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Comment by TillE | Hacker News Reader

I'm not generally a fan of arbitrarily "disrupting" things, but the whole academia publishing system is a creaky historical relic that's going to come crashing down sooner or later. There are better ways to do science in a world with computers and the internet.

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I spent 15 years in academia and now work with dozens of former academics. In all my time, I don't think I've ever met a single person who didn't loathe the journal system from top to bottom, and that includes at least a couple journal editors.

I seethe in anger every time something I'm looking into ends in a IEEE or other journal who militantly police arXiv preprints.

The day we bury the last for-profit closed access journal will be a momentous day in the history of science.

Many people outside academia assume that researchers receive some sort of financial benefit when their paper is distributed, read, or bought for $35 on Elsevier.

But in fact, the publishing companies receive money from both the researcher and the reader. They charge the researcher up to $1,500 to publish the article, and then they extract money from the readers by charging a subscription fee to their institution (which constitute a large portion of the library budget).

Not even the editors or reviewers receive any financial compensation -- they often volunteer their time for the peer-review process.

The entire procedure and profit extraction is a disgrace.

Interesting. Maybe a court could find the contract between a researcher and the publisher to be unconscionable - and therefore non-binding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscionability

Elsevier look like a ripe target for a worldwide campaign to cancel access to their journals unless fees arnt dropped.

Germany are (have?) Pulled access, some other south american countries have also with local academics saying that everyone uses sci-hub for everything anyway.

Could be a good target for an activist hedge fund investor to short the stock and attack the company.

Note that in general, you either need to pay to submit the article xor pay to read the article, almost never do you need to do both.

Do the original authors still own the copyrights?

Not to mention IEEE standards association running a really profitable toll booth for global technology standards. They should be funded by the UN and made completely open.

Absolutely. And in the meantime, Elsevier and the other cynical crooks are making some unparalleled 30+% return on equity.

Disgusting. Hope they come crashing down sooner rather than later.

What do you think is an acceptable return on equity (I'm not sure what "equity" means in this sense)?

ROE is a financial performance indicator. They're generally in the single digits, low double digits is considered good. In a competitive market, they should converge to round about the same number on average, even across industries (module riskyness, correlation with market as a whole, and such factors).

The ROE of academic publishers is abnormally high, indicating some sort of market failure.

In this case, scientists do almost all of the work (write, typeset (mostly), referee) for free (or nominal amounts), so expenses are low.

The publishers charge libraries inordinate amounts for subscriptions (dollars per page).

And scientist need to publish, and they need to publish in high prestige/impact journals, and the prestige/impact is tied to the title, and the publishers own the titles, it is hard for competitors to enter.

any return obtained by legitimate means. what makes their gains illegitimate is the market manipulation combined with abuse of IP law. Their "license" (who needs a "license" to print pages of information to be distributed to other humans, anyway?) lets them "own" the IP that was created by funding public institutions. Thus, their gains are illegitimate. That 30% ultimately comes from taxpayers (which is then ultimately pocketed by shareholders).

You got downvoted, but thanks for asking this, because I didn't know either and now I know.

>There are better ways to do science in a world with computers and the internet.

Well, propose an alternate system that stands a chance of being adopted then.

AI research is experimenting organically with ways to identify important papers (everything gets published on arxiv.org, but that's far from a replacement). A new system is more likely to emerge from all this experimentation than to be invented in whole.

Conferences play a large role, and automated tools like arxiv-sanity.com and Google Scholar (for mapping citations) help. Even Twitter is important, if a major figure tweets about a paper, many people will read it. Conferences are experimenting with models to reduce the lag time from submissions and trying different systems for selecting papers.

We'll see where it goes.

Well, all of those things you mentioned are voluntary, optional and not guaranteed. I think having people whose job it is to peer-review, be selective, be vigilant of bad-science, etc is a good thing. I'm completely for open-access, but I'm against having zero selection criteria. It puts a drag of everyone if they have to wade through thousands of junk papers while doing research.

If hacker news did not have a voting system/flagging system/banning system it would just be a giant cesspool of links and comments submitted by bots.

No one's job is to peer review for established journals. Peer review is unpaid.

To your point, yes, there are plenty of journals that don't pay (but pay for other activities). Perhaps I should have just called it a fee instead of a job. Here are some that do pay - http://academia.stackexchange.com/questions/20930/

Interesting link! I wasn't aware of anyone paying for peer review when I was in academia. It appears from the linked examples that it's still rare and relatively small dollar amounts, so indeed not a job.

I love the example of the New England Journal of Medicine finding that paying $5 was worse than not paying, as potential reviewers found it insulting.

As to other activities, yes, I think companies behind journals typically pay people to do administrative functions for the journal, and the editor may or may not be paid (for Nature, I believe the editor is paid). However, it is possible to replicate the traditional review structure in a completely free OA journal with volunteered resources; in computer graphics, I think JCGT does this: http://jcgt.org/about.html

>"It puts a drag of everyone if they have to wade through thousands of junk papers while doing research."

If something that sounds interesting was published in Nature/Science around 2000, I will usually just skip it. I already know the methods section will be crap and I will be unable to figure out what process generated the data (at least in the case of biomed). When I needed to dig through that stuff and try to make sense of what was going on in detail, that was an awful nightmare. And that was an editorial policy... now they at least let authors put the required info into supplements.

I think that was the era of "peak peer review", the idea has been losing clout ever since (mostly due to the internet).

If it has to be adopted, then it has to be based of that all science is supported by tax grants. It simply has to be accepted that all science that receives any government money has to be complete open and that using any portion of the grant to pay for this should be illegal.

Now that nobody (or close to nobody) can publish in Nature some other open access journal will be the number one.

Without the need for printing papers the amount of people actually needed to run a journal drops to a few admin people (research and peer review is still paid for by others) and somebody to keep the website running. This can easily be paid for by a few universities (Harward is sitting on billions and they have an interest in solving this problem).

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