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Comment by etrautmann | Hacker News Reader

blaming scientists is misplaced. This is a policy-level question, for which the policy IS evolving fairly rapidly. The scientists are also rapidly updating and most papers have pre-prints available via arxiv or bioRxiv, etc and the NIH and many other funding agencies require open access soon after publication. Lastly, many scientists end-run the publishers and make the print copy PDFs available on their lab websites.

In no way can I imagine how blaming scientists for working within the established incentive structure to advance their careers helps advance this issue.

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Blaming individual scientists is largely misplaced, but you can definitely blame then collectively. The root cause of a lot of these problems is that academia has an almost farcical obsession with prestige, and that's largely a bottom-up function of the culture. The inability to collectively move to different publishing venues is merely one consequence of this culture.

...which in turn is a result of governments/funders focusing on "excellence" (whatever that means), there being far more people willing to do research than there are funds available, and prestige being used as a way to distribute those funds.

It also extends to things outside finding like graduate school admissions or even peer review. On top of that, you know who's making the low-level decisions for giving grants? People from and steeped in the same academic culture. That's a much larger driving force than the politicians at the top of the funding organizations who don't even understand the intricate prestige ranking in academic fields to do anything actionable with it.

So if you think that the problem stems from a unique problem in academia's culture, then why do you think academia ended up with that culture while other endeavors didn't? Was it because of the character of academics, or because of the incentive structure they operate in?

I don't think it's a unique problem to academia. I recently read something in exactly the same spirit from a lawyer (almost literally "we won't hire anyone not from a T14 school"). If anything, the interesting thing to watch for is which endeavors don't have this culture.

It's either human nature, or driven by wealthy, prestige-sensitive trustees at the top.

If you want to blame anyone, blame publishers, not scientists. Open Access fees assessed by publishers are astronomical, and fall to the scientists seeking to publish them.

I haven't published in Nature yet, but my group has to fork over thousands per open access article above the usual cost. There is a disincentive to publish open access given that.

Blaming the publishers is not very useful, they are just acting according to their self interest. Their interests are not well aligned with those of the public or scientific community, but they won't care about that until they have to. Have to focus on building up the alternatives, so that the publishers lose the power to dictate the terms. It's happening though, slowly...

As a publishing scientist, let me tell you, science publishing is not a free market. We can't just "build up the alternatives" because that is not conducive to anyone's scientific career. If it's some no name journal where you will publish along side free energy and cold fusion articles, no one will do it.

The mistake is giving journals a profit incentive in the first place in a system that inherently doesn't work well in a market system. You can't have "competition" between journals, it just doesn't work that way. A handful of journals have high impact factors and so get most of the submissions, that's how it is, and they then can crank up their publishing fees because they can.

Perhaps you shouldn't "blame the publishers" given they are "acting according to their self interest." I did say "If you want to blame anyone[...]," implying I don't really care to blame anyone. I admit I am more inclined to blame the publishers, but the whole system is fundamentally broken.

Blame the taxpayer. We as a nation should demand we get access to what we pay for. At this point we are funding publishers to make free money off of what was already paid for.

That's effectively what this article does.

As a software developer, I do have the opportunity to build up alternatives - in fact, I'm hoping for that to be my career.

So that's what I'm doing now [1], and anyone interested can subscribe at [2].

[1] https://medium.com/flockademic/dear-scientists-help-me-help-... [2] https://tinyletter.com/Flockademic

>Blaming the publishers is not very useful, they are just acting according to their self interest.

Blaming the person who mugged you at gunpoint is not very useful, he is just acting according to his self interest.

Alternatives are great, but it's ridiculous to reject blaming the people who are responsible for and perpetuate the very bad status quo. They could end it, they just choose not to. We can and should simultaneously advocate to strip them of their power while holding them to account for abusing it.

At some point, it’s ok to blame the system (e.g. lack of laws) rather than the mugger. You live in a country in civil war, cross the town at night, get mugged, who’s to blame? You, the mugger, the war?

Always the mugger

Not sure why this is being debated. Other people (including yourself) could bear part of the blame, but ultimately the mugger decided to do the mugging.

Is this valid too if the mugger's family hasn't eaten in 3 days? Because it's easy to talk from a cushy home, with a full belly and a trouble-free upbringing.

One can feel sympathy for someone without absolving them. If they're so desperate, then why deny them their moral agency as well?

They are still to blame for the mugging, even if the reasons are understandable.

Yes, huge swaths of ultra desperate people struggling to survive who rob and mug others is definitely analogous to a tiny cabal of ultra powerful, ultra wealthy publishers that could do any number of things but choose to leech millions off the public good.

You are introducing desperation to the scenario, which is totally inappropriate. Unless you know of some publishing house executives who are struggling to put food on the table or homeless?

Also, are you saying you wouldn't blame the mugger?

>If you want to blame anyone, blame publishers, not scientists.

The editorial boards are usually scientists.

And the folks on the grant committee (at least the government ones) are usually scientists.

As a collective, scientists do have the power to require all publicly funded research be available through open access means.

The difference is that those scientists are usually senior ones, who also benefit from the status quo, whereas the ones aching for changes are often the early career researchers, who are hardly to blame.

Even when collectives have power, it is always difficult to exercise it. See for example the limited effect of the Elsevier "boycott": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge

I thought that was true everywhere? Isn't that a major reason people work at Apple, Google...? I didn't ever notice anything different about academia's concern with prestige (feel free to prove me wrong.)

I think it's significantly less true in tech, even if it's still present. People are far more flexible about hiring and working with programmers of different backgrounds, and the views I've heard on tech company prestige aren't nearly as strong and rigid as what I've heard from CS researchers about other departments. (Mostly from folks at Berkeley, but only because that's where I did some research as an undergrad.)

the farcical aspect of the obsession with prestige in academia is that it is within such a small community, for less money, and for a narrower set of opportunities... prestige at the major tech companies comes with more pay, more opportunities, and brand name recognition

As far as I can tell, all young researchers hate the status quo, and want open access to succeed. No one researcher can change the system. Even the ones who believe in open access have their careers to worry about.

I agree with avar's comment above - if the government required that publicly-funded research can only be published the open access way, the problem goes away.

It's a prisoner's dilemma: publishing in a closed, high-prestige journal, benefits the researcher but is bad for science. If the government implemented this requirement, though, all researchers would 'instantly' be spared the temptation of 'defecting' by publishing in a closed journal.

I do think sites like arxiv are in the right direction. Also love the Twitter bots that tweets new papers. I make it a habit to read every new paper related to a field of my interest.

Tell me, when grants are awarded on the basis of if you published in high impact journals, when policy is to not publish in open access, when the vast majority of researchers, especially the youngest generation, despise the current arrangement as little more than rent-seeking by the big journals, tell me, is that the researchers' fault too? Because they are, what was it, obssessed with prestige?

> you can definitely blame then collectively

There are to risks for scientists here: the risk that their work becomes locked after publishing and their increased difficulty in getting access to other papers, on the one hand.

And the risk that his/her colleague will get ahead by publishing in closed journals, while they waste their careers away with less prestigious open publications, on the other hand.

The status quo is that they are more afraid of each other than the publishers, afraid that their colleague is getting ahead, so they can't prioritize open access. This deadlock needs to be cut from above.

> inability to collectively move to different publishing venues

Sometimes it works. For example, the ACM Transactions on Algorithms came into being when the entire editorial board of the (Elsevier) Journal of Algorithms resigned in 2003 in protest against Elsevier. So, it seems the transfer of reputation is possible. This came about after Don Knuth wrote a lengthy letter (linked from [1]) ranting against Elsevier.

It's stunning that apart from isolated cases like this the scientific publishers are still holding on to their ill-gained profits.

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

Ceterum censeo Elsevier(um) esse delendum.

Well, some of them are also complicit in maintaining that incentive structure: https://theconversation.com/why-i-disagree-with-nobel-laurea...

But yeah, it's hard to blame anyone specifically, as the current situation is the result of so many actors: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...

(Apologies for plugging my own article repeatedly, but otherwise I'd be writing the same all the time...)

You can definitely blame Elsevier. Have at it.

Haha, I often do, and they've definitely exploited the system most. That said, even they are accountable to a diverse set of shareholders, and if they were to disappear overnight, there'd also be quite some negative effects. But yeah, if you do want to blame any one party, Elsevier would be it.

I wholly reject the type of argument where "you can't blame people for being self-interested in a given incentive structure". You certainly can. To take it to an absurd extreme, it is a bit like saying you can't blame people for not standing up to Nazis in Weimar Germany. It is indeed suicidal to have done so, yet, you can blame them.

That said, I also wholly agree that it is foolish to expect change before changing their incentives. Public exposure of the racket that is scientific publishing is one such minor incentive change.

Yes, you can blame them. It would give a great feeling of righteous indignation. But would that help solve the problem?

With a functioning justice system or government or social structure, with blame comes punishment and consequences that deter future behavior.

If top researchers refused to publish in or advocate their department pay for closed-access journals, they would die.

If the NSF required NSF funding could not be used to generate work that would be published in closed-access journals, they would die.

If the justice department broke up these journals for the public good or we simply made it impossible for certain IP regulations to apply to scientific research, they would die.

All of these actions require first to acknowledge there is a problem, second to blame corporations running closed-access journals, third to destroy them. You can't skip the second step.

I'm not blaming scientists, which should be obvious given my proposed solution of solving this at the funding level.

Of course some scientists derive value from publishing in prestigious journals, but if that's the case they can pay for those fees themselves out of their own pocket, not out of their research grant.

If those journals demand exclusivity, which they often do, the scientists can of course continue to publish in them if they so choose, but then they can also fund their own research.

EDIT: reread your comment, you're offering hypotheticals I suppose.

I'm okay with the public through the government mandating open access, so they have to then pay the open access fees and we'll all be happy to do it.

It is interesting that open access and preprint are being conflated in some way. At least preprints public. But why is a preprint public and final not in any case?

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