Timothy Gowers is bent on proving academic journals can cost nothing | Hacker News Reader

Timothy Gowers is bent on proving academic journals can cost nothing

vox.com

94 pointsrobertwalsh011 comments

It's a testament to the skill of publishers' FUD that we're still having this conversation. Authors don't get paid, reviewers don't get paid, product is disseminated via pdf, and there is still a "debate" outstanding such that a Fields Medal winner has to get involved to push things forward a bit.

A real estimate is available for JMLR, a reputed machine learning journal, about $10 per article (!): https://blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-j...

See also scholastica (https://scholasticahq.com/) which is also around $10 per article before you add bells and whistles.

Actually for high quality scientific research, that doesn't seem to bad when you consider people will drop 10-20 dollars to go see a movie. Too bad the authors don't see any of it.

usually I'd agree, but I think academic publishing is different from purely artistic work. Research is funded up front by grants. The resulting product is a piblic good, and should be made available to the publoc with zero margin.

If the research has practical value, the authors can capture that through patents and similar systems.

I agree but one counter argument is that a lot of research is already paid for by government.

In the case of JMLR it's not 10USD per-view. It's 10USD per article published. I'm not sure if that was clear from the comment above.

Commercial journals generally charge far more than that per-view. JMLR charge nothing per-view.

When open access, commercial journals will often charge 1000s to publish an article (compared to the 10USD JMLR says it costs them).

Here's two of Gowers' blog posts about Discrete Analysis, the journal:

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an...

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/discrete-analysis-la...

>"Timothy Gowers's first big assault on academic publishing started almost by accident.

In 2012, the Cambridge mathematician took to his blog to write a post bemoaning the exorbitant prices that journals charge for access to research. Gowers vowed to stop sending his papers to any journal from the world's largest academic publisher, Elsevier. tim gowers

To his surprise, the post went viral — and spurred a worldwide boycott of Elsevier, [...]"

>Be top scientist

>Publish a statement of intent on your widely followed blog

>People who have felt the same way but could not express their opinion without damaging their career follow

>be surprised

How much is this article insulting the reader's intelligence?

> How much is this article insulting the reader's intelligence?

I didn't get that sense. Could you explain why you feel it's insulting?

Well, Gowers went at great length explaining its motivations [0] (see the following quote, from [1]). So saying that Gowers started attacking Elsevier "by accident" and "was surprised that it grew as a movement" is very disrespectful to Gowers, to truth, and also a bit to the reader.

>"Once I did hear about Elsevier’s behaviour, I made a conscious decision not to publish in Elsevier journals and I started to feel bad about cooperating with them in any way. [...] Now, however, I have decided that my previous quiet approach was not enough."

[0] https://gowers.wordpress.com/category/elsevier/

[1] https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-...

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