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Comment by smanzer | Hacker News Reader

Good for them. For the last article that I published, the publisher "value added" consisted of highlighting all the all-caps names in my document and asking me to define them as acronyms. Literally the only thing they did, and it wasn't even right.

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Oh, I get so much more out of the publishers: 1.) Long waits during which I worry that I'm going to be scooped. 2.) Lots of typos because Elsevier outsources printing to people who don't speak proper English. 3.) PDFs that do not render correctly in some PDF viewers.

Got a source for #2?

Funnily enough, I was just reading an article from the journal SYSTEM (Sciencedirect/Elsevier) yesterday. Very prestigious journal in my field, but it was littered with typos and mistakes - I figured surely it couldn't be the work of the two authors.

Didn't they also hassle people to review it (for free of course). That's the only thing that would be a bit hard to replace by a totally free service.

They do. They route it to the editor (senior academic), who routes it to appropriate reviewers. I think that the editor does it for free too in many cases. I feel like running ads on the site would pay for the bandwidth, only thing a totally free service couldn't replace is the prestige :(

"Prestige" of a peer-reviewed article in a particular journal isn't the most important thing. What matters is how well-cited your work is. Peer-review is done by contributors to a journal, so you could get the same from a free service.

Publishing in the most prestigious journals is hugely important. The first thing many academic hiring/promotion/grant committees look at is how many Nobel Prizes you've won, the second thing is how many publications you have in Nature or Science. Everything else is just for breaking ties. I've even heard that there are fields where having any conference publications counts against you.

That's not the experience I've had in my faculty. My supervisor has referred to Nature and Science as "shiny PR journals". Besides, citations are what actually matter, because they show how popular your work is within the community. Why else would people who write cool software (GNU Parallel, Scipy, Numpy, etc) all ask for citations for their papers? If all that matters is "getting it published" and not "getting it cited", then they shouldn't care, right?

Citations help you out in the long-time limit for sure; "worlds 7th most cited chemist" is definitely an improvement on "another dude with a bunch of Nature papers." But I would imagine that when you are going toward important early-career milestones (postdoc/assistant prof/tenure), they are mostly looking at your recent work, which will not have had time to accrue too many citations unless it is the absolute hottest thing. In those cases, journal ranking may be a bigger differentiator. I don't know how one would fix this.

Actually reading papers for content would be a start, and not just assuming that a first-author nature paper means you are a genius. Nature editors are human beings who use normal criteria for deciding whether a paper is good. They don't even have subject matter expertise all of the time. It makes no sense to trust the nature brand above your own judgment as a reader.

There is a larger problem at work, however, of university administration and departments using these sorts of signposts to decide who is worthy. I think both widespread managerialism in unis and a poor funding climate are both at fault.

Getting the almost parasitic "managers" off universities should be a top priority goal for the well-educated people. Managers should have no role in any funding, selection or other academic activities. The publishing related rent seeking is a result of poor management of university's academic affairs. The parasitic "managers" at universities, either knowingly or unknowingly, help the rent seeking "managers" at publishing businesses plunder money and thus pressurize academics to bow to the publishers. I know, this is very difficult to achieve but not impossible. Efforts like this (sci-hub) are steps in the right direction. Kudos to her.

Plos or NLM or any number of people will host the content for free; bandwidth is not at issue.

But opening and accessing the data used in the analysis is a big problem.

The big problems are the legal structure strangling us (and the greed and power behind it); we can fly to the moon, making a way to download PDFs is nothing.

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