Is the business of scientific publishing bad for science? | Hacker News Reader

Is the business of scientific publishing bad for science?

theguardian.com

170 pointsa_w64 comments

In the old days there were the journals from the scientific societies and the Elsevier-Pergamon duopoly. Society journals were respectable, generally speaking, and subscriptions were affordable. Elsevier/Pergamon was expensive, pretty bad, and something you could do without if you had to. If the library wouldn't subscribe you'd ask for a reprint. Things weren't great 30 years ago but manageable.

Several things have happened since. The society journals have mostly been sold to commercial publishers, and prices have gone up steeply, Elsevier is as sketchy as always but even more expensive, and the various open-access journals have popped up, with a quality even worse than Elsevier. Finally, even academics at teaching institutions are forced to publish thanks to clueless administrators and a general shortage of funds.

Scientific publishing is fully out of control. Librarians thought they had it bad in 2001, but look at it now!

Sorry, I really meant to refrain from it, but having read the article, I'm again forced to say:

Ceterum censeo Elsevier esse delendum.

(Could be Elsevierum, depending which declension - it's an accusativus cum infinitivo)

Yes, definitely. Is this even a discussion? Scientific journal companies extract enormous rents and add literally zero value. I'm not using 'literally' in the not-actually-literally sense that people sometimes use it. I mean literally zero value. They either don't pay, or barely pay, the peer researchers who review the material (the only valuable part). Aside from that, they do what, exactly? Publish it? The thing that costs effectively zero dollars to do on the internet now? It's disgusting that this business still exists.

> Aside from that, they do what, exactly?

In CS the ACM organizes conferences... beyond that they are an effectively useless organization.

Ya, but the ACM is also a professional organization. That's a fine service to provide, but it doesn't need to be comingled with publishing.

A number of journals provide copy-editing and layout services. My own papers have been improved by both.

Fair. Likely the worlds most expensive copy-editing and layout services, though :) (considering the access price of the journals as the cost of those services).

Why is this even relevant? Few people actually read published papers compared to, say, blogs, so the standard needn't be so high - inconveniencing 100 people is better than inconveniencing 1000. Yet nobody pays for copy editing and layout of their blog. It's not only trivial but also not important if it isn't quite right.

If readability is important for journal articles, then layout is the least important way to achieve that. The whole style of writing needs to be changed. They're notoriously hard to read even for other researchers in similar fields. I'm not saying dumb it down but, for example, perhaps they could be structured a bit like a newspaper story with a quick overview using common vocabulary first, then more details and more precise language later. That's just one idea but my general point is that readability is not what they're aiming for anyway so why bother making it look pretty?

This is already the case. Every scientific journal article I've seen starts with an abstract, which is exactly the summary you desire.

That's a start but doesn't go nearly far enough to relieve the burden of reading papers that researchers have to suffer through. An abstract usually has a high density jargon and undefined terms that are specific to the niche they're working in. What's easy to read is news articles that are based on scientific papers. The fact that journalists write articles instead of just copying and pasting the abstract shows that abstracts aren't very readable.

Also, once you're past the abstract, it's still heavy going. Compare that to text books which tend to be a bit easier to follow.

I'm not saying these are the answers. Just highlighting the problem of readability. That seems more serious than not having a space between a unit and a number, or a formula having a disproportionately big fraction. Even more important than spelling and grammar which humans can mostly correct as they go.

"The fact that journalists write articles instead of just copying and pasting the abstract shows that abstracts aren't very readable."

No, it shows that journalists write for a different audience.

"What's easy to read is news articles that are based on scientific papers."

That shows journalists wrote for a wider audience.

The articles that journalists write are considered better by laymen, but typically, they provide insufficient information for experts to see what exactly is new in the article and/or simplify so much that experts find the information presented downright wrong (search HN on battery or fusion break-throughs for examples)

But yes, it is true that quite a few scientists could do with a good editor that helps them write text that is easier to understand for experts. The current citation-happy culture doesn't help there, with abstracts that have more "(Newton, 1754)" phrases than actual text describing the work done.

Research articles are dense and full of jargon because that is the most efficient way to communicate with their intended audience, which is other researchers.

Making a standard research article readable to the lay audience, even if it is also educated to some degree in the field, would double or triple its length.

What's easy to read is news articles that are based on scientific papers.

The reason they are so easy to read is that the journalists tend to simplify and generalize the results to such an abstract level that the 'research' they present in their article bares only passing resemblance to the actual research presented in the actual paper. And that's assuming a best case scenario where they don't simply misunderstand the whole thing.

All that being said, I agree that most papers could do with a good copy editor. Fortunately there are hundreds of freelancers willing and able to do that and many universities even have someone on staff or retainer that can help out.

Because it isn't about volume, and blogging is an inherently informal style in many cases (says someone who both publishes academic papers and has a blog).

As for readability, clarity of writing and visual clarity are not perfectly correlated. I have read very well-written papers that were still painful to interact with as physical objects.

There's an army of people on Fiverr and the like who would make your papers look fine, for very little money.

A few thoughts:

1. They don't have a standard journal style. I want my Lancet paper to look like a Lancet paper, not just "be fine".

2. I'd have to find them. The journals do it for me automatically on submission.

3. For a lab just starting out, there is no such thing as "very little money".

1. They can make it look however you like. They don't because they're not allowed into that particular market.

2. They're all over those sites. And the journal takes a lot, apparently.

3. A few tens of dollars? How many papers does an academic do in a year? They really can't afford a few hundred bucks?

I think if the publishers weren't in their near-monopoly position, money could be found for this. Heck, someone will probably write an AI that does the formatting in the right style soon.

On the other hand, in my experience the copy-editing process commonly makes things significantly worse, as I described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8776429

There could be some hidden costs that the publishers incur, no? I'm just playing tenth man here.

I'm not the most knowledgeable about scientific journal companies, but hosting thousands of papers online/offline and having to vet all these individually may be quite an expensive process, right?

OTOH, the infamous Alexandre managed okay with Sci-Hub, but maybe it was because she didn't have to vet these?

In the end, seeing the profits these companies make I suppose nullifies any devil's advocate position here. Some of the upper-echelon positions in these journal companies are multi-billionaires @_@

So, the vetting process is actually extremely valuable. Refereeing papers is a super important service. It's just not one that these journals meaningfully provide. They either don't pay the peer reviewers, or they pay them something completely nominal. They do it because they want to, and for prestige. That is the only hard part of operating a scientific journal. The rest is just hosting and distributing static content. If you have a team of peer reviewers ready to go, you could literally setup your own scientific journal on WordPress for free, right now.

I'm excited about the increasing frequency in which articles on this topic are showing up on HN. I believe that many of the problems in academic publishing can be remedied by giving the scholarly community affordable tools to manage and publish journals. After all, they are already writing and peer-reviewing the material themselves. Full disclosure: I'm a founder of a company called Scholastica (https://www.scholasticahq.com), a peer-review and publishing platform used by hundreds of journals across a variety of disciplines ranging from law to mathematics. Sir Timothy Gowers, the Fields Medal winner and Cambridge Mathematics prof, launched a high-quality ArXiv overlay journal on the platform about a year ago (http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/) which I think lends credence to the idea that the scholarly community can write, review, and publish work without relying on the current corporate publisher status quo.

How is your business tackling the current "impact factor" protection scam?

(I am a fan of projects like yours, just much more pessimistic!)

We haven't even addressed the distortion that negative results, such as the results of failed experiments, are never published, yet are extremely valuable. Perhaps scientists wish to condemn their peers to fighting battles already lost.

IME, scientists have wildly different outlooks here. Some are all flowers and unicorns "we're doing it to better humanity" etc., others are fighting vicious (if imaginary?) battles against their scientific peers (=competitors) about who can publish the most (impactful) papers.

For the latter group, if you manage to trick your competitor into a year-long wild goose chase, all the better.

Yes, next question.

More seriously, it's hard to see what value publishers possibly be adding to the publishing process. Beyond tier one journals, full time editors don't really seem to do very much.

But I'd love to see some data supporting the argument that they're of value.

My feeling is that the misery is inhomogeneously distributed when it comes to scientific disciplines.

In physics the situation does not seem too terrible. The American Physical Society is a nonprofit which runs a family of go-to subscription-type journals. Preprints on arxiv are the standard.

Publishing innovations are popping up from time to time. A prominent example is scipost.org, which is funded by national funding agencies and is free to both publish and read. Also, their peer-review is public.

Full disclosure: I have published in various APS journals.

> My feeling is that the misery is inhomogeneously distributed when it comes to scientific disciplines.

>In physics the situation does not seem too terrible.

Yes, but I'd add that also in physics the misery is quite inhomogeneous. High Energy Physics seems to lean heavily towards arxiv and open access, whereas in some other subfields, such as my own in my previous life, some Elsevier journal is #1. Or lets say, on my own case, I guess one could (mostly, at least) publish in non-Elsevier journals with no serious career repercussions, but we're still very far from being able give Elsevier the finger and get by without an Elsevier subscription since one needs to read what others are doing.

I'm somewhat hopeful for the longer term, but progress is painfully slow.

Just curious: which physics subfield is that?

Perhaps my previous comment was overly optimistic, as both Journal of High Energy Physics and the Nature family are published by Springer nowadays.

I worked in, broadly speaking, computational studies of surfaces and reactions on them (adsorption, heterogeneous catalysis, AFM, STEM, etc.). In this area, the #1 journal is (the aptly named) Surface Science, published by Elsevier. Although us computational guys do also publish a lot in PRB/PRL and a smattering of other journals as well of course, but particularly for experimentalists Surface Science is clearly #1. So you still have to read a lot of SS articles.

Parts of computer science are not too bad either. In my field, AI, the top-tier journals and conferences are all open-access and run by nonprofits. I mention conferences because in computer science they are important as well; the top peer-reviewed conference proceedings are as important as journals.

* The top two journals are probably JMLR (machine learning) and JAIR (AI in general), both open access and run by nonprofits. No publication charges either.

* The top two general AI conferences are AAAI and IJCAI; the top two machine learning conference are ICML and NIPS. All four of these publish open-access proceedings (including archives of past proceedings) and are run by nonprofits.

Of course this didn't happen entirely by default, it's taken some effort over the years. AAAI has always been nonprofit, but its digital library has not always been open access. And in machine learning, the top journals used to be run by the Elsevier/Springer duopoly, which was solved in the early 2000s by 40 editors of Machine Learning journal, which included a large proportion of top researchers in the field, resigning en masse to start an open-access alternative: http://www.jmlr.org/statement.html

The resignation letter is actually a great read. I think the author summarized the situation quite well :

"We see little benefit accruing to our community from a mechanism that ensures revenue for a third party by restricting the communication channel between authors and readers."

Similarly, the editorial board of the Journal of Algorithms stepped down in unison and started the ACM Transactions on Algorithms, in protest against Elsevier, back in 2003.

Don Knuth, founder of the JoA, had a hand in it. Wish this happened even more often - without the scientists (and the prestige/impact factor endowed by the scientific community), the publishers have nothing. Don Knuth's letter (typeset in TeX, of course) is well worth a read [1], and since then the situation has only gotten worse, I think.

Ceterum censeo Elsevier esse delendum.

[1] http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACM_Transactions_on_Algorithms

http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~hal/jalg.html

There should not be an industry for scientific publishing in the first place.

Of course there should be. Scientists can't publish and format their own journal articles for printing.

Having dedicated reviewers to decide what enters the journal is also great.

You also need someone to coordinate the peer-review so it's as painless for the involved scientists as possible.

The question is whether those things are worth the exorbitant cost that's currently being charged.

> Of course there should be. Scientists can't publish and format their own journal articles for printing.

They already do! Many (most?/all?) journals require authors to format the paper in journal style.

> Having dedicated reviewers to decide what enters the journal is also great.

In the vast majority of cases (non-tier one journals, basically not Science and Nature) this doesn't happen. They just look at the tick boxes the referees select (Accept with minor revisions, accept with major revisions etc).

> You also need someone to coordinate the peer-review so it's as painless for the involved scientists as possible.

You need a website where reviews can be uploaded. These already exist, and are not a huge infrastructure burden.

> The question is whether those things are worth the exorbitant cost that's currently being charged.

It's clear to most scientists that they're not. What you're paying for is the lockin effect these journals have by virtue of having a high impact factor.

> They already do! Many (most?/all?) journals require authors to format the paper in journal style.

Not in many biomedical journals where Word is the standard format for a paper to be submitted in.

> In the vast majority of cases (non-tier one journals, basically not Science and Nature) this doesn't happen. They just look at the tick boxes the referees select (Accept with minor revisions, accept with major revisions etc).

I've appealed and/or argued successfully with editors to change a decision from "what the referees ticked" on a number of occasions.

> It's clear to most scientists that they're not. What you're paying for is the lockin effect these journals have by virtue of having a high impact factor.

It should be noted its not just impact factor that goes into prestige. For example, at it's height, PLoS ONE had an impact factor comparable to several major society-level journals that carried considerably more weight. "I publish all my work in PLoS ONE" versus "I publish all my work in Epidemiology and AJE" would likely result in very different yearly evaluations.

> Not in many biomedical journals where Word is the standard format for a paper to be submitted in.

I don't know about all journals. The ones I've submitted to usually provide a Word or Latex template.

> I've appealed and/or argued successfully with editors to change a decision from "what the referees ticked" on a number of occasions.

In almost all journals editors are not paid staff. They are volunteers. Personally I've never seen a paper will all negative reviews get accepted by an editor, but they have some sway it's true.

May be I should narrow the scope to computer science. The publishing is pretty much run by research community themselves.

I think about this problem a lot because the whole biomedical publishing industry is so backwards.

One of the reasons why scientists are currently dependent on the journal industry is because the journals control peer review. Unfortunately, instead of merely reviewing manuscripts for correctness, the journals link peer review to "impact," which is a prospective measure of importance (i.e. whether they are likely to get many citations). Every journal you submit your manuscript to will put it through a new round of peer review looking for both correctness and impact. Massive amounts of time are wasted by working scientists and journal editors attempting to prospectively "grade" manuscripts on how important they will be (along with checking the correctness of the manuscript). Upon rejection for either correctness or impact, authors resubmit their manuscript to a lower tier journal (+/- revision) and wait for the next round of reviews. Rinse/repeat. Eventually, assuming the paper is not awful, it will be published.

How could we do it differently?

One idea is to disentangle impact from correctness and eliminate the journals from peer review. Scientists already review each others manuscripts pro-bono, so here's a proposal: Scientists submit manuscripts to bioRxiv as "pre-prints" for a nominal fee (say $1000) and request peer review. An editor selects 3-4 potential reviewers and reviewers are paid a nominal fee (~$150) to perform the review. The money paid by authors covers the reviewer fees and editors salaries. After peer review, authors can decide whether they want to submit their articles for additional peer review and fancy publication in a journal.

Impact is thereafter judged only by how many citations a paper gets, not which glossy magazine it gets published in.

that is more or less the PLoS One or Scientific Reports model, right? you pay the fee, it gets peer reviewed for correctness but not impact, and then published open access.

Yes to PLoS One. I think Scientific Reports (as a NPG journal) still tries to be somewhat selective, but I'm not sure.

My proposal is a bit different because it establishes a preliminary and public review process that is separate from "publication." You cannot take your PLoS One article and now get it published at Nature or Science. But you could do that if your paper was "reviewed" at bioRxiv, meaningfully improved and corrected, and then submitted for publication elsewhere.

It's true, but the review process (while not the publisher) does add value. It's really useful to highlight the gaps in an authors work and suggest additional analysis they could do to support the work and make it more useful. Or even highlight areas where the work is not reproducible (algorithms not sufficiently well described, data not available etc).

Agreed. That's why I'm arguing that peer reviews should be handled separately from publication or any consideration of impact.

You and one of the child posts are both putting "Pay the Fee" before "Peer review and a publication decision".

In my experience, anyone asking for money up front pre-review is running a predatory journal.

The fee is designed to offset the real cost of (1) a person making an informed decision about what reviewers to send the manuscript to and (b) the real cost of a reviewer spending 3-4 hours on the manuscript. That ought to be an upfront cost and the results posted publicly.

The problem with that is two-fold:

1. You've turned peer review into a service - which means I am going to start expecting things for my money. I occasionally get bad or unhelpful reviewers - do I have the right to complain?

2. Unless you can supplant the prestige of journals, who will undoubtedly have their own system, all you've actually done is added a $1000 tax to pre-print services.

Beyond that, I was mostly addressing the perception issue - "Asks for money upfront", rightly or not, is already cemented in academic culture as a place you should not send your work to. That's an uphill battle.

1. Agreed this is a problem, but it's not unsolvable.

A pilot project of peer review as a service could ferret out these issues and come up with solutions. Here's a couple of ideas: (a) let authors give feedback on reviews for editors to consider when assigning this reviewer to future manuscripts, (b) require public disclosure of who reviewed the paper (this presents other problems, but should at least be considered), (c) editors can bring on 4th or 5th reviewers as needed if authors/editors/reviewers feel it is warranted (after seeing all 3 initial reviews)

2. Time is worth more than money. Remember it's not only the PI but also the postdocs and grad students who are not productive while they work on review/resubmission related work. I bet many labs would be glad to pay this amount of money for a single review process.

The goal would be for single-review-per-manuscript to be able to replace journal reviews in most cases. Sure, some top flight journals may require additional review--and that's fine--but those should eventually be outliers, not the norm.

I don't agree about the perception issue for a reputable source which is providing a tangible product. The authors end up with a peer reviewed manuscript that is citable. Call it biorXivGold or something like that and you're done.

^^ This red team/blue team (peer review) on this idea is a microcosm of the best part of science :)

Betteridge's law be damned, the business of scientific publishing is bad for science. Scientific publishing is a complete mess. We have a large scale business built around an industry funded by public money.

This creates barriers to scientists getting access to research papers. As research papers are the lifeblood of discourse in the sciences, we are artificially limiting the effectiveness of our scientists.

In case you were not paying attention, science and engineering is ultimately responsible for all economic growth, so the public has a vested interest in enabling successful outcomes in this space.

Anything with an emotional component of drive that exceeds rationality with respect to holding out for money will of course be exploited.

That's a really high minded way of saying "For every Artist, Musician, Scientist, or Teacher trying to make $1, there's a Shitty C-Student there making $5 before letting go of the rest downstream."

It might sound harsh but it's a fundamental human truth in the US business model of Art-as-Commercial.

Jason Hoyt (of PeerJ) wrote an interesting commentary on this article: https://twitter.com/jasonHoyt/status/879624241817296896

Ultimately it's a bit more complex than "all publishers are evil". There are a while slew of low-cost, open-access journals out there, but the wider academic community still places far too much weight on individual journals' impact factors.

Is it the responsibility of publishers to try to effect a wider change in attitudes? It seems doomed to failure to try and make them, and it seems like pressure from within might be the only way to deal with the problem.

Why haven't PLoS and Science One eaten Elsivier's cake? Their model makes perfect sense in a web-based world. Why are scientists still playing Elsivier's game?

Because a lot of scientists work at large research universities that simply subscribe to the complete set of Elsevier and Springer and so don't see the problem. I'm a big fan of open access, even though I'm at an institution now that subscribes widely, because I worked for a decade at a small research institute that ran up against paywalls constantly.

Beyond not seeing it as a problem, it is a genuine cost. A publication in PLOS Medicine costs ~ $3000.

That's a postdoc's laptop. That's several conferences. And it's a single-digit percentage of my startup funding.

It's not insane to not pay that if you don't have to.

There just isn't as much prestige associated with those journals, and conventional success in an academic career is all about garnering prestige. It's explained in the last part of the article, about the rise of Cell as the magazine everyone wanted to get published in.

Pay-to-publish has its own problems.

I think the current model has issues, and there should be a movement in general toward open dissemination of research, but I'm not sure the PLoS model is much better in a lot of ways. Maybe not worse, but maybe not better.

Where this is all headed is anyone's guess. If I had to, eventually most scientific research will just appear in blogs, being treated like personal journals or something, or in research society journals, kind of like what is referenced in the article, basically run by academic research organizations.

My experience with the second model is that there are organizations that would like to run things that way, but run into problems with copyediting, layout and design, and reviewing infrastructure. They kind of think it's something they can just do on the fly but as they do it they realize it's more work. Maybe a company that just provides the tools is the way to go, but at some point that would probably basically become a publisher.

> Where this is all headed is anyone's guess. If I had to, eventually most scientific research will just appear in blogs, being treated like personal journals or something, or in research society journals, kind of like what is referenced in the article, basically run by academic research organizations.

I'm somewhat hopeful about stuff like "arxiv overlay journals". E.g. see description at http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/for-authors

Because there are other external pressures besides "Can people read my stuff?"

Like it or not, for a junior scientist pursuing tenure, at this point in time, journal prestige counts, and at the moment there's very few open journals with close to the prestige of Science/Nature/Cell/NEJM/Lancet/etc. in many fields. If I can get a paper in those, I'm doing it - because my science isn't going to be better served by not getting tenure because I took a principled stand.

It's also offloading the costs. Libraries pay for journal subscriptions. Labs pay for open access publication fees. One is way easier to abstract away than the other, and even in large grants its hard to find the space to pay for multiple papers costing several thousand dollars each. I usually budget for one or two, but hopefully the research output from the project is higher than that.

If I'm not mistaken, many publicly funded studies end up behind paywalls. Terrible model. Especially in the age of wiki based media. Combine this problem with low quality science necessitated by the publish or perish doctrine, failure to incentivize publishing of negative results, p-value misuse, and the reproducibility crisis of soft sciences, and it is almost a wonder that we make any progress at all! Also ironic that an institution dedicated to order and objectivity suffers from problems with both.

Loosley related commentary: perhaps it is illustrative of the difficulty in bridging the steep impedance mismatch between idea and practice.

I think, its a artificial status symbol for universitys- if you cant afford it - you are not really a scientistic institution.

Like all statussymbols, it could easily be replaced with something more pragmatic - and will never be, because ironically - in something as meritocratic as the sciences, the caste longs for the aristocratic.

Wasn't the point of the web to be a replacement for this? Nobody's done the meta level work of making reviews of URLs easy to access in a relevant way, I think.

But that would be the best replacement, right?

Corrupt institutions are trying to claim ownership of science? What a surprise...

More like rent-seeking. Everyone wants a piece of the action, everyone wants to be a middleman, especially when the taxpayer pays the bill.

the really funny thing is that they have found a strategic position, a local minimum, so deep that apparently they cant get dislodged. even though everyone hates them. even though they provide no demonstrable value. even though, arguably, the process they embody is detrimental to the host (science, humanity, the progress of knowledge).

this is the inarguable sign of a corrupt process - 'eh, i know its wrong, but what are you gonna do?'

i hate the fact that i pay acm membership so i can read papers when i want. i still do every year.

Savvy headline writers flip the bit on Betteridge.

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