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Comment by Vinnl | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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"...

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.

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.

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?

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