Edit: The argument in more detail: https://medium.com/flockademic/to-fix-scholarly-publishing-d...
Imagine HN where you are only allowed to publish your own content and random users would be selected to evaluate your work.
We should try this!
It says "If researchers are evaluated on the quality of their research instead of the journal it was published in, that would remove their need to pay whatever amount of public money a publisher asks of them just to obtain career credentials."
But at least in my field, most of high impact-f journals don't charge any money for publishing there. So the researchers don't really use any significant money on the publishing part.
I don't know how exactly they get their profit (other than the obvious subscription fee they charged the school), but I don't think researcher themselves are paying that (unless of course, by "researchers" you mean universities as the organizations, but then again "find ways to promote your academic work that are independent of the journal it’s published in" will not be relevant since you still need to pay to read other people's publications).
The need to pay "whatever amount of public money a publisher asks" exists because the important researchers choose to publish in those journals instead of other journals where their articles would be freely available.
If researchers are evaluated on the quality of their research instead of the journal it was published in, then one could simply require that they publish somewhere where it's freely available, but it's a bit of a problem since they need to publish in exactly those journals, which happen to be very expensive.
However, in that case, too, the money is not the researcher's. That said, they are the ones that spend it.
In the case of subscription journals, the argument is similar, except that in this case, it's academic libraries who will have to pay whatever amount of public money a publisher asks of them just to be able to access that research. If the researcher could obtain their credentials elsewhere, they would be able to make their work available somewhere where the libraries and the general public would not have to pay to access it.
The question is whether that pays off in the end. That is, do Elsevier and others' papers have the bar high enough that it's absolutely not worth browsing and reading papers outside the commercial publication, or if it's just laziness and convenience acting up by placing trust in these academic publishers. The academics should be aware of the money and power game involved in commercial publishing, so they should be in a position to judge whether there is value to be trusted in it.
See e.g. https://theconversation.com/why-i-disagree-with-nobel-laurea...
So publishing on your own site on arxiv isn't sufficient on it's own, some curation and gatekeeping is essential for academic publishing to work. However, this is not a service that Elsevier et al provides for their payments, this service is provided by uncompensated reviewers from the community.
On the other hand, the ratings are used by the evaluators of science e.g. funding agencies which won't (and can't) evaluate results directly but need some trusted proxy to separate random ramblings from acceptable science, and the prestigeous journals fulfil that function.
Just uploading to the arxiv will not guarantee that your paper has been reviewed.
We could even argue that a purely meritocratic system of publishing will accelerate good quality research as opposed to a reputation based system.
Funding and career advance should be ortogonal to knowledge distribution.
Your Einstein example actually contradicts your point about reputation.
The mistake is using hindsight to judge that paper's quality. Instead, we have to imagine looking at that SR paper as if we lived in 1905 and didn't know if the 26-year-old patent clerk was a crackpot or a genius.
Einstein sent his manuscript to an academic publisher where Max Planck was one of the editors. This is important because MP already had the reputation in physics so his recognition of Einstein's papers' value was taken seriously.[1] The journal itself also had a reputation which was reinforced by the reputation of its editors.
In 1905, Einstein's papers didn't stand on their own. Its dissemination and acceptance was helped along by Max Plank's "stamp of approval".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck#Einstein_and_the_th...
To quote Yudkowsky for a possible solution to this metaproblem "That’s why we have ... there doesn’t seem to be a word in your language for the timed-collective-action-threshold-conditional-commitment… hold on, this cultural translator isn’t making any sense. “Kickstarter”? You have the key concept, but you use it mainly for making video games?" [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium
[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x5ASTMPKPowLKpLpZ/moloch-s-t...
> An assurance contract, also known as a provision point mechanism, or crowdaction[1], is a game theoretic mechanism and a financial technology that facilitates the voluntary creation of public goods and club goods in the face of collective action problems such as the free rider problem.
...
> Dominant assurance contracts, created by Alex Tabarrok, involve an extra component, an entrepreneur who profits when the quorum is reached and pays the signors extra if it is not. If the quorum is not formed, the signors do not pay their share and indeed actively profit from having participated since they keep the money the entrepreneur paid them.
There could be some penalty that researchers agree to pay if they renege on the agreement, and that penalty could be contractual. The non-profit could collect donations for marketing, and enforce the transition through legal action (if needed). Any proceeds could go to funding the next research field's crowdaction.
I am still amazed that the record industry managed to shut down what was likely to be the next iteration of internet: P2P exchanges. Now we have a centralized youtube solving in a bad way what eDonkey+VLC could have solved for two decades already.
Hey, that can still happen..
Country | Number of IPv4 addresses Per Person
US | 4.91196
China | 0.24591
But I don't know about the state of things of the multi-network clients which are popular china.
No, IPv6 is currently available in only few places, such as universities. Where it is available, torrenting is indeed prevalent, and the speed is good (typically saturating our 100Mbps ethernet link).
Recently there has been a renewed push from the Chinese government to widen the deployment of IPv6, but the effect remains to be seen.
Wikipedia still begs yearly for hosting whereas if people voluntered their bandwidth and space there would be no problem hosting it.
I remember eDonkey fondly. The variety of things you can get with torrents pale in comparison of what was open to us: people would just share "their" files with a huge variety of different content. Nowadays you only get a few thousands of the most popular US movies.
I like the idea of P2P social network, but honestly I think that there's no problem to solve in the first place. While distribution of huge video files and music files is a problem and torrents solve it, that's why they are popular. It's not easy to host terabytes of video with thousands of downloads. But it's trivially solved with torrents.
The root of the problem is that to make an academic career you have to publish is one of those journals. When you apply for a new position, the first thing they look for is how many papers you have published in high profile journals.
If scientific research had started in this century, I am pretty sure no researcher would have ever thought of publishing research papers in a centralized journal where the journal gets to make so much money for a contribution that is not commensurate. Instead, they would have chosen an online platform that is funded and managed by the universities and research centers participating in this platform.
What you are saying is equivalent to stating a tautology: Elsevier is still important for researchers' careers because Elsevier is still important for researchers' careers.
The deeper question I ask is: Why is Elsevier or such centralized journals still important for researchers' careers?
Why can't the academia move to a model where only the impact of the paper matter where the impact is measured by some open source metrics like citations, number of stars, etc. I am not suggesting these exact same metrics. These are only examples. But it should be possible. For example, in the software world, GNU, Linux, Node.js, Git, etc. did not become important by publishing in a centralized journal but by publishing on open repositories, some amount of marketing, and by the virtue of being very useful. What prevents existing researchers from moving to such a model? If enough influential people move to this model, Elsevier and others automatically become unimportant.
It appears you've entirely missed the point. There is no tautology. There is only a vicious circle of being forced to publish in established journals to have a chance of having or even starting a career in research, and the fact that most if not all established journals are controlled by companies such as Elsevier. Therefore if your chances of having a career depend on consuming a service sold by the likes of Elsevier and producing content for Elsevier, it's quite obvious that you have to play along this scheme if you intend to have a career.
It's often hard to do so with the theoretical work in academia due to various reasons, either by its pure technical difficulty, or lack of immediate applications. That's why they need to be peer-reviewed. And Elsevier provides a "prestige" platform to have respectable in-field people to review your research and decide it's good or not, due to the lack of other metrics.
I failed to see how it's related to journal's physical form. As soon as the importance of the research need to be evaluated by other experts, similar platform will exist.
Of course, things like arXiv [1] also exist.
I publish most of my research in the proceedings of the ACM conferences. ACM is a professional association, not a for-profit enterprise. Peer review is carried out by unpaid program committees, where I believe the primary motivation to participate is a combination of moral obligation, networking (with the other committee members), and an opportunity to get exposed to cutting-edge research. This part is similar to other fields, I believe. The main difference is that paper authors are expected to provide camera-ready PDFs of their paper, with the ACM doing little apart from proving LaTeX templates, concatenating the PDFs, and perhaps arranging a few print runs (but I think it's been a while since I have seen physical proceedings).
Most ACM conferences (and journals) are not open access, but some are. Generally it takes a subscription to their Digital Library to download the papers. My impression is that this subscription is cheaper than for the large publishing houses, but I don't know. In any case, an author can pick various licensing models for their paper, with one of them permitting the author to provide a "preprint" of the paper on their personal or institutional website. In practice, that means the papers are publicly available with minor effort, only that ACM does not take responsibility for the hosting.
The entire process appears quite lean, and the expenses incurred by ACM are covered through general membership and conference attendance charges. Further, the ACM appears to continually (and rather aggressively) move towards even more open access-ish policies, likely because it is ultimately run by academics.
The main difference from arXiv is that pre-publication peer review does actually take place.
It's not a tautology, it's a vicious cycle: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...
At some stage it even worked when used in the same lan. I guess I’m not one of those heroes that can single-handedly design and build a working program, I wish I could muster some help to make it real...
In my own field, virtually all of our journals are produced by non-profit learned societies instead of companies like Elsevier or Springer. But thank goodness that these journals are still published on paper and collected in my library alongside the production of PDFs. Any work I write requires having several publications open in front of me at any given time, and that is a lot easier with paper journals instead of PDFs. Plus, printed journals in library holdings allow one to spend hours browsing through research without any of the distractions that electronics bring.
I definitely appreciate having PDFs of articles, but paper still has its place.
Seriously, I'd only consider going to the library if I need a whole book (for a single chapter I wouldn't bother, digital or local printing is fine for that) or if the resource is not available in a digital format at all, which is getting exceedingly rare unless I need something really old. Especially if I've decided that I need paper X for whatever reason, then it'd be useful to read it right now at my desk instead of some time later this day after a visit to library.
I strongly disagree I’ve writtrn two published articles and two dissertations, and PDF versions have made my life so much easier (mendeley in particular)
I remember Timothy Gowers calling for a boycott of Elsevier back in 2012. It's 6 years since then and Elsevier is still alive. Influential researchers still submit their work to Elsevier! It took less time (a few weeks?) for everyone to boycott Digg!
It's surprising how the Internet has been used to distribute cat videos, advertisements, time-draining, and attention-draining content to a sickening degree but it is still underutilized to distribute good content like research papers such that the Internet becomes the primary and de facto media for such content.