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Comment by foo101 | Hacker News Reader

I am surprised that it took so long after the invention of the Internet. In the pre-Internet era, these journals used to play a significant role in distributing research papers in physical paper form. It made sense then. There was no way to copy a 10 page research paper from Germany to China with a few finger taps at low cost. But with the advent of the Internet and its pervasiveness, it no longer makes sense to rely on a costly media based on physical printing, distribution, and centralized organizations milking money out of it.

I remember Timothy Gowers calling for a boycott of Elsevier back in 2012. It's 6 years since then and Elsevier is still alive. Influential researchers still submit their work to Elsevier! It took less time (a few weeks?) for everyone to boycott Digg!

It's surprising how the Internet has been used to distribute cat videos, advertisements, time-draining, and attention-draining content to a sickening degree but it is still underutilized to distribute good content like research papers such that the Internet becomes the primary and de facto media for such content.

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That's because, despite being called "publishers", publishing is not the main function academic publishers like Elsevier are being used for. Their main function is identifying and recognising the most valued academics in each field. So obviously academics are going to pay whatever amount of public money is needed and available to get that stamp of approval, because otherwise they'll be out of a job in a very competitive job market.

Edit: The argument in more detail: https://medium.com/flockademic/to-fix-scholarly-publishing-d...

This is it. They are not distributors, they are the gateway to scientific professional advance. You will not get much just by posting things to arxiv.

So that implies that a majority of academics, or at least a portion of them with meaningful power, of academics actually place value on the 'name stamp' that Elsevier and others apply to other researcher's work. They all could just read a PDF from the original researcher's own web page or university's online archive but they choose to prefer the 'Elsevier gated' papers instead. Otherwise people publishing via Elsevier wouldn't "get much" either.

The question is whether that pays off in the end. That is, do Elsevier and others' papers have the bar high enough that it's absolutely not worth browsing and reading papers outside the commercial publication, or if it's just laziness and convenience acting up by placing trust in these academic publishers. The academics should be aware of the money and power game involved in commercial publishing, so they should be in a position to judge whether there is value to be trusted in it.

The fact that they put the 'name stamp' is due, essentially, to the referees that allow that paper to be published. Refereeing is also part of the CV of a researcher. So, unless you find another way to do the refereeing process, there is no alternative to the 'name stamp'.

Just uploading to the arxiv will not guarantee that your paper has been reviewed.

Well, it's not so much about the readers of the research (especially in some disciplines, most of them access articles through arXiv), but about the academics on tenure track of grant application committees. They're not actually going to read the research of the hundreds of applicants they have to judge, but will rather rely on proxy measures such as the journals they have published in.

See e.g. https://theconversation.com/why-i-disagree-with-nobel-laurea...

In some sense gatekeeping is essential - for example, one might want to skim all recent accepted papers from the top venues of a particular domain but skimming all submitted papers from all venues in the same domain is physically impossible, even if that would be a full time job doing nothing else. You do need the community to read all the proposed papers and throw away the majority of them, and sort others into lower-ranked publications focused on a narrow niche which you read only if that niche matters to you.

So publishing on your own site on arxiv isn't sufficient on it's own, some curation and gatekeeping is essential for academic publishing to work. However, this is not a service that Elsevier et al provides for their payments, this service is provided by uncompensated reviewers from the community.

On the other hand, the ratings are used by the evaluators of science e.g. funding agencies which won't (and can't) evaluate results directly but need some trusted proxy to separate random ramblings from acceptable science, and the prestigeous journals fulfil that function.

I have one small question about the article:

It says "If researchers are evaluated on the quality of their research instead of the journal it was published in, that would remove their need to pay whatever amount of public money a publisher asks of them just to obtain career credentials."

But at least in my field, most of high impact-f journals don't charge any money for publishing there. So the researchers don't really use any significant money on the publishing part.

I don't know how exactly they get their profit (other than the obvious subscription fee they charged the school), but I don't think researcher themselves are paying that (unless of course, by "researchers" you mean universities as the organizations, but then again "find ways to promote your academic work that are independent of the journal it’s published in" will not be relevant since you still need to pay to read other people's publications).

Right, that could have been more clear. It referred to money one often has to pay to make a work available as open access when it's in one of the traditional "prestigious" journals, i.e. the non-subscription ones.

However, in that case, too, the money is not the researcher's. That said, they are the ones that spend it.

In the case of subscription journals, the argument is similar, except that in this case, it's academic libraries who will have to pay whatever amount of public money a publisher asks of them just to be able to access that research. If the researcher could obtain their credentials elsewhere, they would be able to make their work available somewhere where the libraries and the general public would not have to pay to access it.

The money comes from the subscriptions.

The need to pay "whatever amount of public money a publisher asks" exists because the important researchers choose to publish in those journals instead of other journals where their articles would be freely available.

If researchers are evaluated on the quality of their research instead of the journal it was published in, then one could simply require that they publish somewhere where it's freely available, but it's a bit of a problem since they need to publish in exactly those journals, which happen to be very expensive.

Reputation is misleading. The Special Theory of Relativity is not good because Einstein wrote it. It stands on its own.

We could even argue that a purely meritocratic system of publishing will accelerate good quality research as opposed to a reputation based system.

Funding and career advance should be ortogonal to knowledge distribution.

Absolutely, but you're describing what the world ideally should be rather than what it actually is, I presume? :)

>Reputation is misleading. The Special Theory of Relativity is not good because Einstein wrote it. It stands on its own.

Your Einstein example actually contradicts your point about reputation.

The mistake is using hindsight to judge that paper's quality. Instead, we have to imagine looking at that SR paper as if we lived in 1905 and didn't know if the 26-year-old patent clerk was a crackpot or a genius.

Einstein sent his manuscript to an academic publisher where Max Planck was one of the editors. This is important because MP already had the reputation in physics so his recognition of Einstein's papers' value was taken seriously.[1] The journal itself also had a reputation which was reinforced by the reputation of its editors.

In 1905, Einstein's papers didn't stand on their own. Its dissemination and acceptance was helped along by Max Plank's "stamp of approval".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Planck#Einstein_and_the_th...

So do we need more people like Max Plank and Einstein or we need Elsevier?

Most of the time the publishers just forward the abstract or sample to peers and then make their decision based on that.

Imagine HN where you are only allowed to publish your own content and random users would be selected to evaluate your work.

Right, it's not the actual evaluation part that's the publisher's value (as in: they do provide value there, but others can do that just as well), but in the brand name that acts as the credential, i.e. its the recognition that publishing in a certain journal gets you that leads to the high prices.

So like submitting a pull request and having my peers evaluate it?

Sort of, but there's the additional constraint that the repo only accepts a limited number of PRS per month

> Imagine HN where you are only allowed to publish your own content and random users would be selected to evaluate your work.

We should try this!

it's called "the internet"...

This is not a technological problem, but a coordination one. Each of the individual researchers, faculty and grant committees are being perfectly rational in supporting status quo, they are just stuck in a suboptimal Nash equilibrium [1].

To quote Yudkowsky for a possible solution to this metaproblem "That’s why we have ... there doesn’t seem to be a word in your language for the timed-collective-action-threshold-conditional-commitment… hold on, this cultural translator isn’t making any sense. “Kickstarter”? You have the key concept, but you use it mainly for making video games?" [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nash_equilibrium

[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/x5ASTMPKPowLKpLpZ/moloch-s-t...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract

> An assurance contract, also known as a provision point mechanism, or crowdaction[1], is a game theoretic mechanism and a financial technology that facilitates the voluntary creation of public goods and club goods in the face of collective action problems such as the free rider problem.

...

> Dominant assurance contracts, created by Alex Tabarrok, involve an extra component, an entrepreneur who profits when the quorum is reached and pays the signors extra if it is not. If the quorum is not formed, the signors do not pay their share and indeed actively profit from having participated since they keep the money the entrepreneur paid them.

There's actually a publisher in the humanities that operates like this! Knowledge Unlatched funds monographs (i.e. books), then academic libraries pay a fee not to access those books, but to have them made available as Open Acess. It's actually been really successful in obtaining funds for open access publishing while circumventing the problem of people not paying for it because others might be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_Unlatched

Interesting. So perhaps a non-profit could start a grass-roots crowdaction campaign for all researchers in a field to switch to open-access overnight, and use US contract law to enforce compliance (in the US) if the threshold is reached?

There could be some penalty that researchers agree to pay if they renege on the agreement, and that penalty could be contractual. The non-profit could collect donations for marketing, and enforce the transition through legal action (if needed). Any proceeds could go to funding the next research field's crowdaction.

Critical mass, momentum, catalysts, etc?

Because as techies we fail to recognize that some things are the way they are not for lack of a better alternative, but because of entrenched interests.

I am still amazed that the record industry managed to shut down what was likely to be the next iteration of internet: P2P exchanges. Now we have a centralized youtube solving in a bad way what eDonkey+VLC could have solved for two decades already.

> P2P exchanges. Now we have a centralized youtube solving in a bad way what eDonkey+VLC could have solved for two decades already.

Hey, that can still happen..

Here in China, where privacy is rampant, P2P dies because of lack of public IPs.

Was that an accident, or was it on purpose because centralized systems are easier to monitor/censor?

China does not have many public IPs (v4) in the first place, so I doubt it is in any way deliberate. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_IPv4_addr...:

Country | Number of IPv4 addresses Per Person

US | 4.91196

China | 0.24591

And IP addresses per internet-connected person?

Searching for 'China internet percentage' shows several sites claiming ~50%, so double the ratio to ~0.5, or 10 times less than the USA.

I don't know the numbers, but even if it exceeded one, it wouldn't mean every Chinese would get one public IP. Many IP addresses are still on sale.

Isn't IPv6 widely deployed in china? Most major bittorrent clients have partial or complete IPv6 support these days - although IPv6 DHT support is still lacking apart from Transmission and BiglyBT.

But I don't know about the state of things of the multi-network clients which are popular china.

> Isn't IPv6 widely deployed in china?

No, IPv6 is currently available in only few places, such as universities. Where it is available, torrenting is indeed prevalent, and the speed is good (typically saturating our 100Mbps ethernet link).

Recently there has been a renewed push from the Chinese government to widen the deployment of IPv6, but the effect remains to be seen.

What do you mean by shutdown? I'm using torrents almost every day.

But you are not using P2P to exchange pictures or video with your friend or family. You store them in a big central server that somehow magically get paid for.

Wikipedia still begs yearly for hosting whereas if people voluntered their bandwidth and space there would be no problem hosting it.

I remember eDonkey fondly. The variety of things you can get with torrents pale in comparison of what was open to us: people would just share "their" files with a huge variety of different content. Nowadays you only get a few thousands of the most popular US movies.

Cost of maintaining my pictures and videos is tiny, as is cost of maintaining Wikipedia (relative to its users). Simple VPS for $1/month is enough for me, and with economies of scale, I'm sure that it's few cents per user at most. Wikipedia has no problem getting enough donation to continue its work.

I like the idea of P2P social network, but honestly I think that there's no problem to solve in the first place. While distribution of huge video files and music files is a problem and torrents solve it, that's why they are popular. It's not easy to host terabytes of video with thousands of downloads. But it's trivially solved with torrents.

Hosting costs are not the main reason for the yearly fundraisers on Wikipedia. From July 2016 to June 2017 the Wikimedia Foundation raised $87.5 million in donations and spent $2.2 million in hosting.

https://annual.wikimedia.org/2017/financials.html

This has nothing to do with the physical form of the media. Of course everything is digital and has been for decades.

The root of the problem is that to make an academic career you have to publish is one of those journals. When you apply for a new position, the first thing they look for is how many papers you have published in high profile journals.

It has everything to do with physical form. The fact that research is carried out via centralized journals is a relic of a practice that is over 300 years old, when printed paper was the only feasible medium to distribute such research.

If scientific research had started in this century, I am pretty sure no researcher would have ever thought of publishing research papers in a centralized journal where the journal gets to make so much money for a contribution that is not commensurate. Instead, they would have chosen an online platform that is funded and managed by the universities and research centers participating in this platform.

What you are saying is equivalent to stating a tautology: Elsevier is still important for researchers' careers because Elsevier is still important for researchers' careers.

The deeper question I ask is: Why is Elsevier or such centralized journals still important for researchers' careers?

Why can't the academia move to a model where only the impact of the paper matter where the impact is measured by some open source metrics like citations, number of stars, etc. I am not suggesting these exact same metrics. These are only examples. But it should be possible. For example, in the software world, GNU, Linux, Node.js, Git, etc. did not become important by publishing in a centralized journal but by publishing on open repositories, some amount of marketing, and by the virtue of being very useful. What prevents existing researchers from moving to such a model? If enough influential people move to this model, Elsevier and others automatically become unimportant.

Coordination is hard, otherwise this would already have happened. I recommend "Inadequate equilibria" by Eliezer Yudkowsky https://equilibriabook.com/ if you want a better grasp on how and why such situations arise and cannot be easily optimized.

> What you are saying is equivalent to stating a tautology: Elsevier is still important for researchers' careers because Elsevier is still important for researchers' careers.

It appears you've entirely missed the point. There is no tautology. There is only a vicious circle of being forced to publish in established journals to have a chance of having or even starting a career in research, and the fact that most if not all established journals are controlled by companies such as Elsevier. Therefore if your chances of having a career depend on consuming a service sold by the likes of Elsevier and producing content for Elsevier, it's quite obvious that you have to play along this scheme if you intend to have a career.

I will be careful to compare academia with software world (open or not), since the latter ones more often than not fall into "applications", which can be relatively easily judged by, as you said, "the virtue of being very useful".

It's often hard to do so with the theoretical work in academia due to various reasons, either by its pure technical difficulty, or lack of immediate applications. That's why they need to be peer-reviewed. And Elsevier provides a "prestige" platform to have respectable in-field people to review your research and decide it's good or not, due to the lack of other metrics.

I failed to see how it's related to journal's physical form. As soon as the importance of the research need to be evaluated by other experts, similar platform will exist.

Of course, things like arXiv [1] also exist.

[1] https://arxiv.org/

Peer review is necessary and time-consuming, that is true. But I do not believe that requires the need for profit-focused enterprises like Elsevier or the other publishing houses. I don't think any field has come up with a perfect solution yet, but as a computer scientist, things seem less grim than in many other disciplines of science.

I publish most of my research in the proceedings of the ACM conferences. ACM is a professional association, not a for-profit enterprise. Peer review is carried out by unpaid program committees, where I believe the primary motivation to participate is a combination of moral obligation, networking (with the other committee members), and an opportunity to get exposed to cutting-edge research. This part is similar to other fields, I believe. The main difference is that paper authors are expected to provide camera-ready PDFs of their paper, with the ACM doing little apart from proving LaTeX templates, concatenating the PDFs, and perhaps arranging a few print runs (but I think it's been a while since I have seen physical proceedings).

Most ACM conferences (and journals) are not open access, but some are. Generally it takes a subscription to their Digital Library to download the papers. My impression is that this subscription is cheaper than for the large publishing houses, but I don't know. In any case, an author can pick various licensing models for their paper, with one of them permitting the author to provide a "preprint" of the paper on their personal or institutional website. In practice, that means the papers are publicly available with minor effort, only that ACM does not take responsibility for the hosting.

The entire process appears quite lean, and the expenses incurred by ACM are covered through general membership and conference attendance charges. Further, the ACM appears to continually (and rather aggressively) move towards even more open access-ish policies, likely because it is ultimately run by academics.

The main difference from arXiv is that pre-publication peer review does actually take place.

And that's not taking into account that much of academia comprises disciplines where nothing is exactly "useful", or expected to be (e.g. arts and humanities). Metrics of worthiness in these areas are naturally going to be pretty subjective. (Which is not to say they couldn't be crowdsourced.)

> What you are saying is equivalent to stating a tautology: Elsevier is still important for researchers' careers because Elsevier is still important for researchers' careers.

It's not a tautology, it's a vicious cycle: https://medium.com/flockademic/the-vicious-cycle-of-scholarl...

Uhm, I can barely code my way out of a paper bag but I took a stab at exactly that in https://github.com/ecausarano/heron

At some stage it even worked when used in the same lan. I guess I’m not one of those heroes that can single-handedly design and build a working program, I wish I could muster some help to make it real...

Well you needed a robust hypermedia platform that permits low friction collaboration. Sharing DVIs via email, FTP, or Gopher doesn't cut it.

You shouldn't conflate the negative nature of for-profit scholarly publishing with the use of paper as a medium.

In my own field, virtually all of our journals are produced by non-profit learned societies instead of companies like Elsevier or Springer. But thank goodness that these journals are still published on paper and collected in my library alongside the production of PDFs. Any work I write requires having several publications open in front of me at any given time, and that is a lot easier with paper journals instead of PDFs. Plus, printed journals in library holdings allow one to spend hours browsing through research without any of the distractions that electronics bring.

I definitely appreciate having PDFs of articles, but paper still has its place.

> Any journal submission I write requires having several publications open in front of me at any given time, and that is a lot easier with paper journals instead of PDFs.

I strongly disagree I’ve writtrn two published articles and two dissertations, and PDF versions have made my life so much easier (mendeley in particular)

Why "strongly disagree"? If PDFs have helped you, then that speaks for the value that I suggested of having both paper and PDF.

Behold the invention of the printer! You can turn PDFs into paper in the comfort of your own home!

When an entire department of researchers wants a publication on paper, as well as people in other departments who need to occasionally draw on this field’s research, it makes sense for a single paper copy to be produced and held in a library where everyone can readily consult it without having to incur their own printing costs.

Printing is significantly cheaper than a subscription to an Elsevier journal.

Please read my comment above. In my own field, none of our respected journals are produced by Elsevier (or a similar for-profit publisher). The non-profit learned societies that do publish our journals provide the PDFs free of charge, and for the paper copies they charge libraries only the cost of production – which also makes it possible for even individual scholars to often buy their own bound hardcopies.

When an entire department wants a publication on paper, a single copy in a library won't serve that need (since that copy can only be in one place at once). I experienced this in college (before electronic journals were widespread) with professors assigning a reading to an entire class and not providing copies.

The vast majority of scholarship is unlikely to be in any assigned reading list and the journal will probably be there sitting on the shelf when you want to have a look at it. In cases where there is suddenly high demand for it, then it makes sense to make copies of the article for everyone (or let them download a PDF), but I am happy that I don’t have to print myself everything I want to read.

Printing costs are pretty much insignificant for documents as small as the typical publication. If you really like it to be on paper, printing ten pages, reading them and throwing them out is still cheaper than spending an extra ten minutes of your time to walk somewhere and fetch an existing copy. Printing a paper costs much less than a dollar in supplies, walking to a library costs much more than a dollar of paid-for time. In this case, convenience is cost efficient and it does not make sense to rely on centralized paper copies to try and save a few cents of toner.

Seriously, I'd only consider going to the library if I need a whole book (for a single chapter I wouldn't bother, digital or local printing is fine for that) or if the resource is not available in a digital format at all, which is getting exceedingly rare unless I need something really old. Especially if I've decided that I need paper X for whatever reason, then it'd be useful to read it right now at my desk instead of some time later this day after a visit to library.

Why did people boycott Digg?

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