Open Source provided the path to achieve our publishing goals | Hacker News Reader

Open Source provided the path to achieve our publishing goals

systemsapproach.substack.com

59 pointsteleforce8 comments

I feel like the Wizard of Oz when I tell the scientists: you've had this power from the beginning. No one needs to "escape" from big publishing. The scientist has always had complete control over the work. They own the copyright.

All that big publishing offers is presentation. The reason many professors choose traditional journals is because they like how the final product looks. Certainly not every reader demands high quality typesetting. Nor does every paper require it. It's just that the overall product is pretty desirable. That's why people keep submitting the papers and dealing with the downsides. It's a product that people want.

Now you can complain about the price. It can be steep for people. But that money goes to pay for copyediting, typesetting and formal archives. These are nothing to sneeze at. Ask a professor for a copy of their syllabus from three years ago. I swear that half of the people can't find them.

You get what you pay for. Yes, professors can have their grad students stay up late fiddling with LaTeX for hours. Yes, there's a value in just giving away a copy for free. But there's a reason why people overwhelmingly choose journals for their best work.

I don't know if it is the case for all journals, but for the few papers I submitted to journals, the journal didn't do any special typesetting or copyediting. We submitted the LaTeX that was basically published as is. The main value of the journal was the peer review process.

The amount of work that a publisher does varies, but there can be quite a bit of typesetting. Naturally, there are some lazy, low-rent journals that don't do much. And certainly the publishers love it when the author(s) do a great job from the beginning. But the layer does something.

This is not a great take IMO - The journals choose to use publishers not the authors - Publishers do not provide enough value to justify their price gouging

The publisher creates the journal and brings aboard the editor(s). The author then can decide where to submit a paper -- or maybe even just distribute it for free on the Internet and forgo all of the bureaucracy. The author has ultimate control.

Now you might argue that authors need to publish because the promotion committee cares. Okay, but again the professors are in control. If they don't want to use the journals and their filtering pipeline, they can come up with their own way of giving out promotions.

The value in publishing at a journal has little-to-nothing to do with how nice the typesetting looks and everything to do with getting the stamp of approval that “this is a good piece of science”.

Did they say which Creative Commons license? I missed it if they did. Oh wait, if you click through to the repository you can see it: CC-BY-SA.

Good! That's a relief. CC-BY and CC-BY-SA are effectively like open source licenses, as is the quasi-license CC0, whereas the other CC licenses are not due to restrictions on derivative works or on certain kinds of use.

A bit ironic that this is written on substack…

Reply on news.ycombinator.com