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Comment by dougmccune | Hacker News Reader

I think we agree. It would be better if there was a different way to validate the importance/impact of research. Particularly if there was a way to evaluate the importance immediately, as opposed to waiting years to see how the impact plays out (via citations, etc). So if there was a committee that provided that evaluation entirely outside of the publishing ecosystem, that would be great (great from the viewpoint of humanity, maybe not publishers' business models).

Hell, if you were guaranteed that your tenure committee actually read your full papers and then made their decision about the importance of your work entirely on their own, then you don't need any other validation of your work. But at that point we're sadly living in a fantasy world. In the real world academics making hiring decisions need external validation to judge their applicants. Figure out a better way to provide that without losing a ton of money and you're golden.

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>> Why does this have to happen at the expense of public access?

I didn't understand from your answer why validation and restriction of public access need to go hand-in-hand. When I left academia, I was no longer able to read tax-payer funded research papers without paying an exorbitant fee per paper. Are you saying that lowering the fees is would lead to "losing a ton of money"? Do you mean the publisher would become unprofitable, or become less profitable?

I'd iterpret that as the fact that right now, any academic or institution who chooses to unilaterally avoid the current system will lose lots of funding, as the publication metrics are actively used by the funding bodies in project evaluation.

I am not aware of any alternative that can replace the current publication metrics for this purpose. The funding bodies have no motivation, capability or resources to make a replacement themselves, so that would have to come as a ready-made replacement in order to be accepted, and actually work (have usable content) for evaluating all current academic disciplines and academics out of the box (which seems rather unrealistic) so that a multi-disciplinary funding body can actually put that metric in their next funding round official evaluation criteria.

They don't have to go hand in hand. Others have pointed out eLife as an example of high prestige open access. There's no reason, other than history and inertia, that the validation has to come at the expense of access. However, I'd argue that I haven't yet seen a good model where the validation isn't expensive (by some definition of expensive). So I definitely think curation/validation can be delinked from the paywall, but I'm not convinced they can be provided free or cheap (and yes, the standard argument that reviewers aren't paid is valid, but the idea that publishers don't have real costs managing that process is simply naive).

This makes sense. Thanks a lot for clarifying and taking the time to write your original post.

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