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Comment by dkarapetyan | Hacker News Reader

The scientific publishing industry makes no sense to me. It wouldn't take much for a few universities to get together to set up the required infrastructure for sustaining the entire enterprise online with on-demand printing as a last resort. Why they don't do this is the part that makes no sense to me.

What is the value that Elsevier is adding to have the de-facto monopoly on the entire enterprise of scientific publishing in so many scientific disciplines?

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Its because most PIs could care less about the actual research, but rather only care about their 'rank' in the pissing contest that is academia. The internet should have, and in some more lucrative and distributed areas of the ivory tower it actually has like Archiv, made journals redundant and pointless. Only peer review should have remained. One would naively think this based on the idea that the academy is about knowledge. However, PIs can commonly be vain, narcissistic, and only promoted based on previous accomplishments. These are the people that got through via the random sieve that is modern schooling with nothing but A+s from kindergarten through grad school; they only know rankings and nothing else. As such, a barrier of luck under the guise of effort must then again be invented, this being the journal process. The reason is that there is not enough money for all the grad students out there to become PIS. Publish or perish is not a bug, but a feature that keeps out people from un-well connected labs and PIs. Remember, ~50% of all papers are never read (0) and ~50% of all papers have such large issues with their stats, that they can be considered noise (1). That means ~25% of papers are even relevant to the world in any meaningful way. Couple this with the average time for papers to appear from the submission to 'print' is ever increasing for 'new' authors (2), and you have what could be reasonably considered to be a concerted effort to keep out competitors.

(0) http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/half-academic-studi...

(1) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1182327/

(2) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4533968/

http://www.nature.com/news/the-mathematics-of-science-s-brok... (good overview of the issues)

> most PIs could care less

So, they do care.

While I agree that some of the blame falls on the PIs, it should fall on the university system as well. My PI recently read his mid-tenure review to our group, noting that there are explicit publishing metrics evaluated by the department which play a major role in his performance review. Things like ranking of journals published in (ref. Reuters InCites), # citations etc. I understand a department's desire for a quantitative evaluation metric, but at the same time as long as this mechanism is in place the system will not change.

It's getting there, though admittedly some fields are more advanced than others.

Maths and physics are pretty good examples. You have https://arxiv.org/ for open access to pre-prints and overlay journals are starting to gain a little traction, for example http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/

You don't need to be an overlay journal to be an open access journal. In machine learning (that maybe is something many here are more interested in than the quite abstract math stuff of Discrete Analysis), JMLR has been around for a quite long time: http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/papers/

I don't think it's hard to figure out at all. These journals have something people want, prestige.

Scientists are free to publish in whatever journal they want, including open source. They chose not to. Yes, you could argue it's not much of a choice since their tenure is dependent on publishing in these journals.

Start convincing the people who make the important decisions to stop looking for "Science" and "Cell" in CVs and the problem will solve itself.

That seems so obvious that I have always assumed that the feedback loop is from the likes of Elsevier and back into the pockets of the top brass of the universities. How could Elsevier otherwise keep everyone hostage?

To be clear: it's not for the lack of alternatives, like http://frontiersin.org or http://elifesciences.org .

It's purely a cultural problem with life sciences . The problem is how to get way more people to publish in open access journals, so that they become prestigious. Elife is doing good progress with it.

Arxiv for life man

That would assume universities exist to perform logical value in society.

Universities do exist to add value to society through education and dissemination of information. Seems like a pretty clear charter if you ask me.

Don't some universities exist to make money?

Universities are generally non-profit. For profit ones exist but are generally regarded as scammy.

Of course, one could argue that universities exist to grant generous salaries to highly ranked administrators, who are mostly politicians.

It doesn't matter 'why' something exists, what matters is what those things that do exist are actually useful for.

Screw drivers exist to turn screws, but you are perfectly justified to use them for whatever you need should you find one in your hand.

> It wouldn't take much for a few universities to get together to set up the required infrastructure for sustaining the entire enterprise online

O_o

It's a bit more complex than "let's just share everyone's articles out of Bob's google docs account" - from technical details to user workflows to reputation/trust to administrative politics to scientific politics to sourcing verification/reviews to a hundred more things I can't think of off the top of my head, doing such a thing is a massive undertaking and requires buy-in from a lot of people.

The arXiv website operates on less than $1M per year (source: Wikipedia page) and takes care of everything that is needed to disseminate knowledge except for arranging reviews (don't forget that traditional publishers are not actually doing the reviews). In terms of arranging reviews, it shouldn't be hard to do better than the publisher-run reviewing platforms (which in my experience are all incredibly crappy). I don't know what is the budget of review-specific systems like Easychair (run by a company) or the French Épisciences (public project) but it's probably not that much.

Compare these costs with Elsevier's >$2G/year revenue...

arXiv only supports a handful of related disciplines, whereas Elsevier has literally thousands of journals in scores of disciplines. You're comparing apples to oranges. EasyChair is also something to run a conference with, not a blinded review system per se. Someone still has to drive the blinded reviews

If you (royal 'you') think that navigating academic politics is so easy and Elsevier can be so massively undercut, then go for it. You'll make a ton of money with your <$1M infra and your low-budget review system - even if you charge only 10% of what Elsevier does. Don't forget either that you have to keep a legal team on-hand to deal with how you handle all this free information - after all, all the big open-source companies have legal teams, despite their info being 'free'.

If you want to bring a giant like Elsevier down, the technical part is not the difficult part, though it is in itself a difficult project to do right.

> arXiv only supports a handful of related disciplines, whereas Elsevier has literally thousands of journals in scores of disciplines

Yes, you should probably scale the operating costs of arXiv according to the number of papers published. arXiv's reported overall cost is a few dollars for each paper hosted. Compare this with Elsevier's subscription fees or most journal's $1000-plus fees to put your article in "author pays" open access.

> Someone still has to drive the blinded reviews

Yes, an editor, which in my field is essentially always an unpaid volunteer.

> Don't forget either that you have to keep a legal team on-hand to deal with how you handle all this free information

This should probably apply to arXiv to. Can you show me evidence that arXiv is having lots of legal trouble just because they are distributing PDFs? The only legal trouble I could see them getting into is essentially trolling from Elsevier et al about "their" papers getting uploaded.

> If you (royal 'you') think that navigating academic politics is so easy

I do not think this.

I think we agree that, as you say, "the technical part is not the difficult part", but I disagree with you in that you seem to imply that large for-profit publishers are somehow necessary (see your earlier message, "from technical details to user workflows to reputation/trust to administrative politics to scientific politics to sourcing verification/reviews to a hundred more things I can't think of off the top of my head"). Again, Elsevier has a profit margin of 37%, which is ridiculously high, and shows that a large part of the money they take in is a net loss for research. Of its other operating costs, I suspect that lots cover things like lobbying, litigation, having useless booths to be seen at conferences, etc., that research doesn't need either.)

To borrow an argument from https://medium.com/@jamesheathers/why-sci-hub-will-win-595b5...: contrary to most fields of human activity, if large for-profit publishers were to disappear overnight, I'm confident that a self-organized, free, Internet-based way to distribute and review articles would take over very quickly and run at a fraction of the cost. This isn't just speculation: Sci-Hub already exists, works fine, and the main obstacle to its growth is copyright trolling from large publishers, not some intrinsic difficulty.

So, in my opinion, the challenge to replace Elsevier is not technical (as you say), but it's not caused either by some intrinsic need for something like Elsevier: it's just a question of inertia of researchers and of the prestige of journals. Of course academic publishing is hard to do right, but Elsevier is not doing it right, they are simply milking the prestige of the venues and smaller publishing companies that they bought.

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