Hacker News Reader

Comment by betterunix2 | Hacker News Reader

"I realize that it costs money to publish journals and papers"

This is news to me. The last article I published was automatically typeset using LaTeX, following a template provided by the publisher that has not really changed in years. Hardly anyone, universities included, actually request or require printed copies; those who prefer paper copies typically print a PDF of the article they want using a generic office printer. Articles are selected for publication by volunteer reviewers, and in many cases the editors are also volunteers.

At this point there is no actual need for publishing companies, which is why the system seems like it is broken.

View on HN

Publishing doesn't cost money, that's true. But the publishing companies are still filling two needs, represented by these two questions:

- 3,700 papers in my field were published last week. Which, if any, should I read?

- How's Bob's career doing? Should he get tenure? A promotion? A grant?

Under the system we have now, you should read papers in your field if they have been published in a journal you respect, and your career is a success if you're getting published in journals that your evaluators respect. If everyone self-published their own work -- which is the historical norm -- people would need to work out other methods of judging the quality of a paper than "Elsevier said this was good".

> Which, if any, should I read?

Excuse me, but this decision is not being made by the publisher. It's being made by hard working volunteer reviewers, who are typically not paid by the publisher. These reviewers are the people actually deciding what papers are accepted or rejected, and thus deciding which you read, and they deserve credit for it.

I think you mean to point out that the publishers are the abstract entities to which prestige is attached (often for historical reasons), which they certainly are. Though that's slowly starting to change, as researchers move towards open access and away from for-profit publishers.

Why would the reviewers deserve credit for the decision to honor or not honor a paper? Nobody cares or knows who they are. Nobody cares what they think. What people care about is whether the paper got published. If it was published over the objections of 80% of reviewers, nobody cares about that either. The decision to publish is made by the publisher, and that's what people care about.

> The decision to publish is made by the publisher, and that's what people care about.

I'm saying that it isn't. Modulo weird edge cases, the publisher delegates that decision to reviewers. If they choose to reject a paper, then it gets rejected.

Unless I'm really mistaken about how things work. My only first-hand experience is in PL, a field in which we publish in conferences rather than journals. I've sat in on a PC meeting where the decision to accept or reject papers was made. In cases where the reviews were clear, the paper was accepted or rejected without fanfare. For borderline papers, the decision was made through discussion among the reviewers who had reviewed that paper and the PC. I don't think the PC members were paid for it. The reviewers certainly weren't.

> Nobody cares what they think.

I care what they think. It would be really interesting and informative to have a system where paper reviews were public.

EDIT: What's your experience with publishers? Do you know more than I do?

I could be misinterpreting your comment, but it reads like a broad misunderstanding of the role, economics, and value-add of contemporary publishing.

Here is a (now somewhat old) breakdown of per-article costs, contrasting open access and subscription journals: https://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-sci...

From my perspective the main values that an modern open access publication provide are primarily emotional labor: 1) herding cats: all those reviewers and editors that are volunteering are incredibly flaky and need to be hounded by phone, in person, etc. This can't be automated because everybody ignores bots. 2) resolving disputes. hopefully the median paper goes through the process smoothly, but any dispute involving prominent researchers will require dozens of hours of careful mediation, fact-checking, and follow-up. 3) generally being a responsible institution (not suffering fraud or embezzlement, planning for change over time, etc), which is valuable because humans don't have the time or capacity to judge every piece of content from scratch and fall back on reputation. All of these tasks require competent, savy, and highly trained folks, or the whole thing falls apart. Many in the old (subscription) world would say that open access publishers have already cut corners at $3k/article, and if you read around on the internet everybody complains about how long it takes to get responses or resolve disputes, so maybe they are right.

If these numbers sound totally bogus to you, maybe you should jump in to the publishing business and undercut everybody with superior service? Try writing a business model. As to whether we need publishing at all, i'd also try convincing researchers and authors to just post their results on blogs or wikis, which have zero barriers, require no new development, etc. I think authors/researchers value the services publishers provide, even apart from the whole branding/reputation/incentives game. Even pre-print repositories involve a degree of labor to review, moderate, and resolve disputes.

"automatically typeset using LaTeX" is only a norm in a few fields, which are all relatively well resourced and tech-savy. The fact that extra typesetting labor is involved in fields that don't use LaTeX might be one reason that pre-prints have been slower to take of in fields not covered by, eg, arxiv.org.

Another class of costly labor is copy editing and getting details right. This means things like tracking down every single citation and making sure they exist and are formatted correctly, spelling corrections, making graphs color-blind accessible, etc. This is hard to automate with current tooling; a lot of time and resources are currently being spent on next-generation open source publishing/manuscript pipelines to make this sort of thing more machine-verifiable, but it's going to be a long struggle to get authors (legitimately busy and distracted and over please-do-everything-this-new-disruptive-way-please-ed) to change their established field-specific workflows.

> If these numbers sound totally bogus to you, maybe you should jump in to the publishing business and undercut everybody with superior service?

This process has begun in several fields:

- https://quantum-journal.org

- http://discreteanalysisjournal.com

- https://lmcs.episciences.org

The reason that these types of journals have not completely disrupted those fields is not that their business model is flawed (I don't think they are even for-profit), but that academics know that their future job prospects rely on the reputation of journals they have published in.

Maybe the publishing companies are doing something useful in other fields, but in my own field the only reason we bother with Springer is that they have brand recognition among university administrators. Nobody I know sees any value beyond that, and some have even complained that Springer's paid editors have reduced the quality of published articles (at one CRYPTO conference a few years ago, someone pointed out several instances where Springer had introduced spelling errors). At a few IACR members meetings people have questioned the need to bother with Springer, given that the IACR is more than capable of organizing things.

"If these numbers sound totally bogus to you, maybe you should jump in to the publishing business and undercut everybody with superior service?"

I think you misunderstood my point: I think publishing companies are completely obsolete and that we should do away with them. Once upon a time publishing companies were necessary to distribute research papers on a mass scale. Today we have the Internet, which serves that need at far lower cost and also makes it easier to organize things like peer review.

Prior to the printing press there were no scientific journals, and knowledge was spread peer-to-peer and at great expense. Things changed because of what was a new technology at the time. Now we have another new technology that is changing how scientific knowledge is spread, and scientists will have to change accordingly.

"it's going to be a long struggle to get authors...to change their established field-specific workflows."

If that is what keeps the publishing companies relevant, I would say they are a dying industry and that we should hasten their death.

> This can't be automated because everybody ignores bots

They can't ignore the fact that their work won't get published until they've finished their required number of reviews. It's easy to build in the right incentives, and review work should be part of thier professional responsibilities, and can be baked into the publishing platform they use.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com