But the reason we still use these publishers is simple and we all know it. Many people are happy to complain about publishers but nobody is happy to take the hit on their own CV. You shouldn't use publishers for the above reasons, but did you see my latest Impact Factor XX paper in Journal You Have Heard Of?
I tried buying a few reissued historical mathematics books published by Chelsea (now owned by the AMS) and I could have gotten a better output by taking the Internet Archive’s scan to my local copy shop. I quickly returned them and looked online for a used original.
It makes me also not want to buy recent editions of e.g. Springer mathematics books: the technical content may be great, but the binding falls off and the figures all look like crap. It’s a hard choice whether to buy a used 15 year old copy with various technical errors sprinkled throughout, or a poorly made recent edition with corrections and an extra chapter or two.
Producer prices for printing have long been increasing much quicker than general inflation for a long time, so either lower quality or higher prices for the end product is a natural consequence.
Those kind of services do make very small print runs possible at lower prices than would be the case for traditional printing at the same time (because they have lower fixed and higher per-unit costs than traditional printing), but they don't represent a reduction in overall printing costs.
Is it too much to ask to name actual services that meet the description given? That is:
> print-your-own support and produce good binding on quality paper at good prices
I know it's a bit subjective, but I want to know, which services do that?
Certain subjects depend on quality, clear illustrations.
I just assumed a new book meant quality of the original, but I was wrong.
Years ago, when I was learning watch repair, I bought a new copy of The Watch Repairer's Manual, by Henry Fried. Published by the American Watchmaker's Press. It wasen't cheap then either.
As I was reading it, the diagrams seemed fuzzy. I thought it was just me though. I'm a first edition collector, and have a huge library. You would think I would have spotted a bad printing run.
Well, I happened to buy the same book off eBay, but was published in 1973. The pages, and illustrations were crisp, and clear.
I learned my lesson though. It's a clever way to sell a new book. My lesson was don't trust new book anywhere. Used, old print is fine by me.
New is not better when it comes to certain books. In the back of my mind, I wondered how anyone could offer a new copy of an obscure book. Well, it's by inferior printing.
There's a market for quality reprints of certain books. We like to think we made so much progress, but not when it comes to printing books. We have regressed. Pick up any magazine from the 40's through the 70's, and you will notice the quality difference. I'm not saying we need to go back to Linotype printing. Im just saying we have regressed in printing.
(My grandfather was a completely color blind printer. He went his whole career never telling anyone. He was laser focused on the print quality, or "tack sharp" as he used to say. Yes--completely color blind. He would ask his coworkers, customers if the colors looked right. He would then make color adjustments. His best advice to me was moderation in everything. This was coming from a 3 pack/day smoker, eight drink minimum, with a 1/2 hose feeding his lower extremities due to plaque. He lived until 80. Crazy?)
Is it possible that what you'd bought was a counterfeit? Amazon apparently has a problem with knock-offs being commingled with their publisher-supplied stock. Here's the founder of No Starch Press tweeting about Amazon selling counterfeit copies of Python For Kids. The diagrams were fuzzy & pixelated (and black and white), and the paper quality was significantly inferior:
https://twitter.com/billpollock/status/844030960333152256
There was an HN discussion about it 6 months ago:
This is exactly the kind if situation where digital hi-res screens and zoomable vector diagrams as presentation formats are immensely superior to paper print. You're a collector and hence holding on to print editions because of nostalgia. We're however hobbled from evolving high quality modern documentation by being tired to "printability" like pdfs and Tex
Hard to browse, bookmark, annotate (either in place or separately), cross-reference, cut and paste (as with scissors). Doesn’t help that most books are not available in a carefully crafted digital-native format.
The people I know with the most effective research habits, even ones who get most of their material online, still make great use of note cards, white boards, marked-up printouts, and the like.
For now paper is definitely preferable for reading anything but pulp novels, newspapers, and ongoing discussions. But I can imagine that changing if some people put in work on the software side in the next couple decades. Biggest pain point at the moment is probably authoring tools.
If every basic textbook was filled with interactive (programmable?) diagrams, computer simulations, extra related media, links between text and video lectures, a wider variety of practice problems at varying difficulty with full listings of hints and solutions, in depth technical annotations and bibliographic links to primary sources (viewable in place) for every chapter, etc., learning from textbooks could be made much more reader-centered, with books becoming less a serial prose format and more like a tree/graph. But all that stuff takes massive amounts of work, and would require some kind of collective funding by a group laser-focused on the real-world effectiveness and quality of the output, rather than political bullshit or rent-seeking, as most current curriculum designers and textbook publishers are. Teams of volunteers like Wikipedia aren’t really able (at least that I’ve seen) to make a novice-friendly but still accurate explanation or a coherent narrative for a whole large subject.
Your other points I think are important, but really more related to teaching materials and textbooks than journal articles. Projects like nanohub are doing interesting work in this area imo.
What to me would sound less unlikely (and I am totally on the outside of all of this), if PIs take into account editor's interests and preferences -- that is, if you know that editor is interested in topic A (say, oxygen on exoplanets) you might lean in that direction with the paper you hope to publish there (e.g., in abstract / intro / conclusion stress how your research supports existence or lack thereof of oxygen). Also not impossible to know if an issue is dedicated to a specific grand theme, so articles on that have a significantly higher acceptance chance.
Whether this is 100% kosher or not can be debated, but this is far, far off from agreements that a journal will publish whatever a specific researcher writes.
If you need anecdotal examples, I'm sure we can provide some :)
If you're a PI on a big project or heading a big group, it's routine business to meet journal editors, invite them to your lab and reach publication agreements before writing your paper.
Obviously the paper will still go to review. But even that is already a big hurdle you have bypassed. In the big 3 journals, it's equally tough to get to review than to pass reviews once there. Plus, with direct contact to the editor, it's easier to get your paper reviewed by friendlier peers and/or influence ultimate editorial decisions.
University Press type publishers have always targeted upmarket since the 1970’s, when a wave of consolidation and focus on short-term profits squeezed those books out of regular publishing.
So many books are written by idiot business consultants with nothing to say. Think Randi Zuckerberg but maybe not as bad. University Presses, to my eternal gratitude, do not seem to have this problem yet and all their books say something worth saying.
Sorry to go on that rant, but just wanted to stick up a little bit forOxford University Press, which publishes the amazing “Very Short Introduction” series btw.
Also would like to say your point is still valid. I’ve heard the same thing about the music industry. When you go to a label, they expect you to already have a marketing plan...weird
Having a dedicated editor would definitely improve the quality of the results. You wouldn't believe what authors do to their PDF files before submission. I've seen papers that center an 8x11" copy of their paper in the middle of an A4 canvas. I've seen papers where all the pages are just giant bitmaps that show the paper (presumably to avoid plagiarism). I've seen papers that have incorrectly-embedded fonts, so after our pipeline, we didn't notice that all the text in figures was replaced by Chinese characters (sorry!). I've seen papers that have permuted font maps, so even though the paper looks correct on the screen, the letters on the OCR layer don't match what you see, making the work impossible to find on Google.
Not to complain against the authors. We all have to break out our LaTeX tricks minutes before the submission deadline to fix that weird compile bug. My point is that it's important to have _some_ oversight. It's not enough to just zip up all the PDF files and call that "open access."
The reason I stopped pirating music wasn't because I thought there was anything wrong with it.
I stopped pirating music because services like spotify have so many value adds for such a low monthly cost that it makes sense to use their services rather than pirate.
Spotify offered something better than free.
It's time for industries that haven't caught up with the times to start rethinking their business model. Opinions on IP aside, piracy is going nowhere and trying to fight the pirates based on ethics is futile.
That's good and all, but we can imagine a volunteer-run service that's just as good or better than Spotify -- but it's based on piracy. We could also imagine it reaching the pinnacle or convenience, so nothing else could be added except marginal improvements.
Would that make using it OK -- that there's no other paid alternative that's more convenient?
In the end somebody got to pay the artists both for the production costs and for making a living on top of them. And I don't say every artist deserves money just because they are an artist -- but every artist that people actually listen to they work does deserve a cut for that.
You can talk about how artists need to be paid until the end of time, but that won't change people's behavior much.
We don't ask that for many other moral dilemmas -- we consider certain things unacceptable and try to stomp them even if people "do them". Why should it be the relevant question for music distribution?
We now have the technology to make available the great majority of human knowledge and culture to a vast amount of humanity for free. I'd call that a very positive state both for the people receiving it and the benefits it would bring to the world.
And the only thing stopping us is that certain people would like to be paid. It's the same argument with cheap generic drugs for the third world. At some point you have to incentivise research. But also, at some point you have to consider the benefits to the rest of society too.
That depends: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Lending_Right
"A Public Lending Right (PLR) programme, is a programme intended to either compensate authors for the potential loss of sales from their works being available in public libraries [...] Canada, the United Kingdom, all the Scandinavian countries, Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Israel, Australia, and New Zealand currently have PLR programmes. [...] How amounts of payment are determined also varies from country to country. Some pay based on how many times a book has been taken out of a library, others use a simpler system of payment based simply on whether a library owns a book or not. [...] In the United Kingdom authors are paid on a per-loan basis calculated from a representative sample of libraries. The current rate is 7.82 pence per individual loan."
(I imagine that any occurrences of "authors are paid" should be replaced by "publishers are paid", but I don't know specifics.)
For almost any kind of digital "piracy" you can make arguments that sound very similar to yours, because in the end libraries and piracy do something very similar: both buy content once and redistribute it for free. The only reason we treat libraries different is because of history and because libraries have a bunch of physical restrictions that seem silly in the digital world.
There's nothing wrong when discussing the morality of piracy, but it's irrelevant when the topic at hand is what media distributors should do in order to make money.
Imagine a convenience store which experiences so much theft that it loses money, and they're trying to figure out what to change to save the store. Is it useful in that context to state that "theft is immoral"?
Copyright is basically a subsidy to content creators. Just like any other government subsidy, it should be adjusted periodically to balance its benefits against any drawbacks.
There is no question of morality here, only a question of effectiveness -- is a subsidy really needed, and if so, how much?
That seems like a weirdly narrow definition of morality, maybe due to the long association with the Christianity and the faith's retreat from the public sphere.
I prefer the definition of morality as the set of shared rules and norms that we as a society decide are to our mutual benefit. In that case, laws and morality are absolutely closely intertwined.
But all I see is a bunch of interest groups trying to pretend that there is a consensus and painting anyone who disagrees as a modern day Jack Sparrow. It's easy to manufacture a consensus if all the opponents are criminals, isn't it?
I don't deny that there might be some kind of broad consensus on the issue of copyright. I just don't think that the content of it will be anywhere near what the law of the United States currently says.
I said "Copyright is not about morality." Copyright is about promoting creativity first and foremost. It has zero moral value apart from whatever starlight it might reflect from the more fundamental value of creativity when it's in the right point along its orbit (when it works effectively).
Suppose you're building a startup to help poor people. That's obviously about morality. But how about your choice of javascript framework? You just use whatever floats your MVP without torturing your devs too much. And as soon as it outlives its usefulness, you can throw it away without a second thought and there's nothing morality has to say about it.
E.g. copyright maximalists say that pirates are thieves, that they unjustly take from content creators what is rightfully theirs.
Copyright opponents will say that this is a cash grab by greedy corporations, that this will destroy the freedom of the web, etc.
Theft, destroying freedom -- these are explicitly moral claims.
You might be right that morality is not the appropriate framework with which to think about copyright, and I tend to agree, although that certainly hasn't stopped both sides from harnessing moral outrage to buttress their viewpoints.
The maximalists claim that copyright violation is identical to theft, whereas their opponents claim that copyright law is being used to make huge profits and destroy freedom. The former puts copyright at the center of the moral spotlight, but the latter pushes it aside and helps us see that justice and freedom are the true moral issues.
In the same way that we have some folk intuitions about the validity of ownership of property, we have them about intellectual property. Namely, we (the citizen of the western world) have an intuition that creators of intellectual works should have some say in how their work is exploited.
When it comes to the abstraction required to create a system of property, the one that strikes me a the most bonkers is the concept that people can "own" a geographic section of the earth.
Laws and ideas about ownership and property don't exist as some Platonic Ideal, but they change and morph to fit the societies they exist in. IMHO, IP law today, especially but not exclusively in the United States, does not serve content creators but publishers, and it is my belief that it is time to adjust the laws to fit the society we want to live in.
With the obligation to follow the law comes the right to demand changes in the law.
TL;DR: physical property="who gets to have this", 'intellectual property laws'="who gets to make money from this".
Physical property isn't natural, but it's an answer to physical scarcity, which is natural.
You and your friend can build identical houses, they can't be both exactly at the same location. Physical property creates a non-volatile answer to the question "Who gets to build his house there?".
All working societies must address this problem (even societies in which money doesn't exist), hence "property" (which I don't claim is the only answer).
Texts, recordings, etc. are a completely different issue.
Original works might be rare, however, there's no scarcity in using them : you and your friend can both listen to your copy of a recording without interfering. So there's need to answer "who gets to listen to this recording?", as there's no scarcity, and thus, no conflict.
The conflict lies between distributors, because the only scarcity that remains, when works can be copied for free, is in the exploitation. For distributors, money is scarce, so question becomes: "who gets to make money from this recording?".
This is a very different question, which already presupposes the existence of money, and exploitation.
Arguments that the concept of intellectual property serves no purpose are refuted by the increasing role it plays I our economy.
See: Moral rights were first recognized in France and Germany,[4] before they were included in the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works in 1928.[5]:37 Canada recognizes moral rights (droits moraux) in its Copyright Act (Loi sur le droit d'auteur).[6] The United States became a signatory to the convention in 1989,[7] and incorporated a version of moral rights under its copyright law under Title 17 of the U.S. Code.
> Moral rights are distinct from any economic rights tied to copyrights.
I have a moral right to insist that I wrote something, and argue against people who say otherwise, even if I assigned the copyright away, renounced it, or let it expire. It's more about honor than property. A Picasso is a Picasso no matter who owns the painting now. It's an insult to Beethoven to say that he didn't compose his 9th even though all his copyright has long expired. The same would be true even if all copyright law was repealed tomorrow.
Reegardless of how you feel about that scope of law (and I'm not declaring views one way or the other), the point remains that your initial assertion does not square with the stated foundations of law, in at least part. Regardless of how separable or inseparable those moral rights are from any other.
If the HN hivemind wants to declare its support for the counterfactual, so be it.
But just because people think all law is about morality doesn't make it so. It's the job of a philosopher to question people's assumptions and identify errors in them. This looks like a classic case of hasty generalization. Some laws are about morality. Other laws might not be.
I think copyright belongs in the non-moral category. You have not offered any reason to disagree with my statement other than a vague "But people in the 18th century believed otherwise!" Well, I'm not disputing your historical facts. The fact is that people in the 18th century believed a lot of things. Some were true, some were not.
Again, this is at odds with your initial statement. And again, for some quite large and significant aspects of copyright.
This confusion was no doubt intended by those who coined the term "moral rights". But they are not the same thing. Copyright law is not needed to enforce moral rights, as you can very well see from the fact that we do acknowledge the creators of works that predate copyright by hundreds or thousands of years. We can freely copy Homer's works. And we do. Be we don't remove his name from them.
There aren't many people arguing that the 2010s have been a better decade for music than the 60s to 90s.
Of course, this assumes consumers and content distributors can join the dots - and so far there isn't much evidence they can.
Since the producers are obligated to maximize profits for their shareholders under most corporate structures by supreme court decisions, their focus will be to reduce labor costs while maximizing total revenue from consumers.
There are no winners here except the distributors. Some kind of artist cooperative is a necessity. Then at least the smaller creators will get paid fairly.
It's also worth noting that part of the reason the UK has/had such a vibrant music scene is the dole. That is, they pay their artists to let them do their thing.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/money-are-y...
https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/art-and-design/role-of-th...
Right now, I'm following maybe 10 or so artists on social media, youtube, bandcamp, etc.
I pay a handful of them $1-$10 a month via patreon in return for them releasing their music for free via youtube (I generally also get clean, high quality versions out of this).
There's another handful I follow who release albums on Bandcamp and I can listen, and if I like it I can pay $5-$10 to download and keep forever.
I don't use Spotify or similar services, but my friends who do tell me about a huge world of similar small artists and variety of tastes they discovered through that service.
The music industry no longer takes a few select artists and makes them superstars everyone has heard of, yes. But in return there's something for everyone, and lots of artists making ends meet rather than a few artists getting rich. I think this is a net positive.
This is ok, perhaps even desirable. Ultimately, the market for music is already so oversaturated that more artists aren't really "needed" (that is to say, there is much more than enough music to service demand, not that more good art isn't valuable), and most non-elite artists would welcome reduced competition.
> There aren't many people arguing that the 2010s have been a better decade for music than the 60s to 90s.
Well either way that is a totally subjective argument that cannot ever be concluded definitively, there is so much more music produced today than in the 60s-90s that it'd be impossible to even make a fair subjective judgement regarding which decades produced "better" music. Certainly, I think everyone can agree that stronger economic incentives do not necessarily mean better work is produced and there are those who suggest that the opposite is true.
Costs of prediction are pretty low now, everything except the cheapest indy albums sounds great.
That may be true for music, but simultaneously, we have another "golden age" of western TV series (both live-action and animated). What's the difference? From what I can see, TV series are just as heavily pirated as music is.
The difference is those series have still enough paid subscribers to make the production costs and handsome profits worth it.
Things are now in a great turmoil, so we're still seeing where this goes. But I think it's no accident that Patreon was started by an independent musician. They expect to pay out $150m this year to artists. What do patrons get in exchange? Basically nothing. They just like supporting people doing good work.
I agree the morality of pure piracy is not so great. But the notion of piracy itself is rooted in a specific and entirely artificial theory of ownership, plus an industrial model built around that. The morality of that industrial model is in practice not so great either.
Things like Patreon and Wikipedia suggest that the morality of the commons is one that could work well in practice. It has its issues, but I don't think they're a priori greater than the historical alternative. Especially if it's supplemented with the sorts of things that Kevin Kelly describes as "better than free": http://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/
In the US this comes from the copyright clause of the constitution.
"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
The problem this was trying to solve was how do you incentivize people to create in order to 'promote the progress of science and useful arts' for the public's benefit. Limited time monopolies are the means to get to the overall goal of promoting the progress of science and useful art for the public's benefit.
Originally this limited time was 14 years with the ability to renew (once for 28 years max) - it also wasn't automatic and had to be registered. Today it's automatic and 75 years after the death of the creator (or 95 years for contract work) and even worse this change was retroactive. The retroactive change isn't within the original spirit of the law since people don't need to be incentivized to create something they've already created. You also can't opt out of it for works you've created, the best you can do is permissively license something (just stating 'this is public domain' doesn't do anything).
Not only does this lead to problems with orphan works, but massive amounts of culturally relevant material is now off limits for new people to create with - this inhibits new work except under the narrowly defined free use exceptions. Inhibiting progress of science and useful arts is the opposite of the original intent.
Copyright law today has mutated into protecting the profit of the rights holders and extending the length indefinitely, but only by a handful of years at a time so the supreme court can't rule it unconstitutional since it's technically a 'limited time'.
All of this was never intended to stop not for profit sharing of content and the law does a lot more bad than good - we want the minimum limited time restriction to encourage creation for the public benefit, not years after the death of the creator so the family and subsidiary companies can profit forever.
In the case of the journals it's even worse since they're exploiting the researcher's need for prestige and blocking access to publicly funded research. It's a corrupting influence on science and incentivizes scientists not to cooperate. These journals hold science back and offer no real benefit - maybe scihub will actually force them to provide value, but even if it kills them everyone will be better off.
This is further complicated by rights holders having enormous amounts of money they can use to influence legislation.
It typically all comes back to the campaign finance reform Lawrence Lessing talks about in Republic Lost. I think Copyright was one of the original issues that lead to his core argument of a corrupting influence on modern US politics. Specifically the issue with the journals was what drove Aaron Swartz to try and export them all (probably to make something like scihub, but he never got there).
Now the publisher knows this too, and tries to assert monopoly rights, using the skirts of copyright law, over a certain time frame, in the vending of images of the publication. It's ridiculous how little value he's added. And when you examine who paid for the research or work in question, it's a racket. Third world baksheesh is certainly less injurious to progress.
There's a huge crisis of compensation for "content creators", and Spotify does not seem like the hundred year solution. Especially seeing how it keeps maintaining an artificial distinction between producers and consumers and acts as a filter for what counts as music.
That's a non sequitur.
The questions Wiley are dancing around are "what does the publisher actually do" and "is anyone, author or reader, prepared to pay for that".
I think if people can develop Tinder + Buy It Now with no repercussions, questions like "is it okay?" cease being useful. The question of morality goes out the window.
That's a big if; repercussions for prostitution listing services, even with basically zero opsec, tend not to be immediate, and pinkapp hasn't gotten big yet.
> On top of this, we will allow shareholders to opt into hidden ownership to allow them to remain fully anonymous. In such cases, we can distribute profits via Monero or other methods.
Is this legal?
I hope their opsec is on point.
if you think artists should be paid give them money directly, or go to shows and buy merch.
nearly all intellectual property barriers make no sense in a post-internet world. we effectively live in a world without intellectual property barriers (because piracy is easy and prolific) but for some reason people refuse to acknowledge the free and open flow of art and information as a good thing.
It's odd how rarely there's no apparent understanding that the flow needs to go both ways - and if it doesn't go both ways, there is no flow.
Which are works of art where a good fraction of the work is done by unpaid amateurs who are at risk of being sued by the "original artists" (or rather their labels/publishers).
The point is, from that perspective, copyright is an existential threat to a very large fraction of the art I consume.
Sure, some middle layers become obsolete, but the point of art wasn't to provide food for its one time symbiotic parasites.
Would you say that for your work too?
Or it's because conveniently it's not that easily copyable?
"...they are all very poor people who follow as a trade, what other people pursue as a pastime."
I personally think it's fine and expect you think differently.
I'd rather not hash out an entire thing on hacker news about why IP is a well intentioned but bad idea.
Instead I prefer to argue that piracy isn't going anywhere.
Regardless of your opinions on IP, piracy is here to stay. The real questions we need to ask, imo, is how do we progress those IP based industries that have yet to find solutions to piracy.
Music has found value add services, emphasis on live music and merch, as well as a revival in vinyl interest.
Games have found early access, emphasis on online gaming, and crowdfunding.
Video and artistic content creation has found crowd funding, ad revenue, and physical sales of brand products and exclusive value adds (meet a creator).
Software has found expert training, charging for use of apis or backend driven services, charging for additional functionality, often software as complex enough that charging outright for the software and support of it is very common place. Also software highlights that even if one spends countless hours of their lives doing something for free (open source) they can easily take advantage of demand in their technical and creative skills to make a very generous wage in the market.
In conclusion there are a lot of arguments for why we should be IP bound. A lot of these are really good arguments - even the if I voraciously disagree with them. But in the end I don't think IP will win. It's better that we encourage working with solution in a framework with limited or lacking IP.
Sry 4 bad spelling. I'm the lame guy who writes walls of text on hacker news with his phone.
I can't.
The whole premise here is that volunteers can't reach every peak, that some endeavors require resources and those endeavors are how companies can be "better than free". Spotify has infrastructure, input streams, curation, and technical advances that I can't see any volunteer organization matching more than in slim part.
That was what.cd. You could get things not found anywhere, the artists / album map was awesome to discover new artists and the forums were the best.
However, I would still rather use Spotify than go through the bother of downloading dodgy MP3s and synching them to all my devices. I think Spotify's model killed music piracy much more than legal action ever did.
I do recall reading about some trend major publishers did, with seeding 'bad' versions of songs with the same titles as the 'real' ones, confusing people in to wasting bandwidth and resharing 'bad' files. Was that terribly effective?
I remember Madonna's "What the fuck do you think you're doing" mp3's. But it really didn't make me change my habits, or even really annoy me.
Actually, I still haven't changed my habits, as Spotify and Deezer don't have everything I want to listen to, and unlike Grooveshark, they don't allow me to add my own music.
Even though I could through a minor effort, take my entire back catalogue of MP3’s (many were pirated and very clearly sorted and organized), pirate a bunch of new content, and upload it all to a streaming service like Google Play Music, I don’t because then I would be missing out on killer curation and discovery features music services offer today.
[0] http://www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/1155395/business-...
So artists should get more from Spotify than they do for radio plays anyway.
http://kk.org/thetechnium/better-than-fre/
Kevin Kelly proposes "Eight Generatives Better Than Free": immediacy, personalization, interpretation, authenticity, accessibility, embodiment, patronage, and findability.
This was written back in 2008—very prescient in light of the evolution of content distribution since then, and helpful in articulating what sorts of thing actually manage to add value in this way!
What they really offer is filtering; being published in a particular journal is a signal of quality and impact of the work. The production and even distribution pieces are incidental to the value, but filtering is difficult to monetize in a normal market because it has high fixed and zero marginal cost. (The same is largely true of production, and as noted distribution is near zero marginal cost as well.)
Note that this doesn't mean there is no value add: you can have value without marginal cost, such that utility would be lost to customers if you stopped paying the fixed costs. OTOH, if the value produced by the fixed costs has no cost to scale and no practical barrier to people reproducing it once you've produced it, you can't monetize the value produced.
Publishers _do_ add value to _conferences_ by helping out with funding. Since most smaller interesting conferences aren't at all profitable, it's a "symbiotic" relationship between the conference and the publisher: the publisher effectively runs the conference in return for having exclusive distribution rights over the proceedings. Sucks for the profs and students though.
When a conference gets big enough to raise their own funding _and_ bold enough to shirk their publisher's exclusivity contract, in-house distribution begins to make sense.
When I was in grad school I got a thousand dollars or so to copyedit and typeset a prof's book. He had to pay for it out of his grant. The publisher (Springer) literally did nothing.
This situation was neither inevitable or accidental. I forget a source, but a few decades ago some business types realized academic publishing was a captive market, so bought up a bunch of presses and started exploiting it more and more.
Seems to be a natural tendency for troubled industries to lean into their obsolescence and actually kill their value adds in a futile quest for rent.
If you're familiar at all with 1960's music, you'll recognize their work, it permeates popular music.
The artists themselves were often poor musicians and could not play their own music very well.
After watching the movie, I certainly concluded that the record label added a LOT of value.
So, in that case the record label was "adding value" but the Monkees or the Byrds or whoever didn't really receive that value. They didn't get paid much anyway, so they would have rather made less-polished records that were more authentically their own.
The best thing that ever happened to the Monkees was to have Hollywood write and perform the songs for them, while they lipsynced, clowned around and looked good. The best songwriters in the business wrote their songs. How lucky could they get?
The Monkees were not ripped off in any way. The value they received was becoming famous, and that has enormous value they can use to make money off of anytime they please (and they have done so).
One critical value they once provided was to discover and popularize new styles. They don't do that anymore at all. Last time they did in a big way was probably grunge in the early 90s. Since then any new movements have had to go around the major labels. They've retreated to endless retreads of copycat pop.
It's not that they were benevolent, but 25 years ago they held the keys to the castle and disrupting production, distribution, and marketing was nearly impossible. Today with the rise of CDbaby and other agencies handling piecemeal work via the Internet (and bandwidth opening up to serve media), they're dead.
But until recently, their services were quite necessary.
Yes. They seem to be more willing to spend $10X on lobbying to prolong their obsolete business model than $X to pivot to a new one.
I don't know if the number is actually 10, but it certainly appears to be greater than 1.
As an example, take any market with natural monopolies. It costs nearly nothing to a company working with electric power distribution to serve an additional client in comparison to their fixed costs. But the client still wants their electricity.
That produces a completely different implication: Zero marginal cost means that a competitor can come along at any time and charge a zero price. This is the power of advancing information technology: it empowers people with little to no capital & operational budget to have a proportionately huge effect on any information system that has zero marginal cost.
When I made up "circumstantial monopolies" I was thinking of monopolies that only still exist via circumstances. Like there used to be some regulation or it used to be a natural monopoly causing it to be a true monopoly, but those external reasons have disappeared and they only remain a monopoly because of inertia.
Maybe "inertial monopolies" would have been a better term. It's certainly more amusing.
So my argument is that journals may have had a natural monopoly in the past, and have had an inertial monopoly since, but there's no inherent reason why they still have a monopoly today. Does that help explain?
I'm not sure it's convincing, but then I'm not settled on what is so generally. This is a question I've been thinking through heavily.
One model I'm working on is that monopolies are synonymous with economic rents, and derive from network structures, and/or control systems. These might be physical or logical, and would include political control systems, one of the typically sugested forms of "artificial monopolies". I'm not sure that particular distinction is meaningful. It also doesn't seem to be the one you're making.
In the case of extant structures vs. novel ones, which does seem to match your case, there's the question of why an apparrently better or more robust novel system doesn't displace an incumbent. Much of that is seen as a critical mass problem, though viewing it as a critical cohort problem might be more useful: Facebook overtook MySpace by starting and building from a high-appeal, high-value core (Harvard undergraduates). This overcame network effects by seeking individual nodes with a far greater value function both in social and advertiser appeal.
That pattern of overtaking seems repeated among other networks as well. Private jet charters vs. commercial 1st class, even Concorde-speed service, might be another.
For academic publishing, defection of fields, researchers, journals, or specific universities might be a similar mechanism.
Is this in any way along the lines of what you are thinking?
You seem to trying to explain why it hasn't happened to journals before. The answer to which seems immediately obvious to me. So I'm probably misunderstanding you.
I'd not addressed why journals haven't already been disrupted. I did suggest how they might become disrupted, borrowing on the model of MySpace/Facebook. See also: Newspapers/radio, cinema/television, and radio/television. It's not that the old networks fail, per se, but a new network (that is, monopoly), which delivers on the same need (or want), and does so in ways which bypass the original.
But since you raise the question of why journals haven't been disrupted, part of the point is that they'd emerged as a blocking / gatekeeping mechanism only fairly recently. Peer-review is largely a post-1970 phenomenon, and really largely since 1980.
I'm not entirely sure when journal subscription costs became an issue, though I do recall hearing buzzes about it in the 1980s. The emergence of the Web as an alternate distribution mechanism was already suggesting academic journals were obsolete by the late 1990s, and I was part of early Open Access discussions at the time. I basically see that solution still developing, which suggests there simply hasn't been sufficient time.
Sci-Hub is doing a great deal on the time-sufficiency department.
I beg to differ. The infrastructure is only part of the cost (the fixed part). The fuel needed to produce the electricity (or the electricity itself) is the variable part. As a consumer I pay much more for the variable part then for the fixed part, therefore what you say can't be correct.
We do have a very mobile energy market, switching provider is easy.
There may be price caps on the monopoly parting the system - the connection to the grid - that's because it's a natural monopoly, moreso even that the last mile of fibre from the cabinet to your house.
It does not determine final consumer tariffs directly, but instead establishes a maximum revenue per KWh for the regulated firms. And this model has been in place in the UK's transmission and distribution sectors since 1990.
Also, you cannot choose who distributes energy to you. If you could, the sector wouldn't even need regulation. But you can choose who supplies that energy. These are two different sectors, and they're regulated in different ways. The distribution sector is a natural monopoly, while the energy generation sector isn't.
Imagine a hamburger shop. In the traditional frame when you want to make more money, you raise revenues (sell more! raise prices!) or cut costs (cheaper ingredients! minimize labor costs!). Using the traditional approach, it's easier to "optimize" by make your product worse and worse.
The Lean Manufacturing folks, on the other hand, look at business as an exercise in value creation for the customer. They split things into value generation vs waste. When they optimize, they look for ways to reduce waste and increase value for the customer.
That focus on value creation is necessary to start businesses; it's hard to build an audience if you're not providing value. It's a shame that it gets lost over time, with profit being the only focus.
Yep. If you don't add value, don't expect laws to protect you forever.
First, publishers do provide value.[1] Making copies is a trivial part of publishing; that's a straw man. Publishers add value in their role as gatekeepers and filters. They provide an objective, systematic evaluation of research that others can rely on. That evaluation is expensive. PLOS, a leading open access publisher, charges a $2,000 publication fee. Then consider that in closed journals, half the articles are never read.[2]
Second, publishers are not being outcompeted. Piracy is not an alternative to publishing, so it isn't a competitor. Rather, piracy destroys the market. An author or digital artist also couldn't "outcompete" a pirate. Without publishers, how should researchers keep updated on relevant papers; academic and grant committees triage applicants; the interested public distinguish science from pseudoscience?
Publishers should not bear all the responsibility for a complex ecosystem. We absolutely shouldn't wait to see what happens after the current system collapses. We need to collaboratively imagine and build a better system for communicating and evaluating science.
[1] http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/288447.html
[2] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/half-academic-studi...
And yet the peer review process relies on unpaid volunteers. Sure, there's some kudos. But the publishers are laughing all the way to the bank.
> They provide an objective, systematic evaluation of research
Publication bias is a thing. A hugely significant thing.
> Piracy is not an alternative to publishing, so it isn't a competitor
This is an odd semantic nitpick without any discernable meaning. I feel very certain that many who benefit from working within academic publication see piracy as a threat to their revenue streams, hence "competition".
> piracy destroys the market
No, the market has simply changed.
> We need to collaboratively imagine and build a better system for communicating and evaluating science
On this I completely agree.
Nobody is disputing that Elsevier et al make a profit that isn't entirely deserved. You don't have to argue that point.
But that glosses over the fact that their revenue is absolutely not pure profit. PLOS shows that there are costs associated with publishing, even if you get a lot of the work for free. Those $2000 are the value that publishers provide. Maybe they're charging $5000 for those $2000 right now, and that's morally suspect. But when that business model is destroyed, someone has to come up with a way to finance those $2000 of value by other means.
Also:
> Publication bias is a thing. A hugely significant thing.
"Publication bias" isn't the arbitrary injection of a publisher's opinions into articles or something like that. It just describes the fact that more surprising, or positive results are more likely to get published.
Doing away with publishers won't have any effect on this mechanism. Any sort of ranking or discovery mechanism will ultimately prefer the more spectacular result, because that's what people are looking for. In the specific case of pharmacology, mandatory pre-registration of trials, and all-encompassing meta-analysis of those is a good strategy, and it's completely orthogonal to the process of publishing the paper.
By your logic, I can "compete" with GM by stealing all of their car inventory and blowing up all their factories in Detroit. I don't think that makes sense.
> the market has simply changed
Strongly disagree. What exactly is the new market? Selling journal t-shirts?
> yet the peer review process relies on unpaid volunteers
> Publication bias is a thing
I say that publishers add much more value than pirates. Sure, publishers aren't perfect and others add value too. So what?
When the market can't compensate authorship per copy this does not mean the author cannot exist, but that authors will be compensated differently.
Do you seriously think that people would stop making music because they can't become millionaires? There's tons of people making a living playing on YouTube, filling the niche, and living off endorsments and side-selling of merch or lessons.
How do you think your analogy would apply to scientific publishing?
want it printed on dead trees? then sure, pay for a hard copy.
researchers work 40+ hour weeks for months or years. the majority of the work in publishing is reviewing that research, which is outsourced to peers for free. the actual publication is a tiny part (time-investment wise) of the total value.
Further, peer reviewers review for free because they can afford to--they are being paid by government and industry. Publishers cannot survive without being paid.
If academics can peer review, they can do the analysing of reviews and accepting/rejecting, too. Even for-profit publishers often put all that work on an unpaid editorial board.
Also, the costs do not have to be so high that they make Wiley or Springer-type for-profit journals the only way of publishing scholarship. In my own field, the most respected journals are printed by learned societies founded on the basis of an endowment or national academies of science. Since the labour and coordination is already done for free here by academics -- just like with many for-profit journals -- the only additional costs are typesetting and coordination with the printer/distributor, and it turns out that these costs are not so high that you have to lock your content down. These journals do not even have to charge submission fees like other journals in the "open access" movement claim is necessary; it just all doesn't cost that much.
So, piracy is a great solution in the short term, and in the long run there should be a return of journals to learned societies. After all, that is where many of them were originally published anyway before the for-profits bought them up (promising to save on labour and ensure better quality, but in fact unpaid labour is still used and the quality of editing and typesetting has dropped drastically now that for-profit publishers often demand camera-ready copy with no quality inventions of their own).
all this tells me is that there's a serious lack of adequate tools or some common, open platform to facilitate this. it was hard [expensive] to collaborate on sourcecode before Github; now it isnt. it was difficult to research prior art for patents, now it isnt via patents.stackexchange.
Except it needn't be. Reddit-like voting and commenting site for scientists would work just as well to vet papers and provide valuable feedback to authors with nearly zero overhead.
Probably not. There's a well-known essay that explains why karma/votes/likes work very well for easy tidbits like cat photos, gifs, and puns. (The stuff that takes less than 5 seconds to evaluate and requires near-zero effort to judge whether one "likes" it or not.) Unfortunately, I don't have a cite because I forgot who the author was.
Longer topics such as a 20000 word dense research paper with supporting data that requires at least 2 hours of study by a reader/reviewer doesn't work for a karma points system. The effort is too high to contribute significant # of votes. It's the same difficulty for other long form content such as manuscripts for novels/books.
Instead of karma voting, these works require curation that passes the "signal of approval" from one person to the next. With book manuscripts, curation is first done by the literary agents and then the acquisition editors. With scholarly papers, it's a somewhat analogous process (committee 1st pass then forwards to the peer reviewers). Each "approver" has a reputation which signals to the next person that it's ok to invest the hours into studying the work. This social signaling mechanism is also similar for startup entrepreneurs' business plans and VCs. VCs would rather be exposed to your business idea from a referral rather than an unsolicited cold email. All 3 domain examples of book manuscripts, academic research, and business plans share the same theme: people have limited time to wade through a vast sea of poor quality content.
I think people can conclude that flipping through 100 cat photos is different than slogging through 100 dense papers. Another example of this dynamic is the Stackoverflow voting system. There have been several meta discussions lamenting the fact that the "easy" questions attracts a high volume of activity (answers + votes) but the "hard" questions languishes with little attention. That's because the easy questions are more analogous to the low-effort cat photos.
Another commenter in the thread mentioned that github solved workflow for programmers and the same could be done for peer reviewing academic papers. This is misunderstanding the underlying issue.
Evaluating dense papers is not an "information technology workflow problem" that's waiting for collaboration software to solve. The bottleneck is human effort to properly read papers to judge its correctness and significance. In 1687, a human would read Newton's Principia Mathematica at ~200 words-per-minute and after several hours, maybe he'd conclude that "yes, F=ma looks reasonable here". It's 300 years later and we're still the same slow humans reading papers at ~200 wpm. It's worse now because there's a larger glut of bad papers to wade through than before.
Peer review of novels, scientific papers, business plans, is not solvable by a Github/Sharepoint/DropBox. The bottleneck isn't the copying of pdf or LaTeX files from one person to the next. It's the hours of human effort to judge the papers and signal to the next person to also expend hours of human effort.
The issue about publishers isn't the filtering. The real issue is that they they charge too much money for filtering. The high profits is misleading some people to think it's an easy problem solved by github or a reddit-like voting system.
You're attacking a straw man. I said reddit-like, not reddit-clone. There are plenty of obvious problems with reddit's voting system. So what?
What is scientific consensus if not a vote among some random sampling of scientists studying a field. What's left is to formalize this process in an open system so we're not beholden to the publishers and other parties with perverse incentives.
> Evaluating dense papers is not an "information technology workflow problem" that's waiting for collaboration software to solve. The bottleneck is human effort to properly read papers to judge its correctness and significance.
You're wrong. Firstly, it's often impossible to judge the significance of a result even soon after publishing.
Secondly, reviewers already donate their time to review papers, so the human effort is already there. What's needed is a well-recognized system encoding a publishing process, whereby some random selection of scientists obtain access to early drafts with a way to provide commentary and ratings on various metrics, with final publication after some quality consensus is reached among the random selection of reviewers (as a rough idea).
This is exactly an information technology problem.
Yes, and that's what I understood you to mean and a reddit-like voting system for papers is what I was talking about. (I even wrote "reddit-like voting system" as my last sentence in the post you replied to.)
>You're wrong. Firstly, it's often impossible to judge the significance of a result even soon after publishing.
I'm not talking about "significance" in relation to the whole of human history. I mean "significance" in the sense of a threshold for requesting other people to invest their time & effort to study the paper and also the subsequent subscribers to read.
>, reviewers already donate their time to review papers, so the human effort is already there.
Yes, but the key you're missing is that they donate their time because a respectable _somebody_ requested them to do so. The triggers for motivating that donated effort matters.
If I'm a working scientist working 50 hours a week, I'm not logging into a reddit-like voting system and investing hours to read (mostly bad) papers that have 0 votes so I can submit my 1 vote. No, somebody I respect (e.g. a journal editor) needs to ping me and say, "hey, this paper looks interesting, can you review it?" After I peer review it, I may get some quid-pro-quo such as free access to the journal's other papers and/or when it's my turn to submit a paper, the editor will consider forwarding it. So yes, I'm not "paid in cash" but I'm paid "in kind" with some intangibles.
That social dynamic is not replicable in a reddit-like voting system.
Therefore your following scenario of:
>whereby some random selection of scientists obtain access to early drafts
... is not realistic because scientists do not want to be part of random pool to be assigned random papers. That's contrary to basic human nature! Scientists want papers referred to them by another human and not an algorithm. It's not a technology problem, it's a human problem.
All the software suggestions to solve this from programmers including ideas such as a reddit-like system, or a github-like system, or a blockchain type system, etc ... they all misunderstand the culture and psychological motivations of publishing.
>What is scientific consensus if not a vote among some random sampling of scientists studying a field.
Yes, I can see that if you reduce the problem to the simple abstraction of "votes", it seems like building a software platform to formally capture votes is The Solution.
What your simplification leaves out is all the human signaling required before people render their votes. That's the human dynamic that collaboration software doesn't solve.
(In any case, an accepted published paper isn't "consensus" per se; it's just another piece of evidence for people to weigh. The paper just passed through enough human curation filters that may be worthwhile to read.)
I agree with you that it is difficult to improve on the peer review process. At the same time, several researchers have pointed out that publishers aren't really involved in the peer review process. It should be possible to coordinate journal publication through a software platform, replacing the publishers without affecting the peer reviewers or editors.
Yes, I agree employees at Elsevier aren't doing the actual peer review. However, they do critical filtering work before the any journal editors see the paper. See example from Elsevier employee Angela Kerr.[1]
The programmers who think they can revolutionize academic publishing by developing a new peer-review collaboration platform don't even realize that people like Angela Kerr exist. (See repeated disgust in this thread about "peer reviewers are unpaid". That's true but it also makes Ms Kerr's paid work invisible.)
In addition to basic copy-editing, she prevents crackpot articles such as "Darwin's Theory of Evolution is proven wrong by Trump" from reaching the journal editors and wasting their time. (She may inadvertently forward some bad articles but she has enough education to reject many of them outright to minimize the effort by the journal's scientists.)
Administrative people like her cost money. One would have to replicate her duties somehow in the new software platform. That's because the journal editors (scientists) are busy and they absolutely will not want to log into a new collaboration platform and stare at a long queue of unfiltered papers that everybody uploaded. Even though Angela doesn't do the "peer review" per se, the journals still want her to make a first pass cut. None of the ideas I've seen from programmers integrate her function into their model of what peer-review software should do.
With something like Stackoverflow, you have volunteers scrolling through the queue of questions and deleting/editing bad ones so their highly valued experts don't have to waste time with them. That's workable for "programming questions" because they are typically less than 100 words. Even with smaller workload of not reading 20000-word research papers, volunteers still get burned out and quit.
For highly prestigious papers like Nature and Cell that would attract a high volume of uploaded papers, it's very doubtful you'd have volunteers like Stackoverflow to slog through all the junk. Therefore, you'd have to staff up some copy editors and pay them money to do unpleasant work.
The problem is that Elsevier charges an insane amount of money for subscriptions (~$800 million in profits with 36% profit margin). Yes, a new system can charge much less money and be more efficient but you still have to do the work that Elsevier does. The journal editors don't want to do it. The potential software model of synthesizing ideas from reddit+github+dropbox+bittorrent+Sharepoint+blockchain ... don't account for Angela Kerr. Programmers think only in terms of distributing files like pdf and LaTeX. That's why they think academic publishing is a solved software problem and not a human effort problem.
>It should be possible to coordinate journal publication through a software platform, replacing the publishers without affecting the peer reviewers or editors.
The software platform can replace Elsevier in particular, but it can't replace the fundamental "work activity of a publisher". Angela Kerr (or whoever employs her) wants to be paid to do the unpleasant work that journal scientists don't want to do. And she doesn't want to be paid in reddit-like "karma votes" or github-like "stars". The new system can pay Ms Kerr less money than Elsevier (and hopefully pass those savings on to subscribing libraries) but let's be clear that the journal scientists absolutely do not want a new software platform without her.
[1] https://www.elsevier.com/connect/confessions-of-a-managing-e...
There is great need for a software nonprofit to enable scientists and editors to collaborate with minimal overhead, because even $2000/paper is too painful. The true marginal cost should be under $200/paper for scientific editing,[1] and at that price point, open access will overwhelmingly win. If we can build such a platform, I believe that Elsevier will find it very difficult to retain their journal editors.
So if you want to have any hope of seeing things coming, you almost have to think in un-utterable heresies... and bam, I just realized I'm repeating a Paul Graham essay. Ah well. This paragraph's over!
I agree that internet for distribution is the way to go but I wouldn't put a capital-s on solved just yet.
Pirate a game? Hard to find, lot of chances to get viruses and you have to update your fixed .exe every patch.
Buy it? 2 clicks, one download, done. If you can wait a little you get those at half price during sales. You have user reviews and forums to check before you buy instead of paid-for "professional" reviews.
As a group they have slowly been cutting out all the value-adds and buckling down on only one thing: distribution. Distribution is not valuable anymore because distribution has no marginal cost. This is classic rent-seeking. Cut your costs so far that your business does nothing, nothing except extract rent out of a pre-existing monopoly. This lasts exactly as long as it takes the market to make a competitor.
How do you win against free? Be better than free.