It's sad that this process hasn't started earlier. It's a farce that publishers got to erect a walled garden around tax funded research without adding anything of value.
That being said, EU CS academia is a cess pool where more often than not it matters more who you know than what your actual research is. I partially blame the funding agencies for attaching unrealistic publication metrics to grants (publish or perish). On the other hand i had high ranking university staff tell me "they love how they can just burn €6M in 2 year EU project with zero outcome without consequences". Reviewers of such projects only need to have the right political color and zero domain knowledge.
It's sad really and i'm happy i don't have to work in such an environment amnymore.
I'll take a little of the publisher bait (I sit on the board of a "dinosaur paywall publisher"). I'd like to question the popular thinking that publishers do not add anything of value.
There has never been a time in history when it has been easier to publish your research output in any number of other places than a paywall journal. You can post it on your own blog. You want a DOI? You can post it on The Winnower. You need it in a journal with an impact factor (even though you hate impact factor)? Submit it to PLOS One or PeerJ.
By publishing with a paywall journal you are acknowledging the fact that your field values the prestige awarded by that journal. That's what you're getting, the prestige. You can argue all day about whether that prestige is earned or not, but it's not the publishers that are dictating the prestige, it's the tenure committees and faculty. Everyone is "against" the journal impact factor until it comes time to apply for tenure, at which point your tenure committee weighs it so highly that you can't avoid pandering to it. So you publish in the highest impact factor journal.
We're all hoping to change this system. Publishers don't like being held hostage by Thomson Reuters (who controls impact factor) and having to constantly worry about the next year's impact factor. In a lot of ways we'd all love to move to academia-accepted alternative metrics. I would love a system that allows third parties to provide editorial review of the importance of a paper, and allow that to be separated from the journal. As a publisher that's what we're really trying to do, provide a way to judge the importance of a paper before you can get all the citation data coming in over the years. I would love to figure out a different way of doing so. But changing that means changing deep-rooted behavior throughout all of academia. And that is HARD.
These publishers added value back in the days when they actually enabled communication via printing. They should have been abandoned the day after WWW was invented. The "established" publishers literally suck the blood of academia and taxpayer money nowadays. First, they appropriate other people's work in all stages (writing, review, corrections, illustations etc etc.). Then they stymie the development of open-access journals by keeping every good scientist busy reviewing their papers for free (coddling them, showering them with "prestige"). Then they keep the copyrights of work they didn't pay for, they make it impossible for data scientists to collect the experimental data, they hide the papers behind paywalls and they don't even add a comment section where readers can post legitimate q&a's, comments etc. And on top of that they require to be paid for all this free work. If that is not insane, i don't know what is.
The entire reasons you mention have nothing absolutely nothing to do with the value of science. Selling "prestige" in 2015 is a ridiculous thought.
Lastly, consider this. My institution can only afford to pay subscriptions to the most widely read journals, so I find myself using some obscure russian proxy to download them illegally. Apparently there is a need for that, and there are entire websites dedicated to that. This is outrageous.
The HARD thing that need to change is actually simple: it's laziness, and fear, powered heavily by lobbying publishers. Scientists are smart people, all they need is a kick in the butt.
I'm not going to argue with all the reasons you think publishers are insane. However, I will argue with the comment that "selling prestige in 2015 is a ridiculous thought."
Offering prestige in 2015 is even more valuable than it has ever been. There is more research published than there has ever been, from all around the world. The amount of research information is increasing dramatically, just like it is with all information (blog posts, videos published, etc). The value of curation increases with the increase in content, it doesn't decrease. I don't know what the future holds when it comes to how curation is going to be done and how prestige will be awarded, but I'm certain that there will be some mechanism for separating good research from bad research and bestowing prestige. That isn't decreasing in value - on the contrary, it's increasing.
Now you are conflating prestige with curation. Journals dont do curation other than an initial check, instead reviewers decide, for free. Publishers' job is basically to make sure that the herd perceives them as prestigious by coddling the big names to publish in their journals (again, for free). This is social engineering. They do not do anything that an openaccess journal can't do. (Look at eLife, open and prestigious).
We know. Those who haven't experienced it first hand have only to glance at the exorbitant profit margins. But it is not ridiculous that prestige is valuable. That is not what was claimed. What is ridiculous (although not remotely surprising -- it seems to be a frequently recurring anti-pattern in the modern economy) is that a private body which plays a morally tangential role at best in the production of this particular form of value is allowed to hold the process hostage and simultaneously price-gouge scientists in their roles as researchers, scientists in their roles as reviewers, scientists in their roles as editors, and the general public which funds them in all three stages.
Look out for new US/EU public protections of those private margins. TPP/TTIP/TISA is rumored to criminalize non-commercial infringement, even if the copyright holder does not want to prosecute, http://japanitlaw.blogspot.com/2013/01/tpps-effect-on-fanzin...
"..in practice, it is rare for the police to commence an investigation without a complaint by the rights holder.
However, this situation may change. The draft of the request of the US on Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) 15.5(g) stipulates, "its authorities may initiate legal action ex officio with respect to the offenses described in this Chapter, without the need for a formal complaint by a private party or rights holder."
You forget that the "greater community" of scientists already curates these articles for free (the reviewers). It's not the curation that's wrong, it's the closed-access.
Ah, sorry, I thought the comment I was replying to was questioning the need for someone to provide prestige at all, as opposed to being focused on the concept of selling that prestige.
In general I don't have a problem with the idea of selling curation/prestige in the form of products and services, so I don't think it's a ridiculous thought (either for 2015 or any other time in history). Let's take another example, say publishing a novel. That's something that has also never been easier to do in a wide variety of ways. But self publishing a novel isn't (typically) enough to become a successful author. You need to somehow get your book to stand out as being better than the million other novels that people publish every year. So if someone can offer you a stamp of approval that the general public trusts, that gives people a reason to believe your book is worth their time more than other books, that's a valuable service. And I have no problem with the idea that whoever can offer that service should be able to charge for it.
I think the ridiculous thing in 2015 is that academic prestige is still almost exclusively tied to the name of the journal in which it is published. That I still have a hard time wrapping my head around sometimes. So I imagine that that will eventually change, but I'm not convinced that the process of separating the good from the bad and bestowing that prestige will inevitably be free.
So if someone can offer you a stamp of approval that the general public trusts, that gives people a reason to believe your book is worth their time more than other books, that's a valuable service
But a big book publisher doesn't just do this for an author. The author gets to leverage the publishers advertising/marketing budget and connections.
The entire reasons you mention have nothing absolutely nothing to do with the value of science. Selling "prestige" in 2015 is a ridiculous thought.
I don't find it ridiculous at all. Just because it's intangible doesn't mean it doesn't have economic value. As I mentioned elsewhere, a considerable amount of that economic value comes from non-scientists who can't evaluate work themselves but can look at the organ of publication as a rough proxy for scientific value.
The HARD thing that need to change is actually simple: it's laziness, and fear, powered heavily by lobbying publishers. Scientists are smart people, all they need is a kick in the butt.
Considering the kicking they've been getting from the publishing lobby, perhaps a more emollient metaphor is called for :)
The problem here is that prestige is a real economic good even though you'd rather it wasn't. So boycotting the good journals as an author is a terribly risky strategy. It's free to publish on sites like Arxiv, and scientifically good stuff will get a certain amount of kudos from other scientists, but it's not obvious when you go to Arxiv what's hot and what's not. What you need is something with the openness of Arxiv, the signalling value conferred by the selectivity of journals like Nature, Science, or the leading journals in scientific subfields, and (ideally) some way to winnow out stuff that is clearly total crap. And once you have a basic version of this platofrm (which should not be terribly hard to build, but will cost some money (and should probably not be built by scientists themselves, because they are terrible at making web pages)), is a contractual commitment of some sort to get a critical mass of people to agree tp move to that platform instead of submitting to existing journals. IT's not going to work if people do it in dribs and drabs because nobody wants to be the first person to undergo the experiment which may Destroy Their Career. You need a crowdfunding approach - not so much to raise the actual funds but in terms of creating a tipping point - such that everyone keeps submitting to journals and basically doing what they do now until (say) 30% of working scientists are signed up to the new system. When that target is reached, everyone in that signup group moves to the new platform and sticks with it for an agreed-upon minimum period, come hell or high water. You need some sort of a big bang event to make this work because scientists don't have all that much political capital in the western world, and you're getting into a fight with people who have a lot of economic capital and (frankly) who understand politics better than most scientists.
Doesn't "publishing with a paywall journal you acknowledge that your field values the prestige awarded by that journal" contract with "it's not the publishers that are dictating the prestige".
Your arguing that if I post it on a blog, it gets lost in a sea of other content. If I publish it, then I get validation.
If I understand correctly, you are saying that one of the fundamental reasons for publishers to exist is because they validate someone's work (citations, vetting, peer approval). Why does this have to happen at the expense of public access, if the research that goes through that vetting process is publicly funded?
I think we agree. It would be better if there was a different way to validate the importance/impact of research. Particularly if there was a way to evaluate the importance immediately, as opposed to waiting years to see how the impact plays out (via citations, etc). So if there was a committee that provided that evaluation entirely outside of the publishing ecosystem, that would be great (great from the viewpoint of humanity, maybe not publishers' business models).
Hell, if you were guaranteed that your tenure committee actually read your full papers and then made their decision about the importance of your work entirely on their own, then you don't need any other validation of your work. But at that point we're sadly living in a fantasy world. In the real world academics making hiring decisions need external validation to judge their applicants. Figure out a better way to provide that without losing a ton of money and you're golden.
>> Why does this have to happen at the expense of public access?
I didn't understand from your answer why validation and restriction of public access need to go hand-in-hand. When I left academia, I was no longer able to read tax-payer funded research papers without paying an exorbitant fee per paper. Are you saying that lowering the fees is would lead to "losing a ton of money"? Do you mean the publisher would become unprofitable, or become less profitable?
I'd iterpret that as the fact that right now, any academic or institution who chooses to unilaterally avoid the current system will lose lots of funding, as the publication metrics are actively used by the funding bodies in project evaluation.
I am not aware of any alternative that can replace the current publication metrics for this purpose. The funding bodies have no motivation, capability or resources to make a replacement themselves, so that would have to come as a ready-made replacement in order to be accepted, and actually work (have usable content) for evaluating all current academic disciplines and academics out of the box (which seems rather unrealistic) so that a multi-disciplinary funding body can actually put that metric in their next funding round official evaluation criteria.
They don't have to go hand in hand. Others have pointed out eLife as an example of high prestige open access. There's no reason, other than history and inertia, that the validation has to come at the expense of access. However, I'd argue that I haven't yet seen a good model where the validation isn't expensive (by some definition of expensive). So I definitely think curation/validation can be delinked from the paywall, but I'm not convinced they can be provided free or cheap (and yes, the standard argument that reviewers aren't paid is valid, but the idea that publishers don't have real costs managing that process is simply naive).
> "by publishing with a paywall journal you acknowledge that your field values the prestige awarded by that journal" and then going on to say "it's not the publishers that are dictating the prestige".
No. the grandparent post is pointing out that journals do provide value in practice, because people care that someone was published in the journal. This has nothing to do with the publisher, and everything to do with the people reading the papers.
> If validation is so important, why can't there be a subset of tax dollars towards a committee?
You're confusing "ought" and "is". The system, as it works today, isn't that -- you can push for that change, but as it stands, journals add value in an academic career.
Until a researcher can actually submit their research to a tax dollar funded committee (or whatever other alternative people dram up), and get that weighted as heavily as a journal publication when applying for tenure, journals will not be replaced. Working towards replacing journals may be nice, but the parts aren't in place today.
"Working towards replacing journals may be nice, but the parts aren't in place today."
You're right! Why do I feel these Institutions(including higher education) want us to debate this to death? They know "the system" has made them rich. They know we don't have the power to change. We can debate, argue, cry--they will still charge whatever they can get away with-
I just watched a speaking event at BookExpo America, the publishing industry’s annual trade show, about the use of data in the publishing world--and other topics.
Speaker Scott Galloway(NYU professor, and founder of L2) talked about the price of text books, and tuition at his university. I could tell he felt completely hopeless, and demoralized over just how much money they are charging. He said, 'twenty years ago my students were taking the same marketing class they are taking today; Same information, but instead of paying 6 grand to listen to him lecture; they are now paying 65 grand!'
He didn't have an answer to the problems, but he said certain industries are ripe for Change. (I don't think he was being melodramatic, nor acting--he literally seemed shocked at the current pricing. It is beyond money--it's on a moral plane now, and they are getting away with it.
So this Dutch University decided to buck the system. They just said no to this overpriced journal. They are taking a risk, but at least they are taking a stand.
Anyways, I'll give the link to the lecture, and pay attention to Scott Galloway's statements(particularly at around 01:04:37). The hopeless that emanated from this professor was chilling. The other speakers were very polite, and professional, but Scott was the most believable.
I would say that the real value of your work could be measured with something like pagerank: basically if your work is eventually cited, it's prestigious.
What the journals maybe provide is prestige before your work has been widely cited, plus publicity. Even if the article is on arxiv, more people will take a look if you say it will soon be published in, say, Cell. Maybe they shouldn't even bother publishing- just have a list of articles which they would publish if they actually bothered to do so.
You're spot on in that citations are largely the pagerank metric and that's really what "counts", but there's a need for having an earlier metric. Journal impact factor is a computation based on historical citation count of articles in a journal. The leap of faith is then that if you publish in a journal that has a history of publishing highly cited work, that means your work is good and likely to be highly cited. There's any number of ways to argue against that logic, but that's the way it works.
So yes, what journals typically provide is a leading indicator of quality that you can get before waiting for citations to come in. There's a definite demand for such a leading indicator, and I certainly believe there's an opportunity to replace the journal with something else.
I'm curious what you think about variants on the PageRank idea that address the slowness problem you point out. You state in an earlier comment “so if there was a committee that provided that evaluation entirely outside of the publishing ecosystem, that would be great”. You could theoretically have a PageRank-like system where some nodes are papers, some nodes are committees, and (maybe) some nodes are individuals. Then there could be different types of edges, expressing relations like “has cited this paper” or “deems this to be a quality paper” or “recognizes the competence/authority/prestige/whatever of this person/committee”. Then run PageRank on the whole mess.
There are certainly other data points, once example is Mendeley bookmarks, that can indicate what research is being highly viewed/discussed. If you know what people are passing around organically, and especially if you knew who those people were, then you could apply different weightings to that data. If a leading scientist in the field is digging through your paper, or has started citing it in their unpublished work, that might be an indication of quality that's useful.
The other thing that could make citation data more useful earlier might be taking a more complex view of citations. PageRank doesn't equally weight links, ie links from authoritative sources like the NYT count more than random sites. I think there's plenty of room for improvement in applying similar mechanisms to enhance citation metrics. And maybe some of that could start playing into making citation metrics more useful earlier in the process. If you only have one citation, but it's from a preprint article written by a Nobel Prize winner, that should count more than 10 citations from published articles by random postdocs (although I have a feeling that even that idea wouldn't be accepted without a lot of controversy in academia).
Irony alert: PageRank was originally modeled on the observation of how academic citations are a network. Back on topic - still many works are read, but never cited, despite their contribution to science (that's another nut to crack though).
> having to constantly worry about the next year's impact factor
I'm confused by this bit. Isn't impact factor just a complex indicator of the amount of citations, so really an indicator of the quality of the journal? Why is it "worrying about impact factor", rather than "worrying about publication quality"?
This reminds me of the pleasing the shareholders vs. trying to run a successful company disconnect.
Your analogy is spot on. It's a perverse incentive system. It doesn't make any rational sense, but that's the way it is. Even more ironically, the impact factor of open access journals matters even more than for paywall journals. Once a paywall journal is established it's fairly stable. If it loses its impact factor that's bad, but doesn't mean the death of the journal. But with an OA journal if you have an impact factor and then lose it, your submissions drop off a cliff, which directly ties into your revenue, and that will often be the actual death of the journal.
Beyond that, journals can help financially support their attendant society if they're a society journal, and while it gets dismissed, having a copy editor and a layout person improves papers.
Thanks for pointing this out. The revenue to scholarly societies is another big aspect that people often overlook. One side effect of killing off paywall journals is that a lot of scholarly societies will need to figure out different ways to make money to survive. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I can get behind the idea that a society should not base it's financial existence on revenue from a paywall journal. But that's a reality of today's situation.
That's a good point - although based on anecdotal evidence from a couple editors of scholarly society affiliated journals I've talked to, the societies have largely already lost this revenue stream due to steep declines in subscriptions over the past decade. I'm very much in favor of disrupting the existing model of how academic publishing works (and applaud any efforts to cut out exploitative companies like Elsevier) but for anyone reading this who is working on something along those lines, please remember the scholarly societies and ordinary journal editors! If a new system emerges which allows them to be fairly compensated for the work they do but which cuts out the current corporate intermediaries like Elsevier and Brill, I think the current status quo will rapidly shift in a positive direction.
Prestige only has value if the community upholds it with integrity and warrant. The journals are fundamentally looking to protect their business model and their attachment to the community. Thus the journals' prestige becomes significantly diluted (and with warrant).
Publication prestige originated in the publication's crucial role as a discovery mechanism before the Internet. Now there's a much better discovery mechanism, and the community is adapting well to it. If publications had the community in mind foremost, they'd similarly adapt.
Trust me, the idea that the prestige currently offered by today's journals might move to an entirely different venue is a top concern.
I'm not convinced that betting your business on the idea of curation (ie prestige) is a bad one, although I suppose I'd agree that betting a business on the idea of paywall journals as the mechanism of that prestige bestowment isn't wise.
Prestige isn't curation. Curation is a genuine functional benefit, but it is one that is getting cheaper year on year. Prestige is really just the upmarket term for cool, and cool is flightly.
edit - another way of putting it, is if curation is what is being relied upon, then they seriously run the risk of being popcornTimed
I'm curious what your view of what academic publishing being "popcornTimed" would look like.
PopcornTime isn't really the mechanism for curation, it's merely one avenue to show the result of a highly complicated curation process that's always occurring. The curation of movies involves big-budget advertising, box-office results (which feed news reports which feed box office results), websites like IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, and of course some level of purely "viral" spreading of what's good and bad (social recommendation). PopcornTime/BitTorrent itself is just easier distribution that sits on top of and feed off that curation process.
So if you can only make money off the distribution, I agree you're going to have trouble. But if you can shift your business model to be based on the business of curation I think you're fairly safe. You mention the price of curation decreases year on year, but in the case of something as highly specialized and expertise-based as academic research I'm not totally sure the analogy with pop-culture movies holds. "The crowd" can relatively easily curate movies (which says nothing about its ability to select high vs low quality actually), but I'm not convinced "the crowd" can effectively curate academic research without large changes to the overall system (see publons.com for a way that might change if peer reviews are rewarded and open).
And for what! I left Universtiy a year ago. To prepare my dissertation, I had to read hundreds of articles like everyone, and like everyone, I had to sort through all the crap that somehow makes it to IEEE. I expected that peer reviewed articles would be the best there is.
I was working on ECG signals that were acquired in our institute and in a hospital to deal with all sorts of unbearable noises and artefacts. And then there were articles that would be published after testing their algorithms on a synthetic ECG (as if the world is lacking true hearts) with a cute gaussian noise (as if the world is lacking funky electrodes on sweaty hairy dudes), or the least noisy signals of the MIT database (the ones who test their stuff on the first seconds of 100.dat, you know who you are).
What I also found frustrating is that we have to trust the words of the authors about the results.
Cool, the signal is filtered but how long does your program take to deal with the 1.5 million samples? How many lines of code? What was the gear used?
These are all important things to know so that people know if they're improving stuff or not. But the FPGA cluster seldom gets mentioned in the articles.
I didn't expect I had to go through all that crap because I assumed they're frigging on renowed journals (so pre-filtered).
So I spoke to some people about it and it appears there are "international conferences" where you don't even have to attend for them to vouch you attended. You only need to pay.
After hanging out in some of the labs and seeing the mindset of the publishing game and how it's done, my supervisor still calls me so that we can publish something together but the answer is always that I don't have the necessary skills, nor the desire to publish.
I don't want to publish something that'll be a waste of time for other students.
There seem to be some efforts to deal with this racket (I think some companies are doing that)..
IEEE is meaningless. You need to look at the top 2-3 venues in your field and submit there. Most of the rest is noise. Except perhaps for work published in 2nd tier venues by people that have other papers in top tier venues, as most likely such work is at least solid if not quite novel enough to get in to a top tier venue.
I once went to a meeting sponsored by the EU about how to make data resources for computational linguistics more interoperable.
I noted with increasing dismay that everything people were saying aimed to check off requirements that met EU definitions of interoperability without doing anything at all to the data. For example, someone asked to produce XML could just submit something like this:
And now I kind of understand that was the goal. The people running that meeting weren't trying to be useful, they were trying to create a bureaucracy that would excuse their lack of usefulness.
Well, the administrators have outsourced the domain knowledge to the journal reviewers and pay for this service indirectly through journal fees, so from an accounting point of view it makes total sense.
If not publication, what metric should funding agencies use to decide who gets grants? Of course they could hire senior scientists in the field to evaluate grant roposals, but that would mean hiring lots and lots of scientists across all the fields in which they disburse grants; those jobs would be sinecures and from the point of view of the grant applicant it would still be about 'who you know,' just a referee at a grant-issuing agency instead of an editor/reviewer at a journal.
I don't disagree with you about the problem, but I'm not clear on how you would address it. Making the journals less profitable by refusing to pay silly subscription prices to read publicly-funded research would be a good thing for universities, and maybe for scientific publishing, but it's not going to fix the disconnect between people who control the public purse strings and which scientists will get the grants they want.
> outsourced the domain knowledge to the journal reviewers
Except that, by and large, those reviewers aren't being paid. So the 'outsourcing' argument isn't quite it. If it were there would be no problem with open access.
It is more about brand. They're outsourcing the need to determine quality by buying into a brand. That brand is kept afloat by unpaid labour on all sides, yet charges heftily for its brand. It is an understandable model, but not a very pleasant one. Unless you're an Elsevier shareholder, getting paid for your brand IP.
Agreed. When I use the term 'outsourcing' I mean that from grant administrators' point of view the scientific journal is a black box, providing X level of quality control for Y subscription cost.
While their not being paid directly, it should be noted that reviewing, and sitting on editorial boards, is considered in a great many tenure decisions.
Ouch, that's a scathing comment on EU CS research. Being in the US I know very little about it, though I do see a lot of quality work in my field come out of ETH-Zurich. I want to say we don't have the problems you're talking about, but I could just be an oblivious grad student :)
I would hope not. The single biggest research foundation in Switzerland is SNF (http://www.snf.ch/), especially since the swiss participation in Horizon 2020 is unresolved due to political reasons.
I'm a librarian computer programmer, and somewhat familiar with the 'industry'.
We've definitely inherited something from a pre-digital age, where it took non-trivial capital and staff to actually publish and distribute stuff.
But on the other hand, there are still aspects that make it unclear exactly how to change the 'market'.
Someone else in this thread said what the publishers provide is 'prestige'. I don't think that's exactly it -- the editors and peer-reviewers, which are who provides the prestige, are largely unpaid (or very trivially paid), even at commercial publishers. That's not where the money is going.
It still takes some staff to organize and provide administrative services for the actual prestige-providing volunteer editorial staff. Receive papers, send the out, copy edit them, get them in the right format for publication. I'm not actually sure how much staff, not being on that side of the industry.
But it's also not actually free to publish things online, at least not if you do it right (which some publishers do and some don't). Someone's got to write and maintain the software and deal with the operations, pay for the hardware and network, etc.
The costs are presumably less than for print distribution, but we on HN know they are not non-existent. The barriers for a startup may be lower than they used to be, but you still can't scale to serving millions of customers without any income at all. It costs money to put up something on the web, in this case the something being hundreds of thousands (millions?) of articles, that you keep up forever, with good metadata, etc.
So who will pay for it, and how? Formerly, largely libraries paid for it as customers of publishers, and they paid for it because if they didn't pay their subscription they didn't have access to it. They were customers.
Who's going to fund the endeavor when you will get access to the content whether you pay or not? University libraries, who pay for it now, don't generally have budgets (and the people who set the budgets) which allow them to pay for things just because it's good for society. They are getting their budgets squeezed too. Even though it's the universities who pay the exhorbitant rates to get access to the content produced by people who's salaries they already pay. (the authors, editors, and peer-reviewers), and they would benefit from a 'market' that worked entirely differently -- nobody's yet figured out how to create that market.
Maybe governments will pay. Perhaps via university systems in other wealthy countries where, unlike the U.S., universities are almost all public and part of a centralized organization. It sounds like that's what the Dutch are trying to do. People are trying to figure it out. In the U.S., government grants are starting to maybe include line items to pay for publication, but we're still figuring out what the actual right cost for that is, or how to create the organizations to organize it without charging extortionate rates. And meanwhile, existing faculty, without who's buy-in no change can happen, have a fear of major changes to the existing precarious system which may be a mess, but existing faculty know how to deal with it (or they wouldn't be existing faculty). Like people scared of change everywhere.
Thanks for your insight, it's really great hearing from a librarian. One sad, but interesting note: while it seems ridiculous, our costs to publish a paper have typically increased rather than decreased. The margins on traditional journals are actually shrinking, not growing. This is mostly because we simply can't easily drop print entirely for legacy journals. New ones we can launch digital only (although there are lots of reasons that launching new journals is increasingly difficult too). But even though it sounds ridiculous, our customers (you, the librarian, or at least your peers) often demand print in addition to the electronic. So now we have to pay for the electronic distribution as well as the print.
This is purely a problem of legacy. If you launch a new OA journal there isn't the same print expectation. And granted, it's a problem that will go away eventually. But I continue to be surprised that we can't simply stop doing all printing of journals.
And yet the amount of money libraries spend on getting access to published scholarly research has gone up astronomically too. [1] [2] (even if you normalize it for inflation, or per university FTE, or as a percentage of library or university budgets, whatever. Astronomicaly.)
So where's the money going?
When Elsevier reported 36% profit margins in 2010 according to Wikipedia[3], I have trouble believing that publishers are being squeezed too much. At least not Elsevier and other mega-publishers. I can't easily find googlable historical Elsevier reported profit margins, but I would be shocked if they have actually gone down rather than up over the past 10-15 years.
For comparison, it looks like traditional major book publishers have profit margins of around 10%. [4]
Wikipedia states and cites << [Elsevier] also claimed that its profit margins are "simply a consequence of the firm's efficient operation" >>
It doesn't sound like decreasing margins to me, and it doesn't seem that way to the universities paying for these margins, who can't afford it.
It's not math or CS, but some chemistry journals don't allow preprints on the arxiv. Also, for some new results in physics, you don't put them on the arxiv if you're worried about being scooped...
I'm currently co-authoring a paper that will be submitted to an Elsevier journal because it is a good fit for our work. All of my time and that of one other co-author is funded by an NIH grant which of course is funded by US tax dollars. I'm fairly certain the Elsevier agreement stipulates that I cannot share my paper without their permission – assuming the paper is accepted. If I were the NIH, I would make it illegal for grant recipients to publish anywhere that does not support open access.
"To advance science and improve human health, NIH makes the peer-reviewed articles it funds publicly available on PubMed Central. The NIH public access policy requires scientists to submit final peer-reviewed journal manuscripts that arise from NIH funds to PubMed Central immediately upon acceptance for publication"
That is good news indeed! Thank you for letting me know. This is my first publicly funded work and I am not familiar with many of the policies. I will sleep better knowing that our work will not be holed up exclusively in the Elsevier-beast.
For most Elsevier journals, you can post your preprint or even the accepted manuscript online--for example on a personal site or the arXiv. Sometimes I wonder why this point isn't brought up more often in discussions on open access publishing.
In last week's Economist of London (June 27, p.56) there is an article titled 'The halo effect' which explores conclusions drawn by a recent Princeton University study of large firms prosecuted for corruption and amount of subsequent punitive damages as a function of perceived 'corporate social responsibility'. Interesting finding was that 'spending on employee and community relations had a much bigger impact on the prosecutors than did promoting diversity or being environmentally friendly.' When push comes to shove all human interaction, like politics, is parochial. So it's not surprising that within the first-world academic community all Elsevier effort at 'making developing world libraries flourish' by supplying discount textbooks coupled with programs to 'award women scientists in the developing world' has done little to mitigate perception of the firm as being both avaricious and elitist. Seems like a change in strategy is in order.
I would like to see the governments that fund research get together and create a rule that your government funding requires that a public version of the paper be made available online before that paper could be submitted to a private publisher. This would help to separate the public availability of useful information paid for by the public issue from the academics' career-promotion-via-publication issue.
That would, of course, mean that papers would appear prior to acceptance and peer review, which would speed up the pace of research at the cost (if peer review is of any value) of putting more shaky research out there. I doubt this would be a big problem, since researchers in the field know what is going on anyway (they get early copies or at least early discussion at pay-walled conferences already), and others who read the research could see that it had not yet been published in a journal and decide for themselves what to make of it.
Papers that got peer reviewed and published would still have the published version used in citations, so you could see how far it had gone in the publishing process at time of citation. I wouldn't be surprised if people in the field knew how much credibility to give to a paper based on the researchers without waiting for the researchers' more established rivals to "review" it to death.
OTOH, I'm not sure if the peer review system isn't ripe for disruption anyway.
Peer review is a system that's designed for the old dead-trees world, where space for publishing in print journals was extremely limited, publishing in a print journal was the only way to share knowledge, and you only got one shot at it because there's limited options for fixing errors after the plates are engraved. It's primarily there to ensure a minimum standard for the quality of the paper, not necessarily the research. So what it's really good for ensuring is that the paper explains the research well enough that someone who's reading it (and knows what they're doing) could attempt to replicate the work.
What it is not designed to do, though, is ensure that the research is valid. Peer review can't reliably detect fraudulent data, nor can it reliably detect fabricated data. Heck, it can't even detect p-value fishing, which is a really sobering problem when you consider how many scientists really don't seem to understand why p-value fishing is such a problem in the first place. There's supposed to be a different mechanism for detecting that stuff: replication.
Buy ironcially, replication is something the current journal system actively discourages. Space in journals is a scarce resource. Furthermore, journals are competing with each other for prestige. They've got very little reason to waste space on replicating old findings (booooooooring) when they could be publishing brand new stuff (exciting!). In turn, researchers have very little incentive to try and replicate each other's findings. It's already hard to justify spending money on replicating existing findings. But there's no way in hell a researcher is going to waste their precious resources on work that they wouldn't even be able to get published.
So the long and short of it is, people place far too much trust in peer review. In fact, peer review is a terribly low hurdle. All too often complete junk gets through it about as easily as excellent science. The trick is that it just has to be well written junk.
OTOH, a system that removes barriers to doing replication work - or better yet, starts actively encouraging it - could also do much of the work of peer review. Because then we'd have peers reviewing the actual research and not just things people write about research.
Well said, and it explains part of what I meant when I wrote "(if peer review is of any value)" in the post. The other reason I wrote that is because of the political shenanigans inherent in the peer-reviewed journal system. "Anonymous peers" will sabotage the work of their rivals, and the journal editors will often choose them for the purpose of sabotaging research that doesn't support the causes the journal editors are working to promote.
I find it amazing that such an article can be written without spending a single word about the craziness of open access.
Let's repeat the core concept, in the words of the article:
the university or the financier of the research pays to get published
In my own words: the author of the research is the customer of the journal.
It used to be that the reader was the customer, which paid the journal that provided him with the service of having the article reviewed and doing its best to make sure the research was solid.
Now the emperor is naked, and it's finally official what's the purpose of academic journals: let people have their grants renewed.
In reputable open-access journals, you can have the fees waived if you don't have grant or institutional funding that's earmarked to pay for publication/dissemination of research. What usually happens is that universities take at least some of the budgets they previously used to buy journal subscriptions, and put them towards publication fees instead. NIH and NSF and those kinds of grants will also pay publication fees (along perhaps with other ways of disseminating research). If you have access to neither, then you don't pay. Here's is the policy from PLoS, for example: https://www.plos.org/publications/publication-fees/plos-publ...
In CS there are typically no fees to begin with, at least in the areas I work in (JMLR and JAIR are no-fee open-access journals). Instead journals are run basically without staff, authors format their own documents in LaTeX, and an institution (in the case of JMLR, MIT) donates some server space and maybe the time of a student assistant. The main downside to this is that publication quality control tends to be a bit worse, as there's no copyediting or layout type of service (JMLR has quite a few surprisingly badly edited papers, despite being a generally good journal). But it is usually "good enough".
Put more favourably, the purpose of an open access journal is to arrange a critical evaluation of my stuff and to point other researchers to it (curation). To justify paying for this, I think of it like hiring a consultancy and, later, a marketing firm for my research.
Perhaps in a better world, we would disentangle the review and the curation aspects -- I'd pay for the arrangement of peer review of my article, upload it freely to the arxive, and pay separately for unbiased, curated lists of noteworthy articles in my field.
There is nothing crazy about it. Most research is funded by tax money and researchers have a moral and in some countries legal obligation to make their results accessible to the public. The traditional publishing model failed to achieve this. Open access journals are a simple and clean solution.
You say "It used to be that the reader was the customer" but you don't explain why it should be this way.
But the financier of the research is already paying for the research to be done, rarely for their economic interest, but so that it gets out there, establishes the science, furthers knowledge, cements reputations, etc. For research done by economic interests the incentive is even stronger, a drug company, say, wants to get their drug out, proven, marketed.
Your response seems high on derision, but you've not actually made any point about why it shouldn't be the people paying for the research's role to pay for the research's availability.
The counter arguments is on availability, the hegemony of large institutions, and the lack of transparency of funding bodies.
So, other than derision, accusations of naked emperors, and a variation of "didn't used to be like that", what actually is your problem with that model?
> So, other than derision, accusations of naked emperors, and a variation of "didn't used to be like that", what actually is your problem with that model?
The fact that the interest of the journal is now naturally aligned with that of the writer, instead of with that of the reader.
This makes it very useful for the writer, which pays[0], publishes and so gets to live another year having his grant renewed; it also makes it quite useless for the reader, which cannot count on a seriously curated publication.
[0] "Pays" meaning "diverts part of his funding allowance"
I don't know if that's true. "Readers" currently means "research libraries", who act on behalf of the scientists doing the research, so shift isn't so great.
Additionally, open access journals still must maintain an image of prestige and quality -- authors want to publish in the most prestigious possible journal. There is incentive for journals to compete on quality even when paid by authors.
In any case, I think the role of journals as gatekeepers for quality is overstated (peer reviewers and editors generally do a bad job assessing article quality), and as science shifts to alternative forms of peer review and publication, journals will matter less.
It makes much more sense to pay once for publishing a paper than continuously paying for it forever, doesn't matter by who. Searching for a 50+ years old paper and bumping into a paywall is really frustrating. What justifies these journals to make a profit from these papers forever?
As a related aside: Does anyone know why arXiv has no system of public comments or (even better) a public peer review system built in? Whenever this topic comes up at a (CS) conference, everyone is for that, and yet, arXiv is functionally the same for quite a few years now.
This is actually something I have been thinking about writing myself. Look at all the major social networks, and all their metrics, analysis, ranking systems and the like.
Imaging what you could do with a social-network like publication database (research-gate sort of is, but it doesn't think big enough and the UX is confusing, imho). Every publication became a "post" so to speak. You could easily include discussions (both on the paper, as well as general discussions), ratings, user curated lists (instead of expensive journals), host links to any relevant non-paper data. Funding could be provided by Universities, or by means of a registration fee, or simply with an ad supported model. Targeted ads will probably bring in a relatively high CPM due to the target audience.
<rant>
Incidentally, while we're at it, we could also get rid of strict formatting guidelines and super-formal writing, some of the best papers I've read are informal. And it's a very modern thing to do anyway, old papers by Kelvin and the like read much better than what we have to write these days.
</rant>
Note that there are some projects that are related to this, for instance a social network for scientists [1], a Github-like site for article creation with public comments [2] and some unknown third party comment systems for arXiv [3]. (I just found this one by googling.)
For any success of such a project, the official endorsement from arXiv is crucial. Academia is a very conservative place; anything branded as a social network might hit a snag, especially if "pricing" or closed source recommendation systems pop up.
Hmm, authorea looks pretty interesting. Researchgate I touched on before. the last one looks more like a quick experiment than a serious attempt.
I don't think official endorsement by arXiv is necessary, what is important is to gain a critical mass. I think authorea has the right idea to give users a incentive to use the program. If possible, I would offer more free access to gain that initial traction, but of course this requires an investor with deep enough pockets to take the hit. Networking would also be key, to bring it back to the original article: if you could work with those involved here and offer your services to host all these open-access papers...
>Academia is a very conservative place; anything branded as a social network might hit a snag, especially if "pricing" or closed source recommendation systems pop up.
I think we need something similar in openness and positioning as Github. AFAIK Github did not market itself as a social platform at first, but it just made it so easy for its users that it ended up being key to its success.
I think that is the overall approach one should take, don't force the users into a pattern, that will not work and definitely not in rigid-academia. You have to guide them by a good UX, make them think they want to use your features because that is what's good for them (they're like cats in that regard).
Notice that arXiv does not need any money from its users; it is fully funded from academic/private donations and it does not seek to maximize revenue.
Authorea is very different; it has a very tough pricing model where you have to either choose to publish even partial work while you are writing (unacceptable to most scientists I know) or pay per article AND per month.
Basically, my issue with it is the same as with the current open-access model: I am trying my hardest to produce good science and release it for free; yet somebody tries to profit not from my own results, but from my desire to have those results published for free. ArXiv helps me while refusing to profit from this desire, and thus I love it.
You have to keep in mind that a lot of scientists (I think this is true for compsci/math/physics) choose a 50% pay cut so that they can do science, and not go into the (programming) industry. Speaking as a PhD student, we have modest means and do not like to be gouged.
True, which is one of the reasons why I'd like to do some number crunching regarding hosting costs vs. sponsors/ads and premium features (like GitHub's private repos) separate from the Open Access features.
What is peer review, but a formal system of review, comment, redrafting and endorsement? That could be moderated through the same system.
Drafting, extending and version control would be particularly important, I think. It's been a long problem with dead-tree journals, following adjustments in results is hard because they inherently rely on back-links, retractions (in extreme cases), letters, etc. Not a coherent way of centralising information.
Because it was intended as a repository of preprints instead of a publishing platform. It surely has the potential of becoming one, but that has not happened yet.
Besides, if you open up physics papers to public comments you'll be deluged by cranks who think they can prove Einstin woz teh rong!!!! with a bit of algebra and a lot of punctuation.
I don't know how you'd do useful public peer review. By definition, "peer" assumes some professional domain competence.
The current system is probably too restrictive, but it's hard to imagine a more open system that's at least as useful.
Maybe it can work as follows: Support a concept of "reviewer group" that can be created by anyone but can only be joined on invitation. When you post a review, the groups you belong to are shown; you can also filter articles that are approved by a certain group. Eventually, some groups will gain reputation by producing quality reviews on certain fields and people will treat papers approved by them as high-quality.
Heck, you can even create groups like "former reviewers of XXX journal" and as soon as you convince other people, gain reputation very quickly.
My idea would be to either restrict access (to certain areas, such as comments and reviews) to verified groups. Initially I would say to verify users through universities and/or use a computer automated system to rank each user, determining whose opinion to weight heavily and whose to dismiss.
I would also make reviews public and name-and-shame any caught review fixing (if proper evidence is available), which would be the bigger problem imho. But again, I think this is something we should also be able to detect using proper algorithms. If a user Alice always rates the papers by Bob highly, even when others disagree, perhaps her opinion of Bob's work is not to trustworthy.
Hey, my idea is basically a free-market counterpart to yours: instead of restricting access to verified groups, allow anyone to create groups and let them compete for reputation.
This is how some journals come to be more prestigious than others anyway. You don't restrict the creation of journals to verified people; instead everyone gets to run a journal and they compete for reputation.
I think both ideas have merit. Which works best in practice would depend on the degree-of-shit (that's the scientific term) on your network. I fear special interest groups will, if they want, always outnumber legit researchers. If your network becomes large enough to attract the interest of these groups you might end up with "attacks" on climate research and other 'controversial' issues. Verified users could prevent this.
OTOH, I do not like excluding users, but I think public read-access and write-access trough accredited universities and research groups would be a fair balance. (Note, I also think if there is a charge associated with this process we should charge relative to the users country. Subsidizing access for developing countries by charging more in developed countries. To reduce exclusions.)
I don't see how special interest groups will be a problem. Surely, they can flood the reviews with unlegit attacks, but the academia can just ignore them and only stick to the high-reputation review groups. They can make a lot of noise, but I don't think it can be a big problem for the academia.
I'd say that from a UX experience you want the default-settings to work 99.9% of the time. This includes the ratings and reviews of articles. Which you could then only do by effectively censoring these groups when calculating ratings. If you're going to do that, why let them on in the first place?
I would really like a more comprehensive answer from somebody close to the source; you more or less say "it does not have it because it has not happened yet".
Note that arXiv has features that many previous repositories did not have, such as easy access to the original TeX files.
Plus, a comment system for a repository of preprints sounds very useful to me -- you can have early birds (such as PhDs or very active scientists) comment on your paper even before you submit to a conference/journal, thus getting good advice for free.
Wikipedia told me this, but the homepage also advertises itself as an e-print service.
Anyway, "it does not have it because it has not happened yet" is exactly my point, because I don't see why it cannot evolve into a publishing platform.
I'm the former director of innovation for IEEE. I actually recruited many members of my team from HN. We were developing some great stuff to address many of the comments here. Unfortunately they just didn't have the stomach for it - and hardly none of it hit users (and the stuff that did was so watered down to protect current revenue streams that it's completely different (and in some cases silly).
There were a handful of folks in this thread who said they'd be interested in building some new stuff to solve the era problems in how scientific knowledge is created and shared. If anyone wants to contact me directly, I'd be happy to organize those interested, capture ideas, and see if there's something common we all want to work on. I'm at tom@thegrif.net or www.linkedin.com/in/tomgriffin.
There's good arguements for and against a complete conversion to open access research. Ruining all the free fun of open access are charlatans from around the world creating open access journals from nothing and picking up free money and prestige. I'd like to abring up this website:
http://scholarlyoa.com/
It's run by a librarian in Colorado, and he has a set of criteria to determine whether a given open access journal qualifies as a "predatory" journal. Sometimes you see stuff like this gem:
I can't find the link, but I once read a story where they published a paper titled, "Enter paper title". That's how reputable some of these outfits are.
> If this way of putting pressure on the publishers does not work, the next step would be to ask reviewers to stop working for Elsevier. After that, scientists could be asked to stop publishing in Elsevier journals.
Why is stopping publishing in the journal the last resort? This may be my lack of understanding showing, but why wouldn't that be the first step? I would think that all the other pieces would be much more replaceable than the actual papers themselves.
Because it also has the highest impact on your scientists. Asking somebody to stop publishing in the major journals of his field is not going to get as much understanding as the weaker measures. You don't want all your potential PhD students running for the hills because they fear they won't get good publications...
The main funding agency in my country is starting to demand that we publish in open-access journals. It seems like a wonderful thing, except for one little detail: the agency is not supplying any extra funding. The difference in cost between conventional and open-access grants is a significant fraction of the typical grant. Are researchers expected to publish less frequently, or to reduce students stipends?
Why don't all universities just make all their professors papers available online. No journals, etc, just put the damn pdfs online and let people cite by hyperlink and normal inline citations. To hell with the publishers.
The people generally already do make the papers available, but that's still not a replacement for journals or indexed conferences; if I just put the paper online without it also being in a reputable publication, then from the point of carreer and future funding I might just as well thrown it in garbage.
The same goes with low-ranked open access publication venues - publishing in them is worse than not publishing at all; since it prevents me from publishing that research in some place that matters.
What seems to be broken, though, is the question of why that place matters; it seems to be cabal-driven and to some extent corrupted. The results of research should be able to matter purely on their own merit, not because of a tag some committee put on it. Idealistic? Of course, but that doesnt mean that is not worth pursuing.
Most people do that, and most publishers allow authors to publish preprints of their works. Google Scholar is the usual place for looking for citations.
But all this rely on the good faith of the editor and universities preserving the author personal pages forever. And the entire system lacks any standardization or interoperability.
Over 15,000 academics and researchers have already signed a petition boycotting Elsevier. The effort is but a drop in the bucket in terms of what's needed. http://thecostofknowledge.com/
It will be interesting to see how this evolves. I also see more open access publications (where the publication is free for the public, but the author pays the publisher) these days--but I'm not sure if they have subsidies for researchers from smaller institutions.
"It is not unthinkable that if I would submit a love letter, it would be published sooner than an intelligent scholarly article by a young researcher."
It surely is, but beware that unlike fields like social networking which makes money from idle and bored people, scientists have a lot of things to get busy and excited about and are much harder to convince, unless there is some real advantages coming up.
Don't conflate academic publishing with research. It's a facet of research, and there are those working on 'disrupting' it in some form or another (academia.edu, Mendeley (now owned by Elsevier...), Authoria, etc.). Academia, in some sense of the word, is facing MOOCs.
Research itself is a process that is basically self-disrupting, although maybe not in the original Clayton Christensen sense of a newer, shittier, cheaper product moving up-market and displacing the incumbents. Typically, it's the newer, more expensive, better product displacing the older ones and then moving down-market.
That being said, EU CS academia is a cess pool where more often than not it matters more who you know than what your actual research is. I partially blame the funding agencies for attaching unrealistic publication metrics to grants (publish or perish). On the other hand i had high ranking university staff tell me "they love how they can just burn €6M in 2 year EU project with zero outcome without consequences". Reviewers of such projects only need to have the right political color and zero domain knowledge.
It's sad really and i'm happy i don't have to work in such an environment amnymore.