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Comment by mac01021 | Hacker News Reader

[PREMISE:]

These scientific journals hail from a time before the web was widespread and universally accessible.

In the present day, it is technologically feasible for every scientist to self-publish on their own blog (we'd probably want some new tooling for tracking and counting citations distributed across the web, but that's just details for some programmers to work out).

[QUESTION:]

Given the premise, I wonder the following. If we were to simply disband the existing publishers today, rather than trying to regulate them, what system would emerge to fill their place? Would it be similar to the existing system? Or would it be something more free-and-webby as described in the premise? Or something else entirely?

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I think we already have the answer in the field of computer science: ACM. I.e., a non-profit professional organization that runs conferences with peer-reviewed content (and some journals and magazines). A cheap membership (<$100) gives you access to all the content, which could even be free (money comes from conferences and donations).

Fundamentally what is needed is a process that produces peer-reviewed, immutable, discrete pieces of globally published work. Self-published blogs don't really achieve that well.

Hashes do.

Institutional archives do.

I've thought about this for years, and the fundamental problem I keep running up against is that you'd need to reinvent academic culture and incentives to have any hope of replacing the publication system with something better.

So your answer is that, if we disbanded the existing publishers, a new set of nearly-identical publishers would pop up in there place and our system for the dissemination of scientific knowledge would continue to operate just as it does today?

I don't know that you're wrong, but:

Right now, I really want an article in Nature or some other prestigious journal, in order to advance my career as a scientist. If those prestigious publications were suddenly gone, there might be other publications that would spring up to fill the vaccuum, but the new ones would have no track record and no prestige. So wouldn't everyone just as soon either self-publish or else favor non-exploitative, open-access journals?

It's interesting to imagine the same thought experiment applied to other industries.

What if we did away with all car companies? How about all TV media companies? What if all physicians were no longer physicians tomorrow?

By thinking about how it might happen if it were tech companies, I have a possible answer.

From that perspective, I am assuming that the top (in hierarchy, not importance) groups from the then-incumbents will be the fastest to raise new companies, which will still be able to attract talent with the prestige that the old company used to have (think about how startups founded by ex-FAANG work). E.g. Nature executives and leaders develop N2, FOX builds Wolf, Tesla builds...Tesla, all of which start off with more credibility and popularity than offerings without this benefit. I do not think that the exact same situation would arise though. There would still be easier entry into these markets than before, at least at first.

In my understanding, the most valuable service academic journals provide is peer review. If reviewers start accepting online submissions, people could simply send them links to their online articles hosted on their site or blog. Content would be licensed under the CC-BY-SA. If it passes peer review, the journal would simply link to it and also provide a PDF copy. Journals would become a directory of peer reviewed works.

The most valuable (or at least: the reason we're still paying them) service academic journals provide is being able to categorise academics as having published in those journals. There are plenty of journals that provide perfectly fine peer review, but that are not as important as other journals because they don't have their brand name.

In other words: for many disciplines, the potential replacements providing peer review, archival and distribution are already there. The main thing a replacement system will have to find out is how to determine who to give grants, tenure, etc.

(Disclaimer: I'm working on a project that hopes to achieve that.)

Any chance you can post a link to what you are working on? Does it involve a PageRank like system?

It's in my profile, the link is https://plaudit.pub

It's not currently that interesting to the average HN reader though. The idea is to allow researchers to give each other recognition explicitly, ideally replacing the recognition of "being published in journal x". Since researchers already have a reputation in their academic community, we figured that we could leverage that as a counterweight to the indirect reputation that journals currently have.

We do so by integrating with preprint servers and publishers, providing a widget that allows researchers to endorse the research they're reading. The first integrations are set to launch at the start of 2019, so until then there's not much to play with.

That said, the PageRank-like system you might be looking for could just be the h-index? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index

Good stuff, thanks for the h-index link, I'll take a look. I've seen something similar, SCImago Journal Rank, but I think that is only for the journal, not the individual. I really like the idea of moving away from the idea of a journal brand as the ranking of importance.

Has AI been applied to academic journal peer review yet? It seems like this might be a significant use case.

It's an interesting question. At the start, it would be somewhat chaotic, also depending on how you define "existing publishers". Currently, many funders/universities determine who to give grants/tenure/etc by looking at the journals researchers have published in. They will still be able to do that for a while.

However, for academics, it wouldn't be entirely clear what to do. For example, if you choose to only disband paywalled journals, they will likely simple submit their works to open access journals, and over time some of those will emerge as the new "good ones".

Which is an interesting parallel, because that is sort of what Plan S tries to do. Except that it doesn't really have the power to "break up" paywalled journals, but only to deny them the ability to publish work they fund. As more and more funders join (like these Chinese funders appear likely to do), the closer this will get to "breaking up".

If you were able to disband all journals, but not preprint servers, then researchers would probably start publishing their work there, new servers would emerge for disciplines that don't have one yet, and some new system of determining "excellent" work will probably emerge. (Disclaimer: I'm working on one such system.)

If also preprint servers were disbanded... I don't know - nobody would be able to publish any more? Would you allow new publishers to be created?

> Would you allow new publishers to be created?

Yes, that was my intent. New publishers could emerge, and with no new restrictions on their behavior. Basically the main change is that the slate will have been wiped clean in terms of prestige.

I'm wondering

1. would new publishers emerge?

2. how, if at all, would they be different from what we have now.

This is pretty much what the arXiv is, isn't it?

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