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> They actually exist today to prop up an academic research industry driven by cash and reputation.

Just yet another problem with academia that needs to be solved. This system leads to all sorts of academic dishonesty such as reviewing rings. It's at least partially responsible for the sheer number of bad papers being published today. Disrupting it is a good thing.

> If they disappeared tomorrow, there would be a breakdown in institutional funding, there would be chaos in editing, publishing, discovering and vetting information, and it would actually be harder to access information.

It's okay. Just let the whole thing break down. Eventually it'll sort itself out.

> Sci-Hub distributes information that paid journals have already done the work to curate.

This curation is just gatekeeping done by peer reviewers. All they need to do is set up a blog and start gatekeeping it. Good papers get posted there, bad papers don't.

I really don't see why it has to be any more complicated than that.

> But throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't a better solution.

It's certainly better than sitting around waiting for a multi-billion dollar industry of copyright monopolists to get even richer and powerful.

> It's okay. Just let the whole thing break down. Eventually it'll sort itself out.

This seems like one of the worst ideas ever

Can't be worse than allowing this archaic copyright industry to go on.

It could be much worse. Much much much much much much worse.

Some things are incredibly complicated and messy. And not just with the current publishing issues–even getting them to the imperfect stages they reside in now was game changing on an absolutely massive worldwide scale.

With some things, expecting perfection is not only ridiculous, but it leads to thinking such as “it can’t get worse…” and that’s the point at which the _thing_ says “oh yeah? can’t get worse? hold my beer.”

In my experience, when discussing things which are this complicated, on this level, anyone who doesn’t already know a dozen ways things can actually get much worse I immediately recommend they take some time to understand the actual subject better, because this means they have little actual understanding of the topic. I’m not saying this to shame you, I promise, I’m really really not. But if this is something you’re passionate about, then you owe it to yourself to have a better grasp on what the terrifying outcomes look like.

Does any of the above mean things can’t be improved? Of Course Not. There are serious problems with many things, but serious problems means it can have very serious outcomes. We should always look for ways to improve. But only with an accurate understanding.

And to be very clear, there are very serious problems in the academic publishing world, no question.

“It’s too complicated to fix it” is a near cousin of “it’s too complicated for you to understand”, sometimes this assertions are true, but some other times are just driven by the person fear of change. In a chess move, when it has not a very obvious outcome, the ramifications are so numerous that only the keen eye of an expert with thousands of games on their back can predict how it is going to affect the game and ending. In fixing the academia publishing industry there currently exists 0 experts that can predict that so any random guy’s guess is as good as anyones

I’m not sure where or how you inferred something akin to “No one should do anything.” from my comment, but it is absolutely not what I said and absolutely not what I implied.

As botverse pointed out, you offer numerous apologies for the current state of affairs while issuing dire and vague warnings against modifying it.

The approach taken by the machine learning community succeeded and incurred absolutely none of sky-is-falling shyte you moan about.

I think your reading of what I posted is both pulling things out of the context of what I actually said and a bad faith reading. Please dont pull things out of context when you’re trying to have a discussion, when you do this, it implies you’re not getting full comprehension of what was actually said. It’s not a herculean task to keep all points from a couple paragraphs in context. It’s not difficult.

I make it very clear that academic publishing has issues. I state it plain as day, I even literally finish my comment with “And to be very clear…:

> And to be very clear, there are very serious problems in the academic publishing world, no question.

However, changing something without even an understanding of what could go wrong is a very serious mistake. As I said in my comment, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t seek to change and improve things. But if one can’t even imagine what could go wrong, than this person either hasn’t though much about it, or they clearly do not understand the subject very well.

If something needs to be fixed, don’t fall into amature hour. Take the time to actually understand the subject first. Then start fixing.

Now don’t pull bits and pieces of what I said and separate them, please. It’s only a couple paragraphs, It’s not difficult to hold onto the entire context of a couple of small comment paragraphs.

>In fixing the academia publishing industry there currently exists 0 experts that can predict that so any random guy’s guess is as good as anyones

I'm not sure how you can look at political discourse in the United States today and say "yep, let's just blow up academic gatekeepers". Just one anti-vaccine paper from almost 30 years ago (that wasn't even accepted into any publications) and fueled an entire generation of luddites.

The value of academic journals today is trust and the internet has not solved that. Pretend if GP had been searching Google, rather than SciHub. There are millions in the US who have used Google to deduce that placing rocks around your house can cure your migraines all because an enterprising individual had gamed SEO.

"It’s too complicated to fix it" is not what the parent poster was implying. If you take a second to breakdown the actual value that journals provide then one clear way it can become much worse is a model similar to the open web where anyone can publish anything with very loose standards for reproducibility or rigor.

> Just one anti-vaccine paper from almost 30 years ago (that wasn't even accepted into any publications) and fueled an entire generation of luddites.

Ok, so you admit that the journals aren’t even able to accomplish what they purport to. So if this is already a problem, yet good research is inaccessible, what again is the point of the paywalled journals?

No? The journals did their job - the paper wasn't published. The broader internet (and largely a single celebrity) then became vector for a con-man to amplify his misinformation for profit.

I'm using that as an example of something that could become commonplace if you blow up the journal system. Then every paper becomes "I feel this is right because blog-A which aligns to my beliefs says so". Institutional legitimacy is not something that is built overnight.

Sticking with a blatant bad system due to fear of uncertain and analysis paralysis. Let us not leave our caves because the light can burn us!

There's nothing wrong with staying with the status quo if the only alternative proposed is to burn it all down because it'll figure itself out.

I didn’t say or imply any of that. I’m beginning to question if any of you responding even read my comment.

So if Journals don't pay the reviewers and the reviewers are what filters out the garbage, then what necessary function are the journals filling? Do they vet the reviewers? Index the studies?

I've never had much trouble finding what I need on GitHub or scihub. Seems to be indexed pretty well.

And if there is a conflict of interest for reviewers to be paid, then isn't their a conflict of interest for those selecting and vetting the reviewers?

A couple things:

1) They do indeed vet reviewers, both their reviewers and also who ends up on their editorial boards, which for most people on them is just "Yeah, you're going to get more review requests." Editors should - but often don't - also evaluate the quality of the reviews themselves.

2) Some journals do copyediting and layout. Several times this has markedly improved the paper, including one that remade a figure.

3)They also handle some backend stuff. For example, for most medical journals, you just have to check a box saying "This was funded by the NIH" and they'll handle putting it in the appropriate repositories, etc.

Actually, an editor once told me that a lot of papers (50%) are rejected without consulting reviewers. So the garbage is already filtered by the journals. Reviewers can often disagree with each other as well, so a judgement call is needed in those cases.

I agree with your point that payment does not necessarily mean conflict of interest.

The baby is dead. It's time to bury it and mourn its passing.

There are better tools and technology to "curate" science - the only reason for these journals is rent extraction and gatekeeping.

You're right that journals have many important functions beyond peer review, but you're wrong that this has anything to do with their closed-access paid nature. Fields such as computational linguistics have a healthy ecosystem of journals and conference proceedings, all free and open access.

What ways are better?

> Once paid journals go away, Sci-Hub will end up like GitHub

more like we get arxiv.org?

Preprints and blogs should be the default. Instead of peer review, which sometimes (often?) turns into gatekeeping or dismissing new ideas, we’ll judge research on reproducibility. The github model for science sounds better than what we have now. Journals to curate research is pre-internet tech, it’s outdated.

> But throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't a better solution.

It is not a baby, it's a teratoma eating scientific world and society from inside, the time to cut it out is now!