Comment by foo101 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by foo101 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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.

> 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...

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.

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...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com