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Comment by thirdsun | Hacker News Reader

I don't get it - some commenters are suggesting that the authors of those papers aren't paid, but the publisher is. Why would the author want to limit the spread and accessibility of his work in such a way?

As an outsider who doesn't have any experience with scientific papers and how to get them, it seems very obvious to me that there should be a huge demand for an open platform to publish and read those papers - from authors and readers alike. Why does this role need to be filled by an at best semi-legal party like SciHub?

The fact that users with legitimate access to those papers actually opt for SciHub to get them confirms that the current solutions just aren't working for their users. So why would authors rely on them?

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The problem is that that you want to publish in prestigious journals and conferences and the ACM, the IEEE, and everyone else has made deals with publishers to publish the proceedings because the ACM et al aren't publishers. The deals made more sense in the pre digital age, when your only option to read the papers was to get a phone book sized book once a year, but now it's just stupid. Even at universities you can hit the paywall if the journal you want isn't on the whitelist. You end up googling the title and hoping to find it off the authors' websites.

Packing up and creating a new open access journal is possible, but it's hard, because essentially you need a critical mass of the highly regarded members of the community to go with you, because the real power is in the the reputation that the community provides. It's hard to do, but is possible. Linguists are moving from Elsevier published Lingua to a new open access journal called Cognition.

http://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/elsevier-...

Actually Lingua and Cognition are both Elsevier journals. The open access competitor to Lingua is Glossa.

Serves me right for not actually reading the article I only remembered enough of to successfully google it.

Where a scientist publishes papers can make or break their career. Historically for area A, journals B, C, D have the highest impact. If you want your work to be recognized as high quality you will publish in those journals and whether they are "open" or "controlled by a publisher" is irrelevant.

It just so happens that for most scientific areas, the high impact journals are all owned by publishers.

Thanks, got it - so it's the equivalent of signing to a major label instead of releasing your album on Bandcamp.

However, and I may be very naive and idealistic here, shouldn't academics be able to rate and value a paper purely on quality rather than the medium it was published in?

> shouldn't academics be able to rate and value a paper purely on quality rather than the medium it was published in?

Yes. I'm not familiar with all the ins and outs of the current publishing system. But it seems there is room for a more modern publishing agency that can take the best of the old publishing model and combine it with digital age thinking.

Do academics have time to read every paper?

More to the point: do they all understand each other's area of specialty?

Imagine yourself as an employer who has to go through a large amount of applications. You can either read all their publications (if you even understand them) and try to get some idea of their academic performance, or just trust that the more prestigious journals require the publications to be of importance and quality.

It's not the medium, but the forum that matters. There's a hierarchy to forums such as workshop, conference, journal. Then within each forum there are tiers. For instance SIGIR is better than CIKM for information retrieval. USENIX is better than FAST for file systems.

The World

Then even within each conference there's a tier. Posters are the least, full papers are the most.

At each tier, submissions are competitive. This is where the peer review takes place.", and mostly it comes down to reading how the experiments were done and of the conclusions made sense given the experimental setup, and how well the paper is written.

This is why it's a lopsided to blame the publishers. Look at the incentives:

Whether publishers give away their papers openly can make or break their business.

Where researchers publish in open or closed journals can make or break their careers.

Which journals libraries subscribe to can make or break their .. librarian's careers? Hopefully this link in the chain gets broken by Sci-Hub.

As an analogy, people who pay protection money or bribes are still part of the corruption and the mafia or corrupt politicians couldn't function without their support.

Reputation. The publishers aren't just printing presses. They own journals that have gained reputation over decades and serve as a measure of a paper's strength. There are so many papers being published that researchers can't possibly read them all (even in their own field), so they rely on a "caste system" of journals to rate them. For this system to be trustworthy, journals need to undergo the slow, often self-reinforcing, process of building reputation over time.

Of course, the editors of those journals could try to switch to another form of publishing, but they can't take the journal's name with them, and the move would require guts that, unless many do it, may not be justified. Think about it this way: the entire faculty of Harvard can decide to move to a no-name university, but the name Harvard alone would still carry a lot of weight, and every professor who stays behind lowers the effectiveness of the move considerably.

Reputation? If you publish in an Elsevier journal you are an asshole by association, and it's a safe assumption that you don't care about your article being read: a clear indicator of its real value.

Seriously? Among other things, they publish Cell, The Lancet, the various Trends in XYZ, and some of the Current Opinion journals. These are all widely read and well-respected journals.

There are tons problems with the current publication system, but as I wrote up-thread, I think it's unfair to put tons of blame on individual scientists, many of whom are trapped between "playing the game" and making a somewhat ineffective individual stand.

The system works smoothly for them. Not much incentive to change it unless they are prepared to think a bit more widely. One great exception is Timothy Gowers.

"it should in principle be possible to run a journal for almost nothing. The legacy publishers (as they are sometimes called) frequently call people naive for suggesting this, so it is important to have actual examples to prove it, and Discrete Analysis is set up to be one such example."

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/discrete-analysis-la...

Because many important old-timers still read journals back-to-back. This is how they stay up-to-date, and how they find citations. If you are not in a journal, they won't cite you.

I've just had a paper accepted last week in a traditional journal (peer-reviewed and paywalled) and I'd share a few things I know and feel about scientific publishing from an anthor's perspective.

The publisher provide a valuable service to authors. Their online submission protal was a joy to use and their staff very friendly and responsive. Once a panel has decided that my submission was at least fit for further consideration it was forwarded to three peer-reviewers who may and may not be reimbursed for their time. After several rounds of comments and changes, the accepted draft was sent to a publishing house in India for typesetting and proofreading (They've done a very thorough and professional job with it) before it was ready for print. There are a lot of man-hours spent of making this happen and if the hours were billed individually it will add up to a pretty hefty sum. Earlier versions of this paper had been submitted to other journals and were eventually rejected - more hours of work done without output.

Open access journal such as PLOS ONE charges a non-trivial sum ($1500 and up) to cover these costs and all I could say is that you get what you paid for: How much does a good lawyer/consultant charge per hour? Most people only submit to OA journals if they are ideologically compelled or have ran out of other avenues.

The quibbles between Elsevier and librarians is actually an old one (the article linked below dates from 2003) because they own a number of high impact journals and can bundle less popular titles with high impact ones to increase their margins. While this is a pretty underhanded tactic to use, these less circulated journals would probably have gone out of print without the practice.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v426/n6964/full/426217a...

Piracy has been around as early as universities had been around. There were more than one usenet groups dedicated to these activities and reddit's /r/scholar remains as its latest iteration. I was quite active on a medical forum where doctors and academics help each other out with paywalled papers on a quid pro quo basis. (Doctors are probably the most affected since their job requires access to latest research articles yet few hospitals have the budget for it unless they are affiliated with a university) All because there will always be a few odd journals that are not covered by my university's subscription but others might do. Publishers mostly turned a blind eye because their use are limited to a small group of people who cannot be persuaded to pay anyway. Sci-hub is something different since it is much more accessible and comprehensive, which threatens the current business model of publications.

P.S. This thread from another HN front page submission offers an interesting parallel on paywalls and access to journalism.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11592293

Oh, so if doctors weren't to pirate they wouldn't remain abreast? That sounds like yet another disservice from the publishing industry. They are indirectly decreasing people's health. Fantastic.

Many years ago hospital systems employed librarians who acquired articles for medical staff. Costs associated with maintaining a library were at least partially offset by fees physicians paid to be "on staff" at a hospital (or group of them). BTW those fees were typically on the order of several hundred dollars/year.

Of course, among small-medium size hospital systems the libraries are long gone. Some of the largest or those affiliated with universities may still have access in some form. It's an ironic development that so much more research is going on, yet less available to practitioners on the front lines.

Even more ironically, the actual distribution mechanism is hundreds of times less expensive, more efficient and rapid way of providing access to the material!

And that's not even taking into account the thousands of docs in the US who work out of private practices and community health centers.

Many (most?) primary care docs work for large clinics which are often owned by hospital systems. IOW practice environments that tend to be driven by "productivity" stats, and refined clinical knowledge is not the highest priority. Don't know about public/community clinics, but given the chronic underfunding of these agencies amenities like library services are unlikely.

it was forwarded to three peer-reviewers who may and may not be reimbursed for their time

Your phrasing implies that there are journals in your field that regularly pay their peer-reviewers. As far as I know, it's really rare that journals pay for peer review, and most of those only pay a token amount[1]. Are you actually unsure of this journal's policy, or is there some other reason you phrased it like that?

[1] http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/20930/are-there-...

In many disciplines, authors do the typesetting, the publisher only really handle the peer review coordination (reviewers themselves are not paid)...

Yes, this is something new for me as well and I was more than impressed with the quality of their work.

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