening for 1h can come up with tons of deficiencies. The question to ask is why it stays in this obviously deficient state: corporate political control, time, support from employers, ..
In fields where there aren't too many adversarial players (i'm talking about big industrial companies) like math or compsci things are kind of ok already. Its in biology and medicine where it's the worst. It's obviously because their fields are much more penetrated by the industry and more generally by economical goals. At some point you gotta be blind not to see that the ones dragging us behind (or more generally holding levers) are the guys with the big bucks.
GitHub, the company with the closed-source platform, training CoPilot on their users' hosted code against license terms. That's to be our guiding star?
There are a lot of journals with their own editorial boards and these mass-resignations happen somewhat regularly. My guess is that usually some people on the board will first want to decide to get away and then figure out where to move to (eg find some other publisher that is more preferable / get some funding from somewhere for a cheaper to run journal[1]) and then maybe also figure out a plan for the new journal to have a good start (eg with some good papers ready from people who are less constrained by journal impact metrics). So these things tend to take a long time to happen and aren’t really precipitated by EU rule changes.
[1] In mathematics there is the concept of an ‘arxiv overlay journal’ which is an example of something cheap to run: you have a website and editors and forewords and suchlike but each issue is, in some sense, a list of links to specific versions of papers on the arxiv.
On one side academics are crying about outrageous fees (rightfully so, since it's us, the taxpayers who usually pay for that), and immediately after, those same people require other academics to pay those same publishers to go up the academic ladder, get tenure, etc.
I don't know how it's in other countries, but in mine, it's the university itself that decides the requirements for their teaching stuff (including the required number of articles and scores).
Half of the article is about the disparity between pricing of print and e-books. Universities have been moving to ebooks for ease of access, and also to avoid building structurally expensive libraries that cope with the weight of the books. Looks like the publishers are raising the prices of e-books to match the value to institutions. Another case of excessive profits for little effort on the part of publishers.
Curious what is the leading open source system being used for publication of journals where academics are trying to get out of such exploitative practices? Or is it a collection of bespoke setups with no clear leader?
The problem is that academics are evaluated based on the impact factor of the journal they publish in.
If I submit a grant application and I have five papers in Nature, I will get the job. If I submit the application with five preprints on biorxiv, I might as well not have published those. It's like that all the way down - my last academic employer required me to publish a certain amount of papers per year in my niche's top 10% impact factor journals. it's due to laziness - I'm an expert, my employer is not, so my employer cannot evaluate my work quality. So the evaluation is outsourced to journal editors, with a paper acceptance in a prestigious journal being a stamp of approval of my skills.
The reason why people do not build their own journals is that they will work, for a long time, outside this impact factor system. You could chuck all of your papers into alternative journals, but you will fast jeopardise your career. It's not a technological problem, it's a political problem.
Thanks for responding - I obviously don't have much idea of academia but this is seems like an area ripe for "disruption" (as much as I hate the tech-jargon). So if the core issue is being reviewed by respectable peers (the publication is mainly the easy to understand condensed outcome of that review), what is stopping the editors of a reputable journal to get together, tie-up with tech solutions and form their own editor boards? Or is there some sort of exclusive contract between the journal and the members its editor board that they can't review outside of the journal?
Because if there is no such restriction, instead of paying £2,700 to Elsevier, they can pay the new platform significantly less and still get the review done by the same quality of editors. Sure the platform name isn't as reputable as Elsevier's is but the editors are the same and the only way to build reputation is to spend time and effort on it - it is obviously not an overnight task.
It is definitely a hard problem - obviously our armchair discussion can't solve it. But it is a very interesting problem.
Ah but you see, it takes a few years before a new journal even has an impact factor, the sole number with which it is evaluated. To have a high impact factor means that other journals have cited your journal for years in high numbers.
It's a chicken & egg problem - you need a good decade for a journal to be come influential/high IF, but for that to happen you need people to submit their papers to your journal. And they won't do that if there's no or a low IF.... having good editors might help as they'll be able to choose or attract highly influential papers, but that's the least of your worries! Those papers will go to high-IF journals and there's little reason for those papers to go to your journal.
I guess it is the equivalent of the Facebook problem. You are on Facebook because all your family is and no one leaves for a new platform because no one else is using that. Except it is worse here and instead of just missing out on updates/photos, it directly affects your livelihood.
Exactly!!! And there's very little 'regular' scientists can do about this. It's a system upheld by senior academics' conceptions, funding agencies, and university management staff.
Seems like the only answer to this is law enforcing open sourcing of academic research, atleast that which is funded by the taxpayer; though not much hope of that with the lobbying pushed by the incumbent journals.
Yes, there used to be Plan S by the EU, 'all research has to be open access' - which led to an explosion in publisher's prices as people were forced to pay them! Nature used to be Closed Access only, but once Plan S came around they added an OA option for about 10k in euros. Ridiculous.
> Good news! We'll see how the publishers will torpedo it
Indeed! Maybe they will try to make it difficult to access but atleast as long as the access is open and free (as in beer), all those efforts will do is give rise to a secondary platform that will solve the ease-of-access issue.
I suggest you submit a new post once EU decision is final, either way, so that this topic stays in the forefront :)
There are several open access solutions but few (if any?) open source solutions. Arxiv is free but lacks reputation outside a small number of fields. PLOS One has a decent reputation in some fields and probably comes closest in being good value.
I know a couple of people working in this space, and ultimately it ends up being a networking issue: in order to get peer reviewers at a scale which is acceptable, you basically have to buy editors with networks of contacts. Since good or even mediocre reviewers are scarce, this ends up leading to significant competition for reviews. But reviewers are not compensated so there is no market pressure for reviewers to actually exist. Publishing is now a profit-driven system built on top of an informal network created by enthusiasts who were originally doing the work because it was important to them.
There have been a couple of attempts at matchmaking systems and rewards systems. https://www.reviewcommons.org/ is the most visible in my field, but they only get 1-2 preprint reviews out per day so far. This is still quite new and there are a couple of other platforms in development.
You cannot really blame Elsevier here. They are just taking advantage of a dysfunctional academic system. The cost of reviewing a paper properly is high, but academia is not paying that cost by simply not doing a proper review. If the money saved by cutting Elsevier out (in this case £2700 per accepted paper) would actually be added to a pool out of which reviews are financed, I would see the point. But as it is, they will just continue to pretend that reviews are free, and the quality continues to go down the drain. Elsevier itself obviously adds very little to no value, but it is laughable that reviews are supposed to be free. If reviews were priced properly, the £2700 would probably appear to be a minor cost not worth worrying about.
Reviewers don't get paid indeed. It used to be that in exchange for getting published, you'd join a pool of reviewers that got to review new submissions. I reviewed plenty of papers like this. Many of them pretty bad too. It's not a fun job and it's important to do it well because some other sorry person is going to be reviewing your paper at some point. The price of publishing is having to read a lot of poorly written papers.
Editors don't actually get involved with the review process unless there is some conflict. Editors are of course paid positions. Their job is to keep supply and quality up. Generally, they get more hands on later in the process.
The only cost beyond that is indeed some simple, mostly automated, layout work and file hosting. Some of the more prestigious publications have actual professional editors on staff that work with authors to improve style and quality. But most scientific journals don't do any of that. Actually printing the papers is rare these days. It's mostly online at this point.
I've been out of academia for twenty years now, so things have changed a bit probably. But even back then, it was all pdfs and I rarely used printed media (other than laser printed copies of pdfs). Visiting a library or handling actual printed journals or a photocopier just wasn't a thing. Most of that went away in the nineties.
They also manage the review process (screen papers, find reviewers, communicate with authors and reviewers), make sure that papers are accessible long-term (decades to centuries), typeset manuscripts, print paper issues, and several other tasks.
But yes, reviewers are not paid. A half-decent review can easily take 3-4 hours, and a typical paper gets 2-3 reviews, so something like 8-12 hours of PhD-level labor which are not currently compensated.
> They also manage the review process (screen papers, find reviewers, communicate with authors and reviewers),
They do not. That's the editor's job, and Elsevier journal editors are unpaid volunteers -- as the Guardian article correctly pointed out.
> A half-decent review can easily take 3-4 hours, and a typical paper gets 2-3 reviews, so something like 8-12 hours of PhD-level labor which are not currently compensated.
It generally takes much much longer than that.
The average article in Neuroimage is 14 pages long (~ 10000 words), not counting references and declarations. Pure reading, single-domain, technical: the chart says 10k words will take at least 60 minutes. And you'll definitely need to read the article more than once while doing peer review.
Then you'll need to look up references, do some sanity check calculations, evaluate artifacts if available, scrutinize figures, and unless you're up-to-date on all recent developments of the field, probably read at least one more article on prior work just to understand what's going on. If unusual methods were used in the evaluations, you have to understand these too, so better add a few more days.
And you still have to actually write the review: at that point, you only have some notes and scribbles! In neuroscience, we're talking about at least 2-3 days of FTE work. And that's only the first round of reviews. About 80% of articles go through multiple rounds of review-response, according to Neuroimage's own statistics.
In other fields, review times might be significantly longer (weeks, or in mathematics even months, instead of days).
Elsevier profit margins are 40%, according to their own admission. They could afford the costs of compensating this labor. But why would they?
I think it would be interesting to actually evaluate review time. I've seen journal and conference paper reviews go all over the place. Some people blast them out in an hour. Other people dig deep and spend way more time. I don't think I have ever heard of a reviewer sanity checking calculations.
Ultimately, the taxpayer funds the researchers' salaries, and the researchers spend some of their research time on peer review instead of advancing their research.
But these hours dedicated to peer review are not the issue: something scientifically useful gets done. It's the tax dollars that go to Elsevier, in exchange for literally nothing*, that we should worry about.
* sometimes they charge you, the taxpayer, in exchange for access to the research output
Technically, no one; in practice, it gets done by both faculty and grad students/postdocs paid by universities as something that's expected of them to keep getting their wages for their primary work.
The only thing elsevier manages is their website. The review process is managed by academics who also work for free. Typesetting is done by authors. Paper printing is basically extinct.
Typesetting is done by authors (in some fields) and then completely redone by Elsevier staff. The value they add is questionable at best, but they certainly spend a lot of effort making the paper conform to their standards.
...or detract, one might add. I know of a researcher who has been meticulous about editing and wording, only to have the submissions "corrected" for publication to use the wrong word (existing, and meaning something different) for key concepts.
I'm guessing incompetence combined with standard dictionary computer spellchecking at the publisher's end.
Which the author then has to go back and fix because they don't understand what they're typesetting. Some journals provide the LaTeX template too so they don't even do THAT step.
As far as I am aware, they don't necessarily even do the final editing themselves; at least with the APS journals, they outsource the final typesetting to another company.
It's been a few years and I know it depends on the exact journal, but I thought Elsevier had paid editors? My memory is that society journals tend to be unpaid but that Elsevier, Nature, Frontiers, etc. had paid editors.
Not true. Every (decent) journal has someone who goes through the typesetting process again is very time consuming. Whether that plus the review process, website maintenance etc it is worth £2,700 is a separate question.
> But yes, reviewers are not paid. A half-decent review can easily take 3-4 hours, and a typical paper gets 2-3 reviews, so something like 8-12 hours of PhD-level labor which are not currently compensated.
They aren't paid, but that doesn't mean they aren't compensated; those reviewers will later submit papers which will receive reviews, for which they don't have to pay.
When I published with a journal, we had basically direct contact with the reviewers and little interposing. I did all of the typesetting. The journal just executed my latex files. The long term accessibility of papers via journals is largely overblown and it isn't even actual accessibility paid for by the submission - since that is covered by subscription fees.
You'll be surprised how many scientific papers published in reputable journals are not "properly reviewed". In many cases there simply isn't enough time or knowledge to go through every detail of a paper. One example -- if a paper says go to a github repository to look at our source code, guess how many people actually review the code as part of the peer review process? Very few. There could be serious bugs in the code that would affect the results, or maybe the code is difficult to set up and run, but nobody would notice them for a long time.
After reading my previous comments, why would you think that surprises me? I know for a fact that academics of the highest reputation do very poor reviewing. The cost of a low-quality review is basically zero for the reviewer, while the cost of a high-quality review is high. The consequences of this are not surprising.
It's definitely been my experience that reviews are hit-or-miss. Sometimes you get 1-2 reviews where there are valid points that need to be addressed, sometimes you wait 3 months for the reviews to come back, only to find that reviewers 2 and 3 dropped out and reviewer 1 basically said "looks fine".
Part of the challenge of peer review is that it comes _after_ the paper is written, when the cost of changing anything is quite high. I find much more value in peer review when planning experiments, and do so informally with my peers.
You absolutely can blame Elsevier here. A corporation taking advantage of a dysfunctional system to extract profit at the expense of others is bad. "Oh, the system is something that can be exploited so of course corporations should exploit it" is something worth criticizing, IMO.
Peer reviews are usually two reviewers who maybe do two rounds of reviews. Even if people are getting a reasonable fee, £2700 is more than enough to cover it.
i think the reality is that, while peer review can be helpful in various ways to a research community, the filtering function of journals less helpful for academics than it is for outsiders.
(usually people in a field know which preprints are “good” and don’t care much if they’ve been peer reviewed yet.)
so research communities themselves don’t intrinsically want to pay the cost of high quality compensated peer review when most of the value goes to others.
If you’re gonna say you have to pay for reviews, it might be a bad precedent that might establish “professional reviewers” whose main job becomes this. Already reviewing papers is become a stupidly important criteria in green card applications and you see a huge deluge of postdocs emailing editors requesting papers to review (though the top journals will never give a manuscript to a postdoc).
No, what I am saying is that proper reviews are expensive, and that cost should be made explicit. How that should be done, I don't know. Giving prestige to reviews is difficult, given that reviews are anonymous. Personally, I feel reviews should be public and non-anonymous, just like the paper is. If the argument against this is that scientists are so petty that they will hold a negative review against you, well. Even more reason to make everything public, because why would you then trust petty scientists to do proper reviews?
Hah, the power dynamics involved will be brutal with non-anonymous review. You have new phd students reviewing papers submitted by tenured profs with decades of experience and connections and ability to impact their careers. People will be people and so on.
Sadly, this is not novel where the problem and researcher community stand is well known (or, should be). See "the cost of knowledge" release in 2012 by Timothy Gowers. http://thecostofknowledge.com/
It's not just readers who pay. Scientists also have to pay some journals to get their work published (assuming the submission went through) which is totally backwards. Scientists do not get anything monetary from what the readers pay. Now look at other publishing industries. It's the publishers that pay the creators (even if the rates may seem unfair at times, it is still far far better than negative gain for scientific research content creators). Been there multiple times back when I was a PhD student. So I have absolutely nothing against those who use the free sites.
I don't know for sure, but I think that some of their customers are universities, and possibly governments and large enterprises, who subscribe to large swaths of their offerings as bundles.
first, sometimes there are publication fees on the author end.
on the buyer end, university libraries buy huge bundles of journal subscriptions for millions per year to give access to everyone at their institution. this is essentially enterprise sales and the publishers are really good at it using all the typical tactics for winning lucrative contracts.
and the universities don't want to just tell their researchers to use sci-hub, although I think e.g. UC Berkeley essentially did this with a nudge and a wink a few years ago during negotiations.
I think one point is that a profit margin of 40% is only viable because of the size of their platform. If they were broken up and smaller, on competing platforms, then it would be no where near 40%.
For a while, I was (sometimes) busting patents at Google. That meant searching through literally 1000's of articles to see if one or more provided prior art to invalidate some patent being asserted against us.
Quite often, an article would be behind a paywall (and btw, @throwawaaarrgh, it was often Springer or Taylor, not Elsevier). We'd gladly pay $30 for it if it did the job, but nothing to just find out IF it did. And 99% of the time, it didn't.
So I never paid. Nearly always, the professor published something else on the same topic that was open access.
The publishing companies do not create anything of value, they hold a resource (prestige) that they do nothing to improve, transform or grow. Academies do all that labour for free, and the publishers rent-seek on that free labour and run a racket ("publish here or else").
It's a feudal setup: a king controls the land but does nothing with it. The serfs do all the labour and then pay the king for "access" to the land.
they hold a resource (prestige) that they do nothing to improve, transform or grow
That's absolutely untrue. A journals prestige is not a given. It has to be maintained and I know of at a couple journals that have fallen out of favor.
The editorial board makes decisions on which papers to publish, and it's that track record that maintains the level of prestige. They also have to get peer reviewers (nobody will waste their time reviewing for a no-name journal) of a certain caliber to review.
it better to think of the journals as more similar to a luxury good - the value is not in the work done or how much it costs, but the perceived value of other people.
That has real value, and it's clearly apparent people are willing to pay for it.
Yes it is, but why hasnt it changed in the past 30 years? Because the serfs (academics) cannot agree on a replacement ruler. It's not like there arent many good open access publishers. But there aren't many open 'prestige givers'
I'd argue that it has changed quite dramatically in the last 30 years. As you say, there are now many great open access publishers. That wasn't nearly so established 30 years ago. Paid access journals haven't died yet, but they're well on their way.
In my former university, the people in power hasn't changed in the past 30 years. So worshiping the big publishers is still the norm and it takes a while for new students to detach themselves from their supervisors' delusions and realize the whole scam.
The interesting question is: Is there a quasi-monopolistic predatory exploitation of a historically captive market? And what are the mechanisms to destroy it?
From my perspective, it's clear that we have a multi-billion dollar/year heist by corporations whose value proposition (logistics, layout, quality assurance) are quickly eroding. They need to die yesterday.
Unfortunately, in this regard what you pay for isn't what it seems. There's a reason that machine learning is moving fast as a field, and that is because for this field academic discourse happens primarily through pre-prints and conferences. This would stop if discourse moved to publishing via journals. This is because the publishing system is cripplingly slow, exploitative, and a perverse shadow of what it was supposed to grow to become.
They have 25% of the market. Just split them in five, mandate that no entity can have more than five percent of the market and watch their margins shrink.
Maybe there is a less brutal way to do it, e.g., raise corporate tax in proportion to market share.
The point is that the market system we currently have does not prevent oligopoly power and that is creating all sorts of problems.
The product they are selling isn't science/articles, it's exclusivity. Despite the rhetoric, most people don't want inclusivity. They want their stuff to be in the best/exclusive/fancy group, and only want to consume the best, most exclusive stuff.
Obviously, my statement is not universal so providing some counter-examples is irrelevant.
That behavior definitely applicable here, but 25% of the market doesn't sound too exclusive even if they managed to pick in each and every domain the top journals. I mean, the sector is definitely very peculiar with a lot of baggage. The publish-or-perish environment was not inflicted by publishers, its something that emerged in the science communities. The obsessive impact ranking, citations etc reflects ultimately the difficulty of judging academic worth (on which careers and funding rely) at such industrial scales.
But when you see fat margins (and if it bothers you, as it seems to be the case with those walkouts) always look for the reasons nobody can undercut them. Most of the time the "moat" (as they like to say here on HN) is some cozy arrangement.
When I was in grad school, I easily went through 1000+ articles via my institution's library, most of which were dead ends. My school even had to drop the subscription of a journal I was actively using because the price was unaffordable.
For unaffiliated readers, such as those doing industry R&D or individuals researching a medical condition, there are no circumstances under which $30-$50 price per article is affordable, let alone justifiable. This is more expensive than many books, and it's just to read a 10-page PDF which may or may not even provide sufficient context to answer the reader's question. Sci-hub is a literal life-saver for this audience.
"Open access" alleviates the price problem for the reader, but just pushes another unaffordable burden onto the researcher. My group could not afford the multi-thousand dollar "processing charge," and those that could were paying for it with taxpayer money anyway.
So no matter what, someone is getting gouged, be it the reader, the University, the PI, or the public. Prices need to come down by at least an order of magnitude before I would even consider the for-profit academic publishing industry to be anything other than a predatory anachronism.