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Comment by tmalsburg2 | Hacker News Reader

This is not the solution to our problems with scientific publishing. Academics need to stop complaining about Elsevier et al. and submitting to their journals at the same time. Institutions need to stop awarding funding and giving jobs to the people who publish in the most glamorous journals. We all need to stop obsessing about silly publication metrics.

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Free distribution of existing research is part of the solution.

You're right that academia is full of perverse incentives that need to change, but it's not clear how we get from where we are now to the end of "publish-or-perish". There's a need for large-scale coordination and construction of alternatives with the support of funding agencies. Suggestions beyond "individuals will sacrifice their own career standing for the greater good" are what we need to gain the strength of those individuals who are not in the most idealistic portion of the research community.

Welcome to the world of collective action problems, I am afraid. The easy part is knowing what needs to change.

It may not be the solution to _your_ problems, but it sure works for me!

Swimming against the current can kill your career. This is exactly the solution.

The solution is reversing the current.

This is a stop-gap that attenuates the problem until people discover some way of getting the actual solution.

I agree with you, that sci-hub isn't a solution, but what you suggest isn't a solution either.

The research must become more open, better reviewed, etc. But we can't just stop submitting our work.

No one suggested that we stop publishing. Instead we have to publish in open access journals, even if these don't give us as much prestige as the established science tabloids (as Andrew Gelman calls them). Either that or we stop whining about the evil publishers. They are only as evil as we allow them to be.

Basically, if part of the scientists (you don't expect everyone to do that, do you?) will stop to publish in prestige journals, and the other part will, who do you think will have more research opportunities, grants, collaborations, etc.?

I mean are you ready to decrease an impact of your discovery and opportunities for future work, just to make a statement?

Agreed. It needs to start with the funding agencies, NIH, Wellcome Trust, HHMI, etc. Like the Gates Foundation recently did, they need to make it a requirement that you must publish in immediate open-access journals. I'd further like to see the journal not getting as onerous copyright claim but baby steps.

The people with the money need to put their money where the public interest's mouth is. Certainly not where Elsevier's mouth is.

This won't work. The only way is the hiring committees don't judge the candidates' work on which journal published. But at as dire as the current job market nobody will have the time to go through this tedious task.

Nope. The chicken and the egg starts where the money starts. If all the candidates' papers are in immediate open access journals (like the Gates Foundation is mandating soon and hopefully NIH will follow), then hiring committees won't have vanity journals as the signal.

I've read somewhere that the funding agencies fear that less scientists will use their funding money if they have such requirements. No idea what the source was, but could this be one of the reasons they are reluctant?

Care to elaborate? That doesn't make much sense to me. Scientists can't do their jobs without funding, so what alternatives do they have?

You would think this. But actually institutes can be quite selective about what grants they take. (Usually the individual researcher would take whatever they can get)

The biggest example has to do with the NIH "indirect rate". The system, incredibly, is set up so that the larger a proportion of an institute's funding comes from NIH, the more money per grant goes to the institution. "Indirect" refers to the fact that each grant comes with "direct costs" that go to the scientist and "indirect costs" that goes to the institute, and the "indirect rate" determines the amount, expressed as a percentage of grant direct costs, that goes to the institute. This dumb system results in institutes discouraging their own investigators from applying for non-NIH grants.

At my institute if you take a non-NIH grant you have to actually "pay back the difference" in lost funding for the institute that is caused by non-NIH grants lowering the institute's indirect rate.

I specifically referred to NIH as one the funding agencies that needs to take a leadership role for publishing policy. So this comment isn't super relevant to my original comment.

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