Making It Easier to Break Science Journal Paywalls | Hacker News Reader

Making It Easier to Break Science Journal Paywalls

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81 pointsstablemap22 comments

A friend was working on an amateur history project and I was helping them with the database. I figured that I'd start with the standards among professional historians for databases - people, place and event metadata; fields; schema, etc. That way my friend's work eventually could find a much broader audience, both among contemporaries and across time; there would be a much broader set of tools my friend could use (likely even existing FOSS databases); and of course I wouldn't have to reinvent the wheel.

I asked a few professional academic historians - and to my shock they said no such thing existed. They seemed to think I was confused about the need and accepted that everything was done ad hoc as it always had been. One suggested adapting a proprietary online genealogy database to the needs of the project (which was not genealogy nor even particularly focused on people).

It was depressing, thinking of the massive missed opportunity across academia to share and utilize their data much more efficiently. Imagine the state of software development if developers managed their work product the same way, in ad hoc hacked together silos on their personal computers, rather than through Github and the Internet

That was a few years ago, so I hope things have changed.

Frankly, scientific journal publishing is obsolete. The only reason we needed journal publishers in the first place was to distribute the knowledge more widely -- when copying articles required industrial equipment. Now we have the Internet and journals are only sticking around because of their name recognition.

At least in some fields, progress has been made on rendering journal publishers a thing of the past:

https://eprint.iacr.org/

I strongly disagree, and I think the disagreement probably is because we're in two different fields (biology vs CS). I think journals should be open access and non-profit. However, I also think they exist, and they should be tiered. This is how scientists indirectly communicate the importance of a work to the public and to the news media.

A lay-person can quickly grasp that a Nature or eLife or PLoS Biology paper is considered more trustworthy by the scientific community than a random blog post. It's a system that is far from perfect, but it does have predictive power for determining what the scientific community thinks of a work without having to be an expert. This is arguably the single most important utility in science communication, where it is essential that the scientific community is able to communicate updates on issues like climate, GMOs, vaccines, genetics, conservation biology, and evolutionary biology. These are all extremely important issues on which in some ways scientists are already losing the communication battle. If communicating science loses its journal hierarchy, loses pre-publication peer review, all of the pseudoscientists and charlatans and extremist think-tanks will jump on the chance to spew out paper after paper to confuse the public, and confuse journalists. They will engage 24-7 in "debate" about these papers on twitter and blogs, and probably win against scientists because pseudoscientists have more time, resources, and experience convicing people. Some scientists seem to think this is a silly hypothetical, and can't imagine that Ted Cruz could ever write something that looks like a scientific paper. Nothing is further from the truth. I encourage you to look up Answers In Genesis "research journal", a creationist website, and see if a lay-person could quickly distinguish any of those papers from real science (they can't). Climate denialists write equally long and convicing articles on blogs like Climate Audit and Watts Up With That. It takes high levels of domain expertise to debunk these works, or to understand why they're wrong. A world without a hierarchy of journals with pre-publication peer review is a world in which 99.9% of people become unable to determine high-quality pseudoscience from science. We should be making these systems stronger, by improving peer review within the scientific community, by establishing a more rigid and formal hierarchy of publications, not by encouraging communication anarchy. Because we will lose communication battles to pseudoscientists without journals.

A world without a hierarchy of journals with pre-publication peer review is a world in which 99.9% of people become unable to determine high-quality pseudoscience from science.

And what do you think the numbers are now, in the current world with pre-publication peer review?

You make a beautiful argument (genuinely) but I think it overlooks some of the most important criticisms of the current approach. Yes, it's almost universally accepted that ideas published in a high ranking journal have a strong correlation with consensus of those within the field the journal represents. The criticism though is about what happens in the (presumably rare) cases where the consensus of the field is wrong.

If the decisions of what to publish are made only by those invested in the status quo, how does a field self-correct rather than allowing errors to accumulate? How can one from the outside distinguish between a true-scientific field where this happens, and a pseudo-scientific one where it does not? It's a hard question without clear answers, but almost certainly it can't be done by relying only on the opinion of the experts within the field in question.

Using your very appropriate Ted Cruz example, it's worth remembering that credentialism plays to his strengths: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz). He was a debate champion at his undergraduate Princeton, and then graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law, where he was the primary editor of the Harvard Law Review. These are highly respected institutions, and association with them would generally would convince a lay-person this person is not an idiot.

Imagine that he's set up a system of peer review with a group of equally bright but ideologically biased peers, and is trying to argue that anything published without the approval of this group should be ignored as the work of "pseudoscientists and charlatans and extremist think-tanks". Irrespective of the truth of this claim, it wouldn't be a very convincing argument to anyone who didn't start out agreeing with it.

The problem is that locking good research behind paywalls certainly does not help win the communication battle. Schools and grant givers need to stop relying on publishing in a prestigious journal as a criteria for being a good researcher.

I agree that proper, rigorous science needs to be marked as such, but the closed journals are part of the problem and not the solution.

tstactplsignore wrote ”I think journals should be open access and non-profit.”

=> (s)he isn’t arguing the paywalls should stay, but that we shouldn’t throw away the quality stamp that journals offer with the paywalls.

Peer review and curation are great, but those journals mostly get volunteers to do that anyways! What value add do they then add otherwise?

The journals only has to exist as an entity (e.g. steering committee) to organize peer review, and then the results have to be listed somewhere, but that’s pretty easy.

"A lay-person can quickly grasp that a Nature or eLife or PLoS Biology paper is considered more trustworthy by the scientific community than a random blog post."

That is a false dichotomy. The IACR eprint archive is an example of an alternative approach, in which researchers self-host a repository of papers; the only reason eprint does not have formal peer review is that, thanks to inertia and academic politics, we are still forced to deal with Springer etc., so that is where peer review winds up happening. There is no particular technical reason peer review could not be performed via something like eprint; it is not hard to imagine eprint having a special section for higher-quality papers that have been formally reviewed. Peer review is already done by volunteers, and the journal format is totally obsolete at this point (most of the crypto conferences I have been to over the past few years have not bothered printing proceedings for everyone, because bound proceedings are irrelevant: people just access the papers they want via the web, or they have already read the paper on eprint before it is published "officially").

I understand the concern about pseudoscience and the general public, but how are journal publishers, or journals as a format, actually helping? Plenty of pseudoscience journals are floating around, often with names that are similar to mainstream journals, and cranks typically publish their articles in those journals to make references to their work appear more legitimate. If people in general can distinguish pseudoscientific articles from actual science, why do you think they can distinguish pseudoscientific journals from legitimate journals?

Do you work in science or research (or publishing)?

Yes; but as someone else pointed out, my perception of this may be influenced by the field I am in (CS).

Someone was telling me (I haven't verified it) that the costs of access is charged to students per semester. A trivial (or non trivial for someone cheap like me) of $40 a semester. Now, I asked about a dozen people how often they access this resource at the library and none of them had used it. One lecturer enlightened me that some class encourages students to use it but students prefer to not read dense research paper and would rather read articles about the topic and cite the paper.

I don't know if colleges SHOULD pay high yearly subscription is the usage is low. But then, people who DO use it are left high and dry. Multiple colleges share books, too bad they can't do the same with these.

I don't have the numbers but I wonder what a college is charged and how many full ride scholarships a college would be able to give out with that fee?

> Someone was telling me (I haven't verified it) that the costs of access is charged to students per semester.

I have not heard of this in the US. It's probably indirect through students -> tuition -> libraries -> subscriptions.

On low usage: it seems like you might be talking about undergraduates. Journal articles are primarily read (and generated) by faculty, post docs and graduate students. Considering that research grants bring in a lot of money to the university, I don't think it's so simple to consider scholarships that could be given with journal subscription money.

Its a miscarriage of science and justice, when publicly funded science goes behind a journal paywall.

People should be able to access what their taxes funded, and increase communication around science.

I really agree with this quote from the article.

“Access to science is going to be a first-world privilege,” Geltner says. “That’s the opposite of what science is supposed to be about.”

In the Netherlands, at least, it will not be allowed for researchers to publish articles in journals that erect paywalls.

I think this was made a European rule: publicly funded research must be made available to the public (without paywalls).

There is currently a huge kerfuffle going on in Germany, with most universities canceling their Elsevier subscription because Elsevier doesn't do true open access.

As a scientist, I can only thank goodness for Sci Hub. It is so insulting to go through a grueling review, be expected to do reviews myself for free, then pay thousands of dollars for publishing a pdf, and then pay additional thousands of dollars for accessing my peers works. What a mess.

The irony is that European universities are one of the reasons we are stuck with the journal publishing model. I have spoken with tenured professors about this, and in general European universities are more concerned with the name of the journal publishing company that publishes the articles a professor has published for things like hiring and granting tenure. The attitude at European schools seems to be that there is a group of companies responsible for maintaining high-quality journals, and that publishing in journals not operated by the incumbents is questionable. As a result, researchers have trouble pursuing alternative publishing models e.g. running journals over the Internet without the likes of Springer/Elsevier/etc.

(My own experience is that American schools are too fixated on the names of the journals, but less concerned with the company that publishes the journal. So it would still be pretty tough to break the current model, although not as difficult as it would be with Europe.)

Even those who have licensed access to journals thank goodness for Sci-Hub, at least I do. It is often much easier to feed Sci-Hub a DOI and get the paper after negotiating a simple CAPTCHA than it is to log in through some portal so a cookie gets set which tells Wiley that this user has access to these, but not those journals today (but maybe tomorrow, or not), use their search feature to find the correct volume and then finally find the link which hopefully shows an open lock.

In this it is comparable to those copy protection schemes of old which made paying users jump through hoops while the pirates just had smooth sailing all the way. Arrrrrr!

The DOI should take you directly to the article-page. Sci-Hub works through that mechanism.

While I completely agree that current big publisher model is broken (which is why I personally don't submit to or review for the big publishers anymore), I wish people would stop making the above argument because it's not helpful nor particularly strong.

First, taxpayers do not get direct benefit from most of the things funded by their taxes, only indirect benefits. E.g., you do not get to fly around in a fighter plane even though you partly paid for one, but they will keep you safe. So it does not follow that publicly funded science should automatically be publicly accessible (although personally I believe it should be).

Second, in practice the number of people that can get direct benefit from reading any single research paper is very small. The vast majority of those people are working in institutions that have access to the journals, and those few that are not, can usually get a copy simply by emailing the author. So making the papers open will have a very limited real, practical impact for the readers.

Third, if the funding source mandates open access (which many now do), all it means is that a few thousand bucks more per publication go into the pockets of the big publishers as open access fees instead of paying for research. And the institutions are still going to have to buy the same subscription packages to the journals to get access to all the articles. So less public money goes to research, more to the bottom lines of the publishers.

The real problem is that the high impact venues are privately owned and run for profit. That is the problem that needs to be fixed. E.g., instead of mandating open access, mandate that the Chairs or PIs getting funding must serve on publication venues run by non-profit professional associations. Or set up publicly owned high quality venues (like universities in many countries) and make serving in their editorial and review boards a part of the duties of publicly funded Chairs. Or reduce the impact weight of for-profit publication venues when evaluating candidates for publicly funded positions. etc. etc.

Ridiculous. Unlike giving free rides in F-35s, it doesn't cost anything to let me see the results of a study that my taxes paid for. You have to go out of your way to keep information under wraps.

You never know when that "limited, real practical impact" will make all the difference. All it takes is the right set of eyes in the right place at the right time. Not your call, not mine.

TL;DR differential to sci-hub?

Nope, the article claims sci-hub is "falling to lawsuits", which seems a bogus statement -- to be determined.

Article fails to justify its title. Seems they got an interview with one of the Google Scholar founders, tacked on some random stuff related to scholarly publishing and search, and slapped an unsupported headline on it.

(I'm all for breaking science journal paywalls!)

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