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Comment by krisoft | Hacker News Reader

> Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing?

Because people can have opinions on industries they don’t work in?

I don’t work in hospitality, and I have never cooked for a living. I can still confidently tell you when my food is burnt. A chef then can crawl out of the kitchen and explain the complicated process which resulted in me getting burnt food and I won’t care a bit.

My tax money paid a researcher to study long years, then my tax money paid for the equipment the researcher used to research and my tax money paid for the researcher’s time too. And then the researcher writes up what they found and pays a third party also from my tax money and that third party does everything in their power to hide the paper away from me. That is burnt food. I don’t have to work in the industry to recognise it.

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Nothing wrong with having an opinion, but having a strong opinion ("the solution is so obvious, i can solve this in 5 minutes") about an industry of which you known nothing of the inner workings come across as rather ignorant.

Your example of "I can tell when my food is burnt" is a poor one. Can you tell a quality scientific paper? Do you know what's required to get tenure? To get scientific funding? All of those are relevant as to why the scientific publishing system works as it does today. If you don't know those things, then you don't know how to solve the problem.

Your argument makes no sense.

Journal publishers don’t weigh in on tenure or grant decisions. While they provide a conduit for materials that impact such things (the researchers papers), they have no say in anything (including, incidentally, sometimes what gets published)

A publisher provided distribution. That’s it. They aren’t even the chef in this analogy: they’re FOH staff.

Journal editors are faculty at academic institutions. They may or may not be paid a small fee by the publisher for their efforts but it’s typically not significant. Reviewers are unpaid volunteers.

Journal publishers historically charged money because they managed the printing and distribution of print journals. Some also facilitated distribution of drafts. That’s it. The bulk of the intellectual labor was done for free by academics.

As you can imagine, in the age of the internet, this entire process can be replaced by a CMS solution hosted in the cloud.

> A publisher provided distribution. That’s it.

throwawaaarrgh argues that they provide prestige, too.

I agree. Certainly, I can’t see that publishers only provide distribution, as that should be almost trivial to replicate, and lead to a race to the bottom, price-wise, and the entire process would long have been “replaced by a CMS solution hosted in the cloud”.

You are absolutely correct. I have made a tool that suggests the most suitable journal for a particular paper to publish. Fewer than 50% researchers care; they all want to be in Nature, price be damned. Academia is not wrong to say publishers make too much profit, but is entirely unwilling to change the way it works too. And how much is Nature supposed to charge when they need 600 highly qualified people to pick the best handful of papers amongst thousands?

That prestige exists because of its editors and its history in a specific field of study. There’s no “value” being created by the publisher itself in this respect.

There is, in hiring a highly qualified set of reviewers.

Reviewers are volunteers.

Journals main business is selling the stone for stone soup.

I worked in the kitchen and know how the soup is made. If you insist on calling it stone soup, then it's granite - unglamourous, lots of skilled but drudge work to process, but valuable then.

> Your example of "I can tell when my food is burnt" is a poor one. Can you tell a quality scientific paper?

Think of it in these terms: don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining. The science isn’t the issue. The money is.

Academic publishing is much like the US healthcare system, bond rating companies and various other interests, industries and organizations in that through quirks of the path of history they find themselves in a position to extract rents either through regulation, historic convention, effective monopoly and/or misplaced incentives.

When the current state is shown to be obviously deficient, these rent seekers among other strategies will say it’s much too complicated and there are you simple solutions. If you dream that there might be you simply don’t understand the problem.

Publishers make ~30% profit. High? Yes. Sit-on-your-pile-of-gold-cackling? No.

Units error.

Margin is not a measure of wealth.

Spending $700M to make $1B, each year, would be a pile of gold to cackle on, yes.

>Can you tell a quality scientific paper?

Given the replication crisis, maybe scientific publishing as it works today also can't tell quality.

The replication crisis is much worse in fields without open publishing.

Computer science/physics/etc. (arxiv), economics (NBER) and other fields with freely available papers tend to have much better replication numbers than fields that are closed-off.

This is even better when data and code are publicly available.

scite (where I work) makes understanding reproducibility much easier -- we have access to full text articles with agreements from publishers and are able to show you the statements from papers where each reference was used in text with the textual context, section, and a classification, so you can see if newer research indicated a difference in empirical findings, etc. Might be of interest for you is the only reason I'm bringing it up- https://scite.ai/home

If I’m paying for the whole thing, it behooves those in the game to either fix it quickly themselves or at least be polite while I’m offering my half baked solution.

> Can you tell a quality scientific paper? Do you know what's required to get tenure? To get scientific funding? All of those are relevant as to why the scientific publishing system works as it does today.

Knowing these things is also not required to be an academic publisher. All you need is cash. You've mistaken the boss for the expert.

Maybe because "the solution is so obvious, i can solve this in 5 minutes" is what HNers are asked to do on a professional basis?

Why can't we just move the journals themselves inside the taxpayer-funded sphere?

Set up a few journals like "Physics, presented by the Department of Energy" or "DHHS Intestinal Virus Fanbook", and hire on some editors and curators at a modest GS wage.

Either the editors do a great job and the journals eventually get same pride-of-placement as showing up in an esteemed private publication, or they do a middling job and they're still cheaper than pay-for-play open-access publications.

> I can still confidently tell you when my food is burnt.

That does not guarantee are be able to cook it without burning it.

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