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Comment by mattlutze | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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

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