I get it, this is Hacker News and we all disrupt five industries before breakfast, but this so out of touch it's not even funny. Old journals aren't going away just because a few academics decide to start a new unknown journal.
Have you ever outcompeted a cartel that has 100 years and billions of dollars on you? Me neither. Maybe it's possible, but it's certainly neither easy nor as simple as you suggest.
Academics are playing with their own and their students' careers by defying established journals. That's infinitely higher stakes than software devs taking VC money and failing only to use this experience as a piece on their resume for the next job. It shouldn't be that way, but fixing that is hard.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_Re...
The for-profit publishers are welcome to print whatever they want, forever. They even publish "hollow" journals that exist purely as spoilers. You're mistaken if you believe they "make their money either way" they need subscribers, and it's increasingly unattractive to subscribe to second rate journals like "Machine Learning".
If you're going to have to buy the package anyway, any money that is spent on journals not in the package is an extra expense that will have to be individually justified.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Resignation_of_editor...
That's a great detail for that story.
Many researchers do care, hence they publish on their own website, arxiv etc., too. But they do care about future funding, their career, recognition and self validation, too.
That would actually be completely irrelevant. Performance evaluation in academia is tied to the ability to post X papers in well respected established publications with a high impact factor. This requirement is generally imposed by legislation and regulation. Thus what matters is a publication's impact factor, it's reputation, and whether they are already in the acceptable list or not.
If a mass protest led an entire editorial board to leave an established high-impact factor journal to start their own journal from scratch, said new journal would fail to meet any of the criteria that makes a journal an acceptable publication.
> Because, again, these folks don't care if anyone can read their research outside of colleagues who might cite them.
Thus assertion is also wrong. There are researchers who put together their own journals and use them to circle-jerk their way into relevance. This has been happening for years, and I even know of a case where said researcher even ties his papers to his own congress. However, these journals do tend to have a piss-poor impact factor, thus they don't count for performance reviews.
In the US at least, that evaluation is performed by faculty not by a system. If three schools (say MIT, Harvard, and Stanford) said 'we will no longer consider any work published in non-open source journals in the award of tenure' the system would flip very very quickly. Institutions could do the same with REF in the UK.
It is a system of social norms and conventions that are treated as inherent while also constantly shifting...but no one will admit are shifting or socially constructed.
This makes me wonder if there's room for a kind of legal hack that could carry these things over to a new journal. A journal's reputation is essentially tied to its name; and the name is what goes on people's CVs and on the lists of approved journals and so on. It seems like the name is really the only asset of a journal that could not very quickly be duplicated elsewhere if the editorial board decides to move together.
I assume these names are protected by trademark law and that the publishers will fight to the death to protect them. But in the scenario where the editorial board jumps ship, is there some kind of legal argument they could use to either (a) effectively steal the name from the publisher or (b) piggyback on the name and reputation of the old journal, for example by naming the new journal "The Journal Formerly Known As X", so that it's clear to everyone that this is the journal X in all but name, and thus should be treated like X for the purpose of performance reviews etc.? Anyone know how far an editorial board could go in this direction, if they made up their minds to do so?
"Legislation and regulation"? This is an astonishing claim. As far as I know, universities decide their own performance evaluation processes. How on earth did you get the impression that legislators passed laws dictating that academics publish in high impact factor journals?
Not necessarily. In some countries, public research institutions are governed by regulations that cover organization aspects, funding, and performance evaluation.
> How on earth did you get the impression that legislators passed laws dictating that academics publish in high impact factor journals?
By the fact that I spent close to a decade working as a research engineer and as a PhD candidate, and I had to learn how my research group was funded and evaluated in order to remain a research engineer.
This is part of the fleecing. It ends up in law the same way that "Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations" (NRSROs) ended up in law in the US, or anti-third party laws (like against "fusion.")
Those laws and regulations seem like great places to attack, seeing as against the vast majority of academics, the few juggernauts of academic publishing would be very much underdogs. The problem is the weird rationalization that these arbitrary brands serve a useful purpose simply through being labeled as brands that should be respected.
It's no wonder they do as little as possible and charge as much as possible. Their value lies not in the papers they publish, the quality of their peer reviews, or the composition of their boards (which could easily be transferred) but in their titles, as if they were royalty. The only way to transfer this value is to sell the name to a huge company that can realize economies of scale and monopoly power to bring costs down even farther.
I wouldn't be surprised if, say, China did, but China doesn't dictate the way research is done globally.
I suspect you didn't spoke to a lot of UK and EU academics then, because that's how things are ran in here. The EU has been, for the past two decades or so, reforming their research institutions to introduce performance-based funding, which include and are not limited to tracking relevant and meaninful research output in a competitive environment[1]. These include bibliometrical indicators, which takes into account "publication type and the rank or citation impact of the publication channel". At the member-state and and institutional level this involves whitelists of acceptable reference publications.
Re: the EU materials you've added to the post, thank you, I didn't know about this and I can definitely appreciate that it would make defection from the established set of journals more difficult. That said, editorial board defections usually produce journals with similar impact factors to the originals, so it is far from an insuperable barrier.
At any rate, my original comments seem to apply to countries like the US and UK that dominate in research. Academics there have the power to stop serving paywall-and-overcharge academic publishing corporations. We know this, because they sometimes do, and those that do are often successful. But most choose not to.
Not really, at least not anymore. Depending on which metrics you choose to look at[1], China currently leads research output, and by a long stretch, over the US.
Meanwhile, within the EU Germany outperforms the UK by a considerable margin, and both India and Japan outperform the UK as well.
The UK fares even worse in papers-per-capita, ranking between the Czech Republic and Portugal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
> Academics there have the power to stop serving paywall-and-overcharge academic publishing corporations. We know this, because they sometimes do, and those that do are often successful. But most choose not to.
Don't get me wrong, it's possible to overthrow the likes of Elsevier. The current push for public-access research is a significant step to eliminate the stranglehold these companies have on research output by abusing copyright laws. However, unlike the initial claim, this is no easy feat nor straight-forward.
Nobody who knows anything of the content of the research underlying those metrics takes this seriously.
To be very charitable in my interpretation, your personal assertion is simply presumptuous and outright wrong. China outright dominates research in some key fields[1], and in some fields it's outright impossible to search through topics without getting search hits from china.
[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/China-s-research...
Do you have any idea what they do to game those metrics?
The law needs to change to require public access, so that her effort isn't needed.
While it lasted Napster seriously threatened the music industry.
Eventually though the music industry won, without care of the larger damage it wrought.
She's a hero as far as I'm concerned.
Been there, done that! In the 90s, very few believed that Free Software / Open Source could ever become what it is today. I was (a super tiny) part of it. It was hard and took long, for sure. But possible it was. I'd love to see a similar movement in the academic world.
but computer science is an academic discipline, and FOSS didn't emerge from the academy. in fact, inasmuch as Stallman started it, though he could be said to have been in the academy, his actions were somewhat anti the academy.
If I worked for a competitor or a supplier that is actively squeezing my employer, during work hours, getting fired would be the absolute minimum I could expect.
Why don't universities impose an explicit "you are not supposed to work for any of those parasites during university-paid time"?
1. It occurs because academia is a planned, quasi-socialist economy in which there are no market signals anywhere. However even if you get rid of market economics you still need some way to allocate resources. Weird academia-specific hacks like impact factors are the result: they're basically a form of whuffie-like currency, and are used to replace price signals.
2. Academics could change it because they have tremendous freedom and nobody forces them to organize this way, but they never will, because academia is dominated by people who are very sympathetic to Marxist pseudo-economics [1]. Indeed that's how it justifies its own existence: the value of academia to society is framed in terms of negative assumptions about what market-oriented capitalist research can or will do.
It's easy to illustrate the latter point in this case. The author identifies that their system is screwed up and then blames "chokepoint capitalism". Ah yes. A near totally government funded system has an absurd structure because of too much capitalism.
Wrong. Corporate research doesn't have this set of problems at all. The journal system exists exactly because without capitalism academics have to come up with some alternative, and in a centrally planned economy there's no incentive for that alternative to make sense or be any good. So they've drifted into this situation where third parties sell them an alternative ideologically acceptable pseudo-currency called reputation metrics, because they weren't even capable of setting up their own, and flail around mis-diagnosing their situation. Want to get rid of journals? Sure, no problem. Go work for a private sector R&D lab where papers get published on their website and your career ladder is based on the actual market impact of your work, not the impact-factor of where you publish it.
[1] http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2015/03/the_prevalence_1...
Planned economies very inefficiently produce crap. That was one of the big lessons of the 20th century. We have a planned economy for research and not surprisingly there's lots of dysfunctionality, like the work being published in ways that mean its own authors can lose the ability to read it. It's not a morally defensible system really, which is why so many defenses of it are vague appeals to the idea that academics are somehow purer intellects than everyone else. They aren't.
The older academic generations have literally built this system and then no point to it as inherent and unable to be changed. They point to socially constructed parts of our faculty experience and claim that it 'is'. It is the truest example of stupid smart people I have ever experienced. it is fundamentally, laziness and self-interest. They complain about the system that they built - they complain about administrators, who are all either faculty or people brought in to do things faculty complained about doing or turned out to be wildly bad at.
I'll give a couple specific examples:
1) Faculty development offices - faculty complain ENDLESSLY about faculty development offices and programs and staff. They feel they are interfering with The reality is they were created for a bunch of reasons - largely because the many faculty had stopped investing time in mentoring their peers, and when that did happen it was often wildly sexist and racist. So it got replaced with people trained to do the job well, overseen by faculty. Much of there work is on teaching faculty to teach - because faculty doing the hiring don't bother to evaluate candidates on that core competency. Now the faculty complain about 'bloat' and about the documentation that is generated.
2) IT - I worked at an institution where the faculty senate basically called a meeting to lambast the head of IT because the laptop specification suggested for students couldn't do [thing]. The head of IT shared the history of his office...it had been a faculty member's job (they had a teaching release to do the work) and no one wanted to do it, so they hired someone and setup a faculty oversight board, then they couldn't get any faculty to participate, so then they stopped the oversight board and just sent a survey of needs to all the faculty, they got almost no responses. So the IT person did their best. Faculty had control, complained about the work, and then complained that they weren't consulted.
In prior generations, tenure and academic freedom were tools that enabled faculty to work collaboratively and collegially to run a good university. Several generations of faculty have transformed tenure into a reward for doing lots of research. Unsurprisingly, once it became a reward rather than a tool it gets abused...and faculty fight so hard for things that serve themselves at the expense of the university that they find themselves standing on the outside, in the cold, with their trophy, and presume someone is out to get them.
The small university I work at has faculty who are quite the opposite. They push for faculty development, and for support for the staff who support them.
I suspect that part of the difference is that this is a small university—basically a liberal arts college with a vestigial graduate program—while I'm guessing the institution you describe is a larger one.
I would highlight small liberal arts colleges as absolutely different. From working at a number of 'top ranked' (sorry...vomit) STEM focused institutions, my kid will be significantly coaxed towards a small liberal arts college no matter what they are interested in pursuing professionally.
They could also build the labs themselves, grow their food themselves, where does this end?
The taxpayer's representatives couldn't spend two days thinking through where and how they are going to store and sort data coming out of the research they are funding. Well, someone did it for them (not even particularly well) and is now laughing on the way to the bank. Mind you, it's not like the researchers get a share of the profits, so your critique is very unfair.
None of these journals even bother storing the actual data that came out of the research, so that you could check it statistically.
Professors can't build labs but they already run journals. They just don't care to take control from companies like Elsevier because they don't care who can access their research beyond other academics who might cite them or their tenure committee. Even though the barrier is very small, and the benefit to the public large, there is a lack of incentive to go over it.
> Mind you, it's not like the researchers get a share of the profits, so your critique is very unfair.
Of course they don't profit. They just don't care if the public is being overcharged for access to research the public paid for. They don't care that they could change that by putting forth a modest effort. I don't see how that's an unfair assessment.
Neither strikes me as easy.
What you’re seeing is simply incentives and human beings’ universal responsiveness to them.
Doctorow feels like tweetstorms are an acceptable means of getting communication across (yikes), so maybe some things are just unbridgable.
HN sounds like cranks about this. In my podunk region 2 school I have access to all the journals I want, always have as a student. I rarely need that because it's easier to Google Scholar and then just grab the paper off of someone's site, which pretty mch everyone does these days.
Some of the commenters here could have written a phd in the last decade about this topic but I don't think it's the massive stopper of progress that people think it is.
Billions of dollars! Wish we didn't have to bust my ass to get a portion of that, but keep beating up on the academics.
Perhaps you are in computer science. As long as we're trading anecdotes, I went to one of the top universities in my country. I regularly came across articles that were not accessible from large professional societies such as IEEE, ACS, and SPIE. Now I work in a hospital, and they don't have subscriptions to anything non-medical! I have to go through sci-hub for access to my own papers!
I could go on.
All of these journals' articles are sometimes available, especially for very highly cited articles, but not consistently.
Medical research is often found on some NIH website though. The NIH has their shit together. I think they make everyone publish open access in addition to whatever journal they submit to.
The NSF also requires that all the work it funds be deposited in a public archive: https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/public_access/about...
https://en.x-mol.com/paper/article/1429645420640583680
I know that is a single article and I get your larger point. It's very much a field by field issue, in my field (I've been told it isn't a real science by HN, so no thanks sharing), I can't imagine me or the profs I know taking people seriously if they aren't making their stff available.
Here's this one: https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#cornucopi...
It's also available as a Mastodon thread: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/107179959514393968
And an ad-free, tracker-free, libre newsletter: https://mail.flarn.com/pipermail/plura-list/2021-October/000...
It's also mirrored to Medium: https://doctorow.medium.com/all-of-science-gets-a-general-in...
And Tumblr: https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/666303506776...
There's also fulltext RSS: https://pluralistic.net/feed/
The text itself is licensed CC BY, so if none of those formats suit your taste, you can reformat it and republish it, and even charge money for it.
ETA: Here's the methodology behind this: https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd
and here's the rubric for it: https://doctorow.medium.com/dead-letters-73924aa19f9d
(also available as a podcast:) https://ia601408.us.archive.org/16/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podca...
There are exceptions of course. The preprinters tend to be the more CS/quantitative subfields of these disciplines.
Those are the domains I know and in those domains anyone born after 1970 knows that if they want to distribute their work they put it on their site or a number of free archives.
It's like, could Google change their domain name? Sure, it'd be a bit of a thing, but if they wanted to, they could and most people would follow them to the new domain.
We know this is possible because some math journals where the board is passionate about open access have already done it.
I'm sorry, but this is just flat-out false. I personally know a number of academics who hate Elsevier, and one of the standard pieces of advice for students trying to get access to articles locked behind paywalls is to simply email the authors, because they will almost always send you a copy free of charge.
Academics want their research to be free.
I do my part and put all the accepted manuscript for my articles that are not in an open access journal on a public repository (and ResearchGate). This is already a condition to get public funding, as it should be. I still cannot not publish in some subscription-based journals.
1. Academic promotions could be decided internally based on their own evaluation of the research quality, instead of by reference to external decisions.
2. Papers could be sold via the universities own website.
3. University departments could produce their own "journals" that consist only of their own papers and ask people who believe in the universities brand to subscribe to that.
4. Universities could instead patent everything they come up with and allocate promotions based on accrued patent revenue, with the papers being essentially readable adverts for the patent licensing programme,
etc. There are lots of ways to incentivize good research that don't involve journals at all.
The academics could easily solve this by publishing elsewhere. Of course that would require researchers to be judged by something other that impact factor.
At an extreme it’s like saying the Nobel Prize committee is a scam - they offer nothing of value beyond prestige yet scientists are beholden to try and impress them.
To me this is just people trying to have their cake and eat it too - they want prestigious journals to publish in, but they also want them to be free (for author and public) and easier to publish in.
Well, that and 1.2 million bucks.
Since I was a student, I've decided as a matter of principle never to submit to either, and been able to follow that principle all the way through tenure. Though I don't discourage external collaborators from submitting papers to those places, as this principle is more about my or my group's papers.
Luckily, there's a couple other options that are very satisfying (and actually most common) in my subfield and most of CS: non-profit society publishers (e.g. ACM/IEEE), or self-publishing (arXiv or your own homepage). I've done both for each of my papers, and haven't felt like I missed anything. I've also declined reviewing for commercial publishers for a while now, and it makes me very happy to have a great excuse to decline.
When you're old, you can't risk the career of students working under you.
This is a vicious cycle.
To break it, the number-game evaluation for research grants and promotions should stop.
Bean counters with fat bellies who manage grants and promotions won't probably understand all these.
Oh really? Tell me more about how I can publish in journals with low or nonexistanet (conventional) impact factors and still meet my department’s promotion criteria, or convince an NIH review panel that my publication has high impact, visibility, and citation metrics.
Your post presupposes that the solution is so simple when in fact the whole system is perversely incentivized, tragedy of the commons style, and that there isn’t some game theory all locking us in to place.
Upvoted for "Public domain publishing should be a condition of government funding for research", which I agree (and kinda contradicts the previous point, if the gvmt should intervene it means it's not so "easy")
Follow the incentives.
Yes, in many countries legislation requires that some form of open access is used. As with FOIA or GDPR or other legislation which requires people disclose information it is not practical to go around arresting and jailing thousands of admin staff every week day for not complying, so you're dependant upon a cultural shift in society.
However, of course the for-profit journals will lobby to have the rules drafted in a way that permits them to continue to exist, even if they must make some sacrifices.
For example, "Green Open Access" versus "Gold Open Access". The latter requires publication in an Open Access journal, but the former just requires that the for-profit journal not unduly prevent the authors from archiving their own papers, perhaps under an embargo and with copyright permanently devoted to the journal publisher.
In practice, the reality before Open Access but after the Internet was available to academics is that you could get a "pre-publication draft" of more or less any paper by contacting the author. Of course, to know you want the paper is difficult if you can't read the journals everybody is publishing in. So Green Open Access satisfies the obvious technical requirement that if I hear about Professor Smith's breakthrough in Vulcan Unicorn Steel I can go read the paper without paying Elsevier a pile of cash, but doesn't really free Vulcan Unicorn Metal research from funding Elsevier. Smith's peers read about it in the Elsevier journal their institutions pay $$$ to receive copies of and that's how I heard it's a breakthrough.
There are much more difficult coordination problems that people are at least making some progress on, like fighting climate change. This is because a lot of people care about not letting the planet overheat, including the powerful. But academics largely don't care if their research is easily accessible to anyone who isn't citing them or on their tenure committee.
The scam goes further. Most of published papers are basically of no interest to nobody, or nobody except the few uberspecialists in a given field, which intend to use them as input for producing more papers of the same kind. We're paying billions to produce literally useless knowledge.
In the past, there was always hope that the scientists can stumble upon breakthorughs in their work, but in today's environment, everybody has to derisk their research to stay in the game - so that's not going to happen. It's hard to tell why we do continue with a lot of research exactly. One of the arguments I heard was that the knowledge is mostly in the heads of practitioners (i.e. it's impossible to recreate state of the art based on just papers and textbooks alone), so we always want to have a few experts around in case the knowledge is needed in the future. In this model, the scientists are predominantly custodians of existing knowledge and not creators of new one.
They could do it easily if they acted collectively. Individuals attempting to break free simply hurt themselves. Unfortunately, in the history of humanity collective action across a group containing tens of thousands of people, most complete strangers, has never been easy.
I do agree the government should get involved as that's one of the main benefits of government: having a way to enforce collective action.
The pressures that are brought to bear within academia are extreme, including financial, reputational, professional, and more. This produces major incentives to work within the system. I'm not defending this, just pointing out the reality of the situation.
The true disruption would be to get rid of the "journal" format. Of maybe even the article format.
Academic reviews seem to be a bad joke most of the time. Either you have "Reviewer 2" picking at straws to try and find issues with the paper, at the same time some reviewers let complete crap through.
There are improvements here and there but mostly punctual.
This paper had 9 citations the last time I checked. Which I found pleasant.
Funding agencies (which are generally controlled by government, not academia) could easily set the standard to be e.g. no subscription and $500 publishing fee (feel free to replace $500 with a reasonable amount, I think $500 is excessive, but it's much lower than current rates), as shown by the slow switch to Open Access, which has been driven by them.
This is such bullshit. It's a scam. There is not qualification.
If you think there are academics involved (make your case, provide evidence) they are in on the scam. It is still a scam. It remains a scam if your dog could stop it and chose not to. It remains a scam if Donald Trump. It remains a scam if Joe Biden.
Go apportion blame for it all you like and it's a scam. The publishers perpetrating the scam are going to hell. Hopefully here on earth. Hopefully soon.
Not only is your personal assertion wrong, its complete lack of understanding and awareness, coupled with the degree of arrogance and presumption, shows its patently and shockingly wrong.
Without going into details, keep in mind that in academia there's this thing dubbed "publish or perish", and the only publishing that counts is the one being done in established publications with a history of high impact factor. The journals that count are specified by rules and regulations, which are often defined in legislation and comprised of a whitelist of established, often historical, and well-regarded journals.
So unless your journal is already in the list and has a high impact factor, the whole world is pressured to not publish their A-game work in them. This leads to a feedback loop where incumbents are kept at the top of these metrics due to the fact that they are the only one that can receive works that count, and conversely no one who seeks to finish a PhD or secure tenure or get funding will waste their hard work on publications that do not count.
Then there are other factors, like prestige. Everyone wishes to be invited to be a reviewer of, say, Nature, but no one wants wo waste their time reviewing publications to Bob's journal.
It takes far more to put together a journal than a 5$/month instance in the cloud and an afternoon hacking WordPress.
There is no need for this issue to be "solved" per se. Academia can keep up the charade with journals if it needs to, as long as the rest of us can obtain papers via SciHub, this grey status quo serves all parties just fine.
It's more that the taxpayer is fleeced by academia in general (the whole research-funding-publishing complex) for many billions because there's no incentive for academics to save the taxpayer money by handling publishing themselves. (As Doctorow notes, they already review the manuscripts, so all that's left for an existing journal's editorial team to do is vote for a chief editor and switch to any one of many open, free research publication services.)
Public domain publishing should be a condition of government funding for research.