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Comment by 60devs | Hacker News Reader

What is the role of the publisher? I think there are many ways to publish things nowadays... Is the publisher responsible for peer review? Or how does that system work?

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The value that rests with the publisher is mainly the reputation of specific journals it maintains. In some (most?) scientific fields, publishing in a high-reputation journal is of primary importance for grant funding, author's job prospects, attracting top talent, etc.

For example, the Journal of Membrane Science is one of the most highly regarded journals in my field. Anyone in the field can be pretty confident that an article in that journal is a high-quality work, meaning it's scientifically rigorous and representative of the state of the art. Researchers want to publish in that journal so that they are associated with 'the best' in their field.

Articles in another journal, Membranes, which I just discovered now on Google, would not receive the same amount of credence from professionals in the field. This is partly due to practitioners themselves unwilling to trust lesser-known journals; however, professionals are busy and need an easy way to filter feed from the chaff. The value provided by Elsevier in that sense is that they maintain a type of filter of quality.

I'm sure all of the same authors and professionals could start a new journal and immediately stop publishing in Journal of Membrane Science, but it could be a less-than-optimal career choice. In a sense, timing would be everything.

Well... The value Elsevier provides is that it attracts the people who maintain the filter of quality - namely the editorial board.

An interesting case is Lingua, an Elsevier journal. A few years ago, its editorial board (i.e. regular researchers not employed by Elsevier) collectively resigned and founded the new journal Glossa. That is now the journal that provides that stamp of quality, proving that its not Elsevier itself that provides it.

Cool thanks for the link on Glossa. I always thought it was possible for a collective resignation of an editorial board but I've never seen it realized.

I'm curious why/how it was possible for them to do it. The Wikipedia link mentions that there was a disagreement between the editors and Elsevier. How were the editors able to collectively organize and leave en masse? What can editorial boards of other journals learn from this?

There were a number of favourable circumstances. I think the most important two were that 1) the editorial board had many who considered Open Access to be important, and 2) it was a relatively small field in which they managed to get their transition relatively well publicised, which allowed people to submit their articles there without negatively impacting their career.

Interestingly, I'm working on a blog post right now on what others can learn from this (because I'm trying to make it happen more often), so if you (or others reading this) are interested, you can follow along via https://tinyletter.com/Flockademic

> I always thought it was possible for a collective resignation of an editorial board but I've never seen it realized.

As can be seen in the Elsevier Wikipedia page, it has happened several times (not often enough). The Journal of Algorithms case is instructive [1]. Any individual researcher that "fights" the publisher will lose out, but collectively in a concerted move one can be successful.

I think Don Knuth provided enough credibility to transfer the prestige of the journal, and enough of a towering figure to give everyone the impetus to go ahead with the defection collectively.

It would be very interesting to examine cases where this worked successfully and where it failed (or wasn't attempted) and see what differentiates them. I'm pretty sure Elsevier is examining these cases very carefully...

[1] http://www.cs.colorado.edu/%7Ehal/jalg.html

> its editorial board (i.e. regular researchers not employed by Elsevier) collectively resigned

Cases that might be closer to many HN readers are:

1999: Journal of Logic Programming editorial board resigned and created Theory and Practice of Logic Programming

2003: Journal of Algorithms board resigned and founded ACM Transactions on Algorithms, prodded by Don Knuth (see links)

2006: Topology -> Journal of Topology

So, it is possible to overcome the coordination problem and cooperate to defeat Elsevier.

http://www.cs.colorado.edu/%7Ehal/jalg.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13557667

Peer review is done by fellow researchers, without being paid by the publisher. However, the publisher does find the editorial board (and sometimes pays them) that finds the peer reviewers, often (but less and less so) provides typesetting and proof reading services, and most importantly provide the infrastructure that makes the articles available and makes sure that they remain available in the future.

(And there's a ton of other things, like making sure people pay to access articles when they have a subscription and the like, but those are services they provide to themselves...)

For well-established journals, the editorial board finds new editors, so there is no cost involved for publishers.

With respect to typesetting and proofreading, my personal experience is that the 'service' provided by Elsevier was of such a low quality that it actually caused _increased_ effort on the author's side.

Making the articles available is indeed the core business of a publisher. However, prices for that kind of service should have decreased significantly over the last two decades, not increased.

Yes, to be clear: I am not arguing that the value they provide justifies in any way the extortionate fees they're asking. Quite the opposite, in fact - I believe it's mostly "justified" (or at least made possible) through a disfunctioning market.

They tend to organise peer review but they don't actually do it, it's volunteer work. They also usually pay the editor of the journal and assemble the thing, performing the few remaining non-automated DTP tasks required to produce a physical journal. Unless it's online-only.

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