Comment by fast_neutron | Hacker News Reader

Comment by fast_neutron | Hacker News Reader

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Elsevier is far from the only offender in the academic publishing space. This price gouging is rampant, and it affects everyone you could call a "customer." The only variable is who gets stuck with the bill.

When I was in grad school, I easily went through 1000+ articles via my institution's library, most of which were dead ends. My school even had to drop the subscription of a journal I was actively using because the price was unaffordable.

For unaffiliated readers, such as those doing industry R&D or individuals researching a medical condition, there are no circumstances under which $30-$50 price per article is affordable, let alone justifiable. This is more expensive than many books, and it's just to read a 10-page PDF which may or may not even provide sufficient context to answer the reader's question. Sci-hub is a literal life-saver for this audience.

"Open access" alleviates the price problem for the reader, but just pushes another unaffordable burden onto the researcher. My group could not afford the multi-thousand dollar "processing charge," and those that could were paying for it with taxpayer money anyway.

So no matter what, someone is getting gouged, be it the reader, the University, the PI, or the public. Prices need to come down by at least an order of magnitude before I would even consider the for-profit academic publishing industry to be anything other than a predatory anachronism.

What I read in this is that sci-hub is only a third of the solution of cutting out the middle man. The another third is a credible place for researchers to publish to. The current publishers are trying to retain a dead model. We don't really need a publisher anymore. What they do provide that I haven't seed a good solution for is visibility among peers.

Sci-hub is great to grab a paper when you already know the DOI. If you are looking for papers in a specific field you will usually end up on a publisher's site using their search engine.

If researchers could easily browse papers relevant to them I think they would dump publishers all together. The expense of prestige can't hold up over time against a more efficient model that costs way less.

Google Scholar, Arxiv and Researchgate make a pretty robust solution for paper discovery

They don't provide a good solution for filtered/ranked paper discovery, one where someone else sorts the papers so you have to skim through less garbage. For paper discovery the main problem is the overabundance of noise, not the ability to find everything (which is indeed solved already). There are excellent papers both on Arxiv as well as in (for example) NeurIPS proceedings, and there is is trash both on Arxiv as well as in NeurIPS proceedings; but the signal-to-noise ratio is vastly different. And the effect of the 25%-ish acceptance rate in many publication venues is not just cutting out 75% of the papers, because for each rejected paper there's probably two (or a dozen?) more which don't even get submitted there because the authors know it'll get rejected, so such a filter removes 90% or more of papers in a manner that's correlated (definitely imperfectly, but still meaningfully) to whether you'd want to read or skim them.

> If researchers could easily browse papers relevant to them I think they would dump publishers all together. The expense of prestige can't hold up over time against a more efficient model that costs way less.

arXiv is an emerging solution. The peer review bit is missing.

https://arxiv.org/category_taxonomy

ArXiv.org Reaches a Milestone and a Reckoning 2022:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/arxiv-org-reaches...

It would be good if arxiv somehow standardised how to capture methodology. E.g. population size, sample size, sample selection method, computed values to demonstrate outcome, etc etc, to make review as easy as possible. And then if the computed values are successfully challenged, they can be updated and the trust in the paper's conclusions adjusted.

Also missing are viable costs. If arXiv didn't have the support of some nonprofit societies and grants from foundations, it would be in significant trouble.

This may be naive but, doesn't Sci-Hub provide visibility?

The search on sci-hub is not great. It is best when you know the DOI of what you want.

Didn't sci-hub stop adding new papers? Has that changed?

Still going on until the lawsuit in India is resolved.

I have a couple papers I have been trying to get for almost a year. Can't get them on Sci-Hub and the authors never responded when I asked directly.

The closest analogy I can think of is a highway billboard. Say there’s a really good spot with lots of traffic, and you want drivers to see your ad. The billboard company provides a venue for you to put up the ad, and takes care of the printing and real estate. Other than that, the rest of the process of making that ad poster is up to you, your company and any partners you rely on.

The publisher is like the billboard company in that they provide the venue, maybe with good visibility, handle the printing and hosting, and connect you with unpaid peer reviewers.

The only one making money off of all this is the publisher. The benefit you get is that someone else gets to read your work, and maybe you got a “good billboard spot” to get the most impact.

The extra part of this is that academic researchers are a captive market, similar to users who have only one ISP to choose from like Comcast. You have to publish on That Specific Billboard or you risk career suicide. If you were the billboard owner, you have a strong incentive to charge outrageous prices because you know that your customers rely on you, and have nowhere else to go.

I wonder how much of the journal bureaucracy, such as peer-review, actually adds value. Do we really need vetted journals? Are pre-print upload sites with the ability to comment good enough?

Peer reviewers are fellow academics who are not paid. Peer review does not add any cost to publishing. The cost all goes to for-profit companies making record profits.

Peer review absolutely add costs. Finding a reviewer who's qualified, free and willing takes time and effort, and that's increasing by the day. Frankly, I think peer review is doomed. There's now a flood of AI-generated papers that journals need to weed out, and even 99% success is not good enough for peer-reviewers' workload and continued respect. On top of that, natural demographics, the cuts to university funding in the West and the improvement of education in Africa, Asia and South America mean there is a greater and greater proportion of young researchers to experienced, overburdened researchers, and that's just too much load to bear.

It might be easier to find reviewers if they were compensated for their time instead of volunteers for a for-profit publisher.

As soon as you pay reviewers, you now have to deal with people pretending to be academics and pretending to review a paper just to earn money, which adds additional cost. Not to mention that money can introduce biases even if the reviewer is genuine.

Believe it or not, not enough to make a difference. The limiting factor is qualified academics' time.

Depending on the discipline, there are plenty of people with PhDs who are adjuncting for low wages. And for other disciplines, plenty of people with PhDs who work in industry. And plenty of people without PhDs who know enough to find errors in papers (I've found conclusion breaking errors in two so far).

Someone is getting paid to loop in the peer-reviewers in the first place. Probably not a lot for any given article, but it's something.

I guess peer-reviewers may save money by doing some editing that the paid editor would have to do instead. I don't know how this balances out.

Did the previous comment get edited? It didn't seem to be talking about publishing costs.

if only the reviewers were paid I'd understand the question in the context of price gauging. however the journal does _not_ pay the reviewers.

the question how to best organize academic peer review is independent from the price gauging.

Reviewers are paid by not having to pay for reviews of their own papers. To be sure, many reviews are not worth the time to read them, but the good ones have been invaluable to increasing the quality of my work.

The need for a journal in the first place is, in small part, to coordinate peer-review. Eliminate pre-publication peer review and you eliminate, in a small part, the need for a journal.

The fact that a coordinator like a publisher exists isn’t necessarily in dispute. Sometimes it’s necessary to have a 3rd party coordinate reviewers, maintain quality standards, and settle plagiarism disputes. The issue is the price. It’s wholly unreasonable to charge $30 to read a paper, to charge a PI upwards of $2k-$7k to remove the $30 reader charge, or to charge whatever ungodly amount they charge libraries to offer free access to researchers.

Like I said, I’d value the service I get at a factor of 10-20x less than what they charge.

(Edited for formatting)

The journals don't actually do peer review. They are really only an expensive distribution network with limited reach due to cost expense on the reader side.

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