Comment by kriro | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kriro | Hacker News Reader

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If it is funded by government in any way (public university, research project) I think it is borderline defrauding the tax payer that the research funded by tax-money is not free by default. Since close to all research is government funded in some way, shape or form...my answer would be yes in the general case.

I think the long term answer is decentralized publishing. Publish everything you do on a university or private website and let others decide if it's good or not when they want to cite it instead of a peer review that is set in stone. I think people reading papers deciding if they want to cite you are smart enough to figure out if it's good research or not. The peer review process is overrated (and quite often suffers from insider networks). If you decentralize publishing you can also have other researchers upvote a paper to basically approve of the academic standards in the paper. I also think the static nature of papers is a problem. I'd much rather cite a specific version of the paper. I'm thinking about git and pull requests along the lines of "want to cite, fixed layout" or "new research disproves this" etc.

I don't have a ton of time to search each university's publication database or every 2nd tier research team's private home-grown web site.

Journals provide a filtering intermediary that helps me better use my time. Hopefully I can figure out which editorial teams are going to publish good vs ok vs crap research and pick from those, relying on the curative capabilities of their staff to provide interesting and useful reading.

Journals should still want to publish great research, and publicly funded research should still be available to the public. Maybe there's indeed a more relaxed middle-ground to "just put it all out there and hope folks find and share it." We all agree the journal industry needs some help, but I don't think society is well-served by completely decimating its economic model.

> I don't have a ton of time to search each university's publication database or every 2nd tier research team's private home-grown web site. Journals provide a filtering intermediary that helps me better use my time.

I don't have time to scavenge through all the tech news every day, but that's partly why I visit HN. Also, I use Google when I'm looking for some specific topic.

In other words, filtering can be done perfectly well by communities and third-party organizations.

I can certainly rely on social-network-style filtering to surface interesting reading.

It comes with its own trade-offs, particularly the tendency toward "viral" titles and abstracts so that a particular paper would be more likely to be clicked / skimmed / shared. I'm not sure that we want to encourage that as I think it would injure the quality of published works in general.

There are merits to being able to put faces, and reputations, behind the editorial direction of the information stream. Social-network-style consumption would necessarily anonymize or obscure the effect.

As before, there's definitely agreement that more access is better and I'd bet there's a good middle ground available.

For example, a journal I worked with while I was an undergraduate changes their articles to open-access nine months after publication. You still get the editorial process and curation, the team has some financial support to evangelize their journal's mission and most folks who won't have needed the most immediate access can get to it for free. If you're an individual and want the articles immediately, the "subscription" is in the form of a $40 or more donation each year, which receives as a gift the biannual physical volumes and full digital access.

They're not the majority of course but options do exist that straddle both stakeholders' needs. Flipping the market completely on its head simply might throw out useful qualities that wouldn't completely transfer over.

One difference between HN and, say, math is that in this community most readers are probably interested in at least a sizable minority of the topics that get posted here, whereas in a hypothetical community of mathematicians discussing papers, I find it hard to believe that most people will be interested in more than about 1% of the literature.

Then you just use more specialized content aggregators or more specific searches. To make an analogy to reddit - rather than following r/math, you'd follow a specific topic like r/compling.

In that case, you probably know 100% of your peers, and it would be easy to find their work :)

We already have research hubs for free publications. As a former Systems Librarian "Journals provide a filtering intermediary that helps me better use my time" is true for professors period. Students just want articles.

> I don't have a ton of time to search each university's publication database or every 2nd tier research team's private home-grown web site

Directory of Open Access Journals - https://doaj.org/

Advance Public Access to Articles (Chorus) - http://www.chorusaccess.org/

But they provide a lousy and expensive filtering.

So-called "high impact" journals suffer more retractions. http://peterdedmonds.blogspot.dk/2015/06/retractions-and-hig...

Society is most definitely well-served by completely decimating [legacy publishers] economic model. Legacy journals stand in the way of progress and they are laughably inefficient in what they do (filtering / online storage / layout (really!) )

Low impact journals may be significantly worse, but if fewer people look for defects fewer defects get found.

It's not suffer from retractions, but benefit from them. No one bothers to find errors in weak papers and weak journals don't bother to publish retractions. You would expect more retractions for the best journals because they still have decent standards.

Related anecdote: I had a confererence publish a completely plagiarized article of mine, changing only the names of the authors. The paper still contained recognizable photos of my students performing the experiments. I reported this to the confererence and to the IEEE which owned the copyright to our original paper. No action of any kind was taken. Not even a 'knock it off' email.

We're there already, at least in my field. Many research groups and individuals do actually host copies of their papers on their own websites, whether or not the journals are officially OK with it. Failing that, most Ph.D. dissertations are available for free to the public through university websites. If you want to find out what a research group has been up to, the chapters in a group member's dissertation are often substantially the same as the paywalled journal articles with his name on them.

Journals can still perform their review, critique, filtering, and indexing functions without also acting as sole gatekeeper for the source material.

I don't have time to read every newspaper. Aggregator sites (like HN) provide me with a handy list of links to articles relevant to a specific interest or theme. Thus, I have not been overwhelmed by celebrity gossip when I go looking for nerd news.

And many of those aggregator sites are community curated, meaning that there is no editor to pay--only the site hosting bills.

But on the other hand, I'm not sure I want to see what karma whoring looks like for academics.

If there is truly economic value to be had in filtering papers, we would expect an eventual growth in service businesses to help sift through the glut of openly published papers. Since we're currently in a long transitional period from closed to open publishing, there's plenty of time to evolve these third-party filters - from both the business and community sides - without incurring a chaotic "filter vacuum" period.

The major difference, however, would be that the research would be at least accessible to those who can't afford to pay the intermediary. That's what seems odious (to me, at least) about the current arrangement: if I want to access most of the research my taxes have funded, I have to pay again. This is on a moral par with being forced to pay for access to read laws and court decisions that should be a matter of public record, especially in an era where the marginal distribution cost is rapidly heading to zero, and I can't fathom an argument against having basic, immediate, and perpetually guaranteed access in either case.

I agree with you that it's ridiculous in both cases, but I have to point out that PACER, the Federal Judiciary database, isn't free.

Exactly.

:s

Journals provide a valuable service, but I don't think that exclusivity is a necessary component of that service. The people buying the journals will (probably) keep buying them even if they can legally get the papers for free elsewhere, because getting a physical copy of the paper was never the point - curation and peer preview are what subscribers are really paying for. Of course, this goes both ways: if journals start publishing crap to cut costs, people will stop buying them.

Couldn't we have a wikipedia equivalent for research? The peer reviewers do voluntary work anyway. I'm not in the system, so this is a genuine question.

You're describing an Overlay Journal. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlay_journal

The publishing of academic journals generates billions of profit per year. One could easily decimate these profits and still have a viable industry, whatever definition of decimate one cares to use.

Profit margins around 40% if I recall...

Profit margins doesn't mean much in this case. Most science related work (e.g peer review) is done for free. Typesetting costs around $30 per article [1]. It looks like big part of spending is administration and lawyers for taking down copies of the articles.

[1] https://discrete-analysis.scholasticahq.com/post/40-welcome-... (ctrl+f $30)

If there's a demand, there will be a solution. With proper review sorting mechanism, I'm sure that can be solved

Science has been for hundreds of years the most open and transparent institution. But I think that recently it has appeared a new contender that is even most transparent, open software development. I think science could use the same approach for research, from step zero.

One scientist has an idea, he publishes his hypothesis and intended metodology. Others can jump in and tell him, for example, that the hypothesis has been proved wrong in a recent paper, or suggest improvements in his methodology. Others can chip in and offer to replicate the experiment to increase the sample size. Mathematicians could observe and correct the statistical analysis before the conclusion are published. I think that will improve the quality of the results.

Of course, the bigger problem is that most papers would have dozens or hundreds of authors, diluting the individual contribution of each one. On the other hand, finished reasearch already would be peer reviewed and corrected.

The parallels are greater than even those you described. I'm helping a startup focused on bringing out an integrated research environment to help fix many of the issues presented in the comments here and the article. Happy to chat with anyone who would like to see a demo. Email Lane (at) MyIRE dot com.

Have you thought on writing an article about it? It'll be very interesting to read.

That's coming soon.

You're definitely on to something; the parallels between science and open software are tantalizingly close.

From my experience a main problem is real estate; you can't do most science experiments without a proper lab. We could probably brainstorm some creative solutions (like operating an "open" contract research organization to be the hands for everyone's ideas), but at the moment this is too big of a barrier.

With real estate comes cost, then funding, then jockeying for funding, and finally journal impact factors as a measurement of worthiness.

It's also why one can't make a science-related "hackathon" without changing the concept.

that's a great idea

someone should figure out a way to make that happen

Lately I have been thinking about this, and I figured that publishing/citing can be described exactly using a Merkle tree. Things like ipfs have been on the hn front page quite a lot, I wonder whether anybody thought about using them to decentralize paper publishing.

This is not a technology problem. People send their papers to reputable journals because of their reputation and journals have a good reputation because everybody wants to publish there. Getting papers into a big journal is nearly the only benchmark academics have when it comes to getting a job or tenure.

AFAIK from my colleague doing PhD in Europe, one of the main issues is Impact Factor. The universities play "gather the points" game, and you get, say, 35 points for publishing in a major (paywalled, expensive) title while you may get only, say, 18 or 10 points if you published in another (non-paywalled, less expensive, less reputable) journal.

If you have less points than other people, you don't get a grant, or you're more likely to not have your contract extended etc.

The ministry reevaluates the (journal's IF<->points per publication) mapping each year, but it takes a few years for a new journal to get significant number of points. Publishing in low-IF journals if your paper could be accepted by a major one is a career suicide.

The hidden implication is that the system reinforces the power of the all-powerful top journals.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor

Another important point, is that lower IF journals generally have a smaller audience than high IF journals. This is really important for how many times your articles are expected to be cited. Your H-index [1] is now sometimes requested from funding institutions, and I'm starting to see it on resumes. It's all kind of sad.

So, in a lot of ways, the competitive research culture isn't helping inaccessible/exclusivity journal problem, since researchers are actively seeking out those journals.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-index

I completely agree (I am currently a scientist). It's a very hard problem to solve. I'd love working on it and in many ways it can be framed as a tech startup type of problem since it is essentially trying to build a consensus network. In a theoretical world in which I have retirement level money that would probably be the issue I'd try to fix for the rest of my life (unfortunately expecting no progress).

Mathematics seems like the most promising field to start with if you follow a bowling pin type of strategy. There have been some boycotts of Elsevier etc. from math departments and they have somewhat of a "free publishing" tradition at least from my outside point of view. It's also an excellent viral starting point because you can infiltrate other disciplines that tend to cite math papers (physics, machine learning, economics etc.)

I think it is a technology problem, because the journals exist in the first place to solve a technology problem: How to distribute, quality assure etc a paper. Without internet this obviously cost a fair amount of money. Nobody was going to just print copies of journals and distribute them for free.

I doubt a system like the journals would have developed in a world where internet already existed.

I think a variation of the system used to build the Linux kernel could have worked for scientific papers as well. In the Kernel you have a pyramid of trust. Linux trust some people directly, who again each trust another set of people. This continues downwards. In this fashion code can be signed off and bubble up through the hierarchy.

I suspect in similar fashion a scientific paper could bubble up by being reviewed by ever more respected scientists in a hierarchy.

Thanks for clarifying, I was replying to the technological insight in kriro's post however. Btw, is technology here completely irrelevant? The way to access content is pretty important after all. In a decentralized publishing system, what is reputation? Maybe it could be an intrinsic measure with a ranking system of some sort. But this is pretty hard. Maybe the "natural" way to publish content has no unique or sensical way to quantify prestige. The following question arises: is prestige a good criterion to judge science?

I am not sure what percentage of pay walled papers are gov't funded. I suspect many come from private universities or large companies. As for paper versioning, this is already done to some extent. Not as explicit as code on github, but many authors will release multiple versions of a paper. That being said, it is trivial to do versioning as described if you use latex and put your paper's source on github.

U.S. private universities get plenty of public funding.

Almost all published biomedical research is government-funded. "Private" universities in the U.S. get massive federal grants for research.

Companies and private universities publish obviously a lot of research papers. These are still more often than not somehow funded by governments e.g. Darpa, EU funds (Horizon 2020) etc. I am not aware of many projects that are truly completely, privately funded.

lots of private university papers are still paid for with govt research funds

I agree with your first premise - yes, they should be free. In this sense, the peer review process should be paid for by whoever funds the research, rather than whoever wants to read it.

And what do you think about companies that perform large-scale medical analysis on genomic data of customers, and keep their research behind closed doors?

(Probably not a big issue right now, but it could be in the future).

Well, they are the ones funding the research teams and equipment, so it's a different scenario IMHO.

I think we can agree though that knowledge should converge into being easily accessible, all while reducing the collateral effects of doing so (as the article explains: tenure, promotions, prestige…).

Some research grants are industry subsidies. Taking this away results in pure, accessible research that is absolutely useless.

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