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Comment by operatingthetan | Hacker News Reader

Seems like universities have enough power that they could jailbreak themselves from this situation, right?

It's a massive coordination problem. Few universities have the resources, even if central admin had a clue. Even UC Berkeley's fight with Elsevier was a huge undertaking: https://news.berkeley.edu/2021/03/16/ucs-deal-with-elsevier-...

For most, that means collaborating with others. UC system and B1G academic alliance are making moves, but it's herding cats. Even within universities, it's a nightmare of competing interests. How do you convince your faculty to publish through your own press or consortium instead of the higher impact factor journal owned by Elsevier?

> It's a massive coordination problem. Few universities have the resources, even if central admin had a clue.

We should all just mercilessly mock Harvard and its ilk, because they have the resources to do pretty much anything.

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short-lis...

This sounds like an incredibly easy problem to solve if some people felt like solving it. I imagine that it's some administrators near the top that would block anyone from saying "let's have no-one publish to Elsevier any more" because John from Elsevier takes them on such lovely days out in bespoke locations, staying in boutique hotels.

Telling tenured professors where to publish is not going to happen. You might entice them with good contracts, but the revenue from most books and articles is very small. The satisfaction and credibility of an Oxford or MIT Press book is worth more than a few thousand bucks to many people.

Publishing in high impact factor journals is a big deal. At the very least, I think that the powers that be would have to implement guarantees that publishing in a lower impact factor campus publication wouldn't hurt a researcher's chances of receiving tenure.

> At the very least, I think that the powers that be would have to implement guarantees that publishing in a lower impact factor campus publication wouldn't hurt a researcher's chances of receiving tenure.

This honestly sounds like something that should be doable by the university.

Remember that many of the decision-makers are academics with great publishing records. They succeeded at the game and don't want to rules to be changed.

Also, just practically, the journals help a lot in assessing candidates. Even in fields just adjacent to mine, I might trust an endorsement by a good journal over my own judgments. Often I know the work of the editors there and value their judgment. Chasing after highest impact factor journal publications has its problems, but I haven't seen better proposals.

"If you don't let our faculty publish in these journals, their publication stats will suffer (fewer citations, lower impact factor) and that will translate into lower rankings for our university."

Bigwigs at universities care about rankings, even if they are basically garbage.

> This sounds like an incredibly easy problem to solve if some people felt like solving it

If you ignore the hardest part of the problem; getting everyone to agree and coordinate, then yes it’s a simple problem to solve! You can simplify any problem like this, just ignore the hard part!

What if a paper was a collaboration between 3 universities across the world?

Some people seem to believe that all the world's problems are easily solvable if only someone would yell at a lot of other people.

To bring this back to HN topics, anyone have tips on trying to suss out that trait in hiring managers during interviews?

I don't know why you mentioned yelling. No one is yelling. Undesirable hiring managers are easy to spot: they have poor reading comprehension.

That’s…actually hilarious advise that I think probably has quite a bit of merit to it.

Seems right up the AAU’s alley.

They could! They'd have to also change how faculty review and tenure work, to incentivize faculty to publish in alternative open access journals instead of the top (paywalled) journals in their field. Otherwise, faculty will continue publishing with the for-profit publishers even if there's alternatives available.

There are a for proft open access journals. In most open access journals, the payment system is just reversed. The author/s pay a huge amount of money as publication fees (usually a couple of thousands) instead of readers (or their institutions) paying for the article or the journal subscription.

Heck, even the widely hated publishing companies offer open access. It just costs thousands of dollars for an article and tens of thousands of dollars for a book.

Why would any researcher want to pay it?

Most of the time, it is not even up to the researchers to decide that. Open access is usually a requirement by the funding agencies. For example, in the US all federally funded research will be required to be published on open access journals and will be enforced at the end of 2025[1]

[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/ostp/news-updates/2022/08/25/ostp...

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