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Comment by ta123456789 | Hacker News Reader

"The ultimate effect of pay-to-play is that the traditional peer review and refereeing process has broken down. If a dishonest researcher gets rejected from a reputable journal, they can take their paper to a pay-to-play journal and have it published there. With over 10,000 academic journals, it’s impossible for the lay public to track which journals are reputable and which are not. As far as the public is concerned, a published paper is a valid paper."

Ok, but I take some issue with this.

Most scientific papers are not intended at the general public, but at experts working in the specific area that the paper covers. Also, often these papers are not even understandable by a phd outside the area, let alone a lay person.

Which journals and authors are reputable are known to experts in the area. "Pay to play" papers published in obscure journals will not get much attention or be taken seriously.

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Agree. When I was in graduate school the "bad journals" were well known. The pay to play journals are very cleverly disguised, but it's extremely hard to accidentally publish to or cite from one of these journals.

There are many, many problems with the almost cult-like atmosphere of reviewers in good journals but pay-to-play isn't one of them.

So here's the experience driving that observation: I'm adjacent to a number of anti-vax communities and during the pandemic (and before) there were PDFs of "1000 papers showing why vaccines are dangerous" being passed around. Honestly, snake oil salesmen don't even have to go through pay to play, they can just self publish and the effect is the same. If it looks real enough, a lot of people don't have the background to tell the difference. They look at the abstract and the conclusions and go from there.

If we're going to beat that kind of misinformation, the real stuff needs to be open and available so that translators can help people understand it. There were people in academia doing this on social media during the pandemic, but we need many, many more of them. There are a lot of people outside of academia who have enough of a background that they could help - if only they had access.

Edit to add: Also, I've heard from some folks in academia that they've been bitten by open access journals that started out well intentioned and turned into pay to play with bad reputations. And that in some fields, it is hard to track which ones are good and which ones are going bad.

Yes, but the point of publishing is not to inform the public or media - the point is to communicate scientific results to others working in one's field.

Expecting it to be well explained to the general public is like asking all patches posted to LKML to include a lay-language explanation of exactly what the patch changes, without using specialized CS terms.

You are correct they shouldnt be intended for public to take seriously. I think one issue is that the news media frequently spins these articles so the public ends up needing to decipher the accuracy.

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