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.

[1] https://academic.oup.com/spp/article/46/1/105/5037253

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.