Hacker News Reader

Comment by BrandoElFollito | Hacker News Reader

I do not really understand the outrage.

Nobody forces you to publish in Elsevier journals. Just publish it in a blog, where there will be comments. Out of these you make your choice whether the publication makes sense.

The ones to blame are univesities and grant commitees which use the impact index as The Universal Science Ruler.

It is akin to blaming Oracle for closing their databases. You do 'ot like it, move to Postgres, mysql or something else.

Yes, quality of publications will suffer for some time. Yes, papers (blog posts) will be more difficult to get to but it will settle down. Until we have open source science.

View on HN

I don't think this could work for a few reasons.

1. Blogs aren't peer reviewed. Anything that is going to be referenced later needs to be reviewed by other people.

2. It is easy to change the content of a blog after the initial publication. This causes issues for referencing, and removes the "story" of how things were developed which is very important. Hundreds of ideas might end up being wrong before the right idea is found. We shouldn't be able to "delete" the ideas which were wrong from history. This is a part of the reason that papers don't reference websites (with some exceptions e.g. links to software tools or result databases). This is even taught to first year undergrads who try to reference blogs in their lab reports.

3. The journal acts as an independent trusted third party, blogs wouldn't have this. How do I know whether I can trust a blog owner?

There are probably more reasons. All in all I'd like a more diverse group of distributors but I don't think self-publication could replace journals.

I think we have to start thinking about a way to make it work. There is pressure in some areas for papers backed by things like Jupyter notebooks, and machines make accessing the horde of information associated with a paper easier. We also need to disintermediate Elsevier and other bad actors, they're really causing a lot of trouble at this point. The problem IMO is that the internet is too much of a bazaar, and too little of a library. If there was a means to mark off the 'library' content of the internet such that if you asked for a resource at time t, you would get that resource at time t, many of these issues would go away. Sort of the wayback machine on steroids. Yes it would be hard, but not NP hard. This could also allow the use of blogs, in much the same way as private communications can be cited in papers. For example, "We elected not to run fluorine experiments due to advice from this source -- http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2010/02/23/thi...

I know it isn't easy, but we really do need to embrace the internet with respect to scientific literature, not keep walling it off. Cornell's arxiv seems a good start.

Then how is the Apache web server peer reviewed? Or LaTeX? or some other open source software?

By means of people evaluating it (good, bad, knowledgeable or yahoo people), then you read their reports and you make up your mind.

When the subject is one I am an expert in, I will use it and tell everyone it is fine.

When the subject is not one I am an expert in, I will look at what others say and find out the ones who I can trust. This is how, say, Stack Overflow works. And it woks really fine.

The fact that the content is going to change is good. It means that there is a place where the knowledge is updated. Heck, it may become one day the ultimate reference. If it is handled properly it will have updates which keep track of the past.

I have a PhD in physics and had my fair share of publications in the medieval system of "peer reviewed, high impact journals". I am now in industry and I much more prefer to have multiple independent sources of truth and decide on my own. Not a single one is in a journal, all are in places which either state good stuff or are lost in a corner of Internet.

Sure, nobody forces you to publish in Elsevier journals, you will only have less chance of obtaining a grant or tenure in an already outrageously competitive market if you don't.

> Sure, nobody forces you to publish in Elsevier journals

Actually, some researchers are forced to publish in Elsevier journals. Some research institutions require researchers to meet publication quotas and a paper only counts if it's published in a journal that's included in a precompiled list of reference publications. If every single journal is ownrd and controlled by the likes of Elsevier then these researchers have no alternative, because they will get fired if they don't.

> already outrageously competitive market

Indeed, this is a market. If people say "fuck it, I will not publish there" then with exactly zero publications in Elsevier journals these semi-god committees will have to change their minds;

One of the main reasons I left academia is because of this feudal system and the fact that people are busy with their research to change something.

The market I was talking about is the academic job market, not the publishing market - the latter of which is very dysfunctional. That said, you're assuming collective action, but researchers are stuck in a prisoner's dilemma where it might be good if all of them boycotted Elsevier (and the other traditional publishers), but whoever moves first is penalised. You can't really fault researchers for not being the ones to sacrifice their academic careers (and even then some still do so - this article's author being one of them).

I was also talking about the job market.

With this mindset of not being the first one to react, we would not have had any changes in civilization (starting with slow changes, ending with revolutions).

Startups disrupted traditional companies, low-cost services (airlines for instance) disrupted traditional services, open source disrupted traditional software.

Academia is a stone which is not disrupted by anything. No wonders that it is being pushed around.

I am definitely not saying the system cannot be disrupted (heck, I started my own non-profit that aims to do that), just that it is unfair to expect people who are aiming for an academic career to do that. Changes in civilisation have also been the result of collective action, e.g. through governmental action or by people who have nothing to lose.

This isn't the right solution.

A large funding body just needs to announce that starting from 5 years in the future, they will only count articles published in open journals on the applicant's track record.

That will fix things quick smart.

Why isn't it the right solution?

And why 5 years and not tomorrow?

By "large funding committee" you mean a grant-providing one? If so this is more or less the main culprit of my comment.

The total lack of incentives aside from ‘doing the right thing’ perhaps?

> I do not really understand the outrage. Nobody forces you to publish in Elsevier journals.

Scientists are people too, and as people they need to think of their careers. Say you publish in open journals and your colleagues publish in "reputable" closed journals like the ones peddled by Elsevier. Then they're going to get ahead of you. So you need to compete on the same level with them. How would you solve this problem? The interest of the individual is in conflict with the interest of the field on the whole.

Yes, you are correct. This problem exists everywhere, except that there are places where people actually try to react instead of whining because the ugly big corporation is not nice to them by making them pay for the journals.

We had exclusively commercial, proprietary software and then the open source mouvement started. We have a choice now and the ugly companies must adapt and do not have a monopoly anymore.

We had women in the kitchens and at church, they reacted and they are slowly getting equity.

What I am trying to say is that academia is not making efforts to change the paradigm. The Professor God, The TA Semi-God etc. Revered Grant Commissions. All that.

I know all of that, I used to be part of this until the day I said good bye and moved on. I still have a lot of friends in academia and this subject comes back from time to time. And every time the arguments are the same as yours, plus the whining.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com