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Comment by janoc | Hacker News Reader

90% of scientists have no choice. Your funding and career as a scientist are directly linked to where you publish (impact factors and so on). So if you have a "choice" between publishing in a major journal published by Elsevier and a no-name but open journal, guess where you send your paper ...

And the "open access" options offered by Elsevier and others are just an insult added to injury - "pay $4000 for making your work publicly accessible" or "pay nothing but then we put your work behind a paywall, will own the copyright on it and will charge you exorbitant subscription fee to access it".

Unless universities and governments start to actually boycott this and outlaw these practices, nothing will change. That's really not in the hands of the individual researchers that are pressed to publish publish publish and collect "points" for their departments by doing so.

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And I feel like governments can easily change this, simply by requiring that all publicly funded research must be published in open access journals. So, y'know, the people who actually fund it can read it.

As it stands, I'm fully behind Sci-Hub simply because I'm not affiliated with an academic library, and can't afford to pay all their damn fees. It harms individual researchers as well as individuals who are just plain interested in the material.

Many agencies do that, e.g. ERC requires it. However it hasn't changed anything, because these publishers charge (a lot) for open access, and ERC just ends up subsidizing them even more.

Then perhaps those agencies could create their own journals which are open access and then publish everything through those? That'd be an easy way, without having to pay for the open-access?

The problem with open access is that typically you, as an author, get a choice:

- assign copyright to the publisher, have your work paywalled and pay for the access to it via exorbitant subscription fees the university pays

- ask for having it available as open access - and then the publisher charges you thousands of USD/Euro ($4000 is common) for the privilege as a condition of having it published.

Very few university departments can afford to pay such fees so you can guess where the papers end up.

And if you mean open access journals that don't demand these fees - well, that's of little use to an average researcher when their career depends on peer reviewed publications in reputable journals. Publishing it wherever, in a journal nobody heard about with who knows who doing the reviews has zero value and you won't get any credit for that.

That's definitely part of the problem, and would inhibit laws since the publishers know they'd get the free money. Perhaps the government could also regulate the publishers and say they can't charge any more for open access than they can for subscription fees?

Or, perhaps the different agencies can create their own journals for their funded projects and let the research appear in them? Basically, create new reputable journals precisely for open access? Or make it where a paper has to be submitted to a "prestigious" one and an open access one a year or so later (i.e. author keeps copyright, period), which would hopefully build up the prestige of them?

I'm not sure the solution, just trying to think of ideas.

Perhaps we can craft a section to include in research papers citing research showing peer review is currently insufficient for driving science and is in fact contributing to reproducibility crises? How research gets published and the pressures impacting any singular study seems like important metadata to include in reports.

almost all journals let you upload your preprint in arxiv or biorxiv etc.

I've often wondered why universities themselves don't publish each others papers. I understand that there will be cliques as that is standard human behavior but:

-They can maintain their own web servers and have a service charge

-It's an extra project for IT departments that holds real world importance

By eliminating the publisher wanting to make a profit the cost of publishing an be decreased.

Is this a viable start?

They do that and have done it all the time and it's called grey literature: self-publications with dubious peer-reviewing policies, that are prone to fraud and corruption.

In most cases grey literature will nowadays count against you if you apply somewhere, but there are quite a few countries and professors who made their careers with it in some less acclaimed universities during the 70s and 80s.

As I laid out in another post (see above), unfortunately you cannot just start some open access journal and expect it to have a reputation as good as a journal that exists for more than a hundred years. It takes several decades of 95% rejection rate and rigorous editorial work to build up that reputation.

Still, it's the right way to go in the long run, new open access journals open all the time and some have good editorial boards. It just can't happen overnight and for young researchers like me in my area, there is currently no alternative to also publishing in closed journals. It's either publish in those journals, or give up any prospects of making a career in academia.

That's why the current EU open access policies are, as noble as they seem, quite problematic and have a potential to destroy many promising careers within the next 5-10 years.

> That's why the current EU open access policies are, as noble as they seem, quite problematic

The purpose of government funded research isn't to help university faculty build portfolios for professional advancement. It's to find new original knowledge about topics that are in the public interest. That goal is frustrated if the public can't access the knowledge afterwards.

> have a potential to destroy many promising careers

"Destroy careers" sounds too dramatic. I'm expect there will be some churn, and some exceptions, but I expect that a strong P&T case will continue to be a strong P&T case, with the committee noting that some publications were in less established journals because the corresponding research was publicly funded.

> The purpose of government funded research isn't to help university faculty build portfolios for professional advancement. It's to find new original knowledge about topics that are in the public interest. That goal is frustrated if the public can't access the knowledge afterwards.

I'm talking about the evaluation criteria of the government funding agencies. You should tell them them your opinion, not me.

>"Destroy careers" sounds too dramatic.

You don't understand. This is about the quality of the research. If you put arbitrary open access journals on a par with the top journals that have been established over 100 years, or even rank them higher, then even more bullshitters will make a career at the cost of serious scientists.

I'm in the humanities where this is a real concern. I already have colleagues who publish 10 lousy papers/year in bad journals and make a career out of this, rather than publishing 3 good papers/year in top journals.

I wouldn't put this into so drastic words if I wasn't 100% convinced that the problem exists. There is already a race to mediocrity due to excessive indicator counting, pushing researchers away from the top journals to mediocre journals with less quality control will make things even worse.

In my field there are maybe 2-3 halfway acceptable open access journals, and all the top journals are proprietary, mostly Springer and Oxford Journals.

> 90% of scientists have no choice.

100% of scientists have an option to publish a copy in arxiv or biorxiv. It's not happening.

> are directly linked to where you publish

And therein lies the problem, which, if solved, will make open access redundant. I have never seen a conference with a panel "how to change funding criteria". Publishers like elsevier act as a trusted "third party" that validates scientists, and are trusted precisely because they are a third party (i.e. they are perceived as immune to academic politics). Whatever solution is to be found, it will probably have to include such a third party, but in the form of a reviewer who gives grades, not one who withholds the world's scientific output for its own gain. It might be a simple third-party ratings system , like how ratings agencies rate banks. It is a discussion that should have started years earlier.

> 100% of scientists have an option to publish a copy in arxiv or biorxiv. It's not happening.

This is not about publishing, this is about peer-reviewed publishing. Putting something on an open Internet archive does not count as a publication you could put on your CV. Were I work, for example, our publications are analyzed with bibliometric tools based on a point system, and our funding and tenure directly depends on that. Putting something in an archive or on a web page: 0 points. Not peer-reviewed: 0 points. Peer-reviewed but not indexed by Scopus: 5 points (probably should be 0 though). Indexed by Scopus and peer-reviewed: 10 points.

The third party rating system you suggest makes no sense and could not possibly work. You have to understand that it's not Elsevier who do the peer-reviewing, but your own colleagues who do anonymous peer-reviews and are, of course, not paid for that. No mandated 3rd-party authority could possibly determine and warrant the quality of scientific publications. After all, where would the assessors come from? From the pool of our colleagues, of course.

Elsevier and Kluwer themselves do basically nothing. They provide some final editing in India. They don't run the journals, don't compose the editorial boards, don't control the reviews, and have nothing to do with the content of publications. What they have is the prestige of the journals they took over or bought from the 70s until now. For the top journals, which are the only journals that count, this prestige includes a vast pool of reviewers and a famous editorial board, as well as many decades of highly acclaimed publications. You cannot just replace that with a open access journal, it takes 30-50 years of good editorial work for that journal to get the same reputation.

That's the problem.

"Peer-reviewed but not indexed by Scopus: 5 points (probably should be 0 though)."

Why 0?

Because it's usually only "peer reviewed".

Scopus is a huge index (unlike Web of Science), so you won't find any good journals that are not Scopus indexed.

you can get peer reviewed and also submit your preprint in biorxiv. It's disappointing that it's not happening on a broad scale however.

I am sorry but you are completely incorrect here.

If you publish to Arxiv you can't publish in a journal that actually gets you the "points" you need to advance your career or secure your funding. The only exceptions are domains like mathematics or theoretical physics where publishing pre-prints and sometimes full papers on Arxiv is the norm. Most research fields are not like that.

One of the first things most journals will ask you to do is an exclusive copyright assignment as a condition of publication. The only thing you can do afterwards is to publish the paper on your own website (and often not even that, at least not the version that the journal has a copyright on) and use it privately e.g. for teaching or further research. Nothing more. So there is no way to publish the same text both in e.g. Elsevier's journal and on Arxiv without risking getting sued. And few people have the time (unpaid, of course) to write a second version of the same paper only for the sake of uploading it to Arxiv.

The part about the rating systems - this hasn't been created neither by scientists (who work mostly on reputation) nor publishers. This pressure to score, evaluate, grade research output is a purely governmental thing - bureaucrats and politicians wanting a simple number they can compare and use to decide on who gets and who doesn't get funded, who can and who can't apply for tenure and so on.

Elsevier and others (Scopus, for ex.) only filled the demand by providing easy to use statistics, such as impact factors, citation numbers and so on based on their databases. Oh and they have very good lobbyists and e.g. in Germany Elsevier was put in charge of all this data tracking for the German government ...

However, none of this requires any of the publishers - all publications are recorded by the universities anyway, citation numbers are quite easy to estimate even by googling (Google Scholar does that, without any access to the proprietary databases).

And getting stuff like impact factors (which are a largely arbitrary metrics comparing cited vs all published articles in a certain journal) is in the interest of publishers because otherwise their journals will be irrelevant.

> if you publish to Arxiv you can't publish in a journal that actually gets you the "points"

Wrong . Most journals allow publishing of preprints https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_academic_journals_by_p...

I hear this a lot but don’t fully agree to the premise of ‘having no choice’. I published an article once and asked the professor if he was willing to publish open access. His answer was that he was open to it, but that if I was looking for a career in science, publishing OA in the current journals would require more effort from our side to justify the importance of our work. (The other author wanted to stay in science, and wanted to take the easier route, so in the end we decided to publish the old-fashioned way)

Just to say: you have a choice, the OA path just requires more effort. And depending on your area of expertise, the OA journals can actually be very good.

I agree with your conclusion though: change at scale requires universities to change their behavior. Before boycotting Elsevier, a good start would be to move evaluations away from ‘impact factors’ to e.g. h-index.

What you probably haven't been told is that the "more effort" typically means paying a rather exorbitant sum of money to the publisher to have the paper opened up.

You can certainly do that - but nobody does because for that fee you can pay two postdocs' salaries instead. Also good luck justifying that to the university bean counters - "Why do you need this $4000 fee paid when you can publish it for free?!".

The deck is intentionally stacked so high against open access publishing that it is basically unviable in the form it exists today.

Unless scientists start collectively taking responsibility for the state of the world in which they live, I don't anticipate quick change.

Everyone has a choice, even scientists who disempower themselves by telling themselves they don't. Learning to stand up for one's self, individually and collectively, can be much harder work than ins and outs of everyday living, especially when it comes to standing up to authoritarian states/industries.

I can trust my fellow scientists to pull together. We shall overcome.

I mean, if your future career and livelihood depends on you doing something, odds are you don't really have a choice. Now, maybe the few tenure professors can do something, but non-tenured ones don't really have many options.

I always have a choice, even if it's one I may not like.

It may require my career being put on pause so I can conduct my research without such pressures because I recognize Science as a greater purpose.

I choose my values and make decisions based on those. My life is infinitely more joyful and free as a result. I used tell myself about not having a choice (a logical fallacy, btw). Then I admitted to myself some choices are harder than others and I can't expect anyone to change their life for the sake of preserving my values.

The beautiful thing I never heard anyone mention in the past about living true to my values: when I choose to stick by my values without having a plan for the future, it's immediately easier for me to come up with a plan!

That's super tricky and requires being comfortable with uncertainty, which idealized Science is a practice in accepting, though the current climate doesn't really reflect that.

Scientists could benefit from researching and practicing empowerment.

facepalm

Try to build a science career when you are living from the slave wages and short term contracts most universities give to grad students and postdocs. Oh and that doesn't even mention student debt, in case you are in a country where you had to take a loan and pay tuition.

Also, if you don't publish e.g. 2 major papers per year, then your career will be certainly put on pause for you - permanently. There is pretty much no way to get back unless you have a list of current publications on your CV.

Dude, please, before trying to lecture someone about moral choices, at least try to research the subject and the conditions in which most of the research is done.

For your information, most of the work is not done by the tenured professors who can afford to take e.g. a year of sabbatical to ponder their values because their employment is secure. The professor is there to raise funding and to do management work, in the most cases they are only signing their name on work produced by the nontenured staff who certainly doesn't have any of those luxuries.

janoc this is a (correct) description of a corrupted system. It is possible to do research and not to bend to these rules, at least in mathematics.

Publishing in closed journals limits the dissemination of the work. Moreover peer review is not as rigorous as replication or validation of work which is public, related discussion today on HN [0].

Why should I take seriously a researcher who puts carrier over public validation?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18364518

It isn't my intent to lecture, but to speak my truth. I don't presume to speak for others; I simply know my experience taking disempowering stances in the past and am sharing that perspective because nobody ever told me I could live life the way I am now. I found this path through my own privileged sabbatical from the world as I recovered from porn/gaming/media/sex/love/sugar/anxiety/information addiction on my parents' dime. I don't think such a break from the world is required to break from societal programming because it's possible for someone to learn from my experience if they're open to doing so.

I'm building my science "career" outside of academia for these reasons. I put "career" in quotes because I'm not sure if this word fits for me: science is part of my personal spirituality, ie. how I connect with the world around me & I don't know how you define career. I don't need academia for sustainable living because I've worked hard to develop a giving and supportive community. We share a lot of our things and expenses. It's most certainly not the norm and took a lot of work to abandon the scarcity mentalities of the world, especially around money.

It's my intention to share how I live and what I've learned from it, and not to tell anyone how to live. I'm saying everyone literally has a choice every moment, even when there's a gun to their head. I don't fault or judge anyone for their decisions in the face of coercive systems. I had to realize I can have everything I need without using money and that took me decades of struggling within these highly codependent systems before realizing I could trust myself and others to meet my needs. I still use money because some things are harder to share than others in a small town of 9000, like gasoline.

Interdependent living requires massive mental shifts from cultural norms. I'm pursuing my career without a single degree to my name and am loving every moment of it. I'm more privileged and free than most people, despite the little money I have. Several of my friends are doing the same. Some come from privileged families, some don't. Freedom from money is possible and hard af. It doesn't require not having any or giving what you have away.

There's always another way. When I choose to believe there isn't, science says (& my experience confirms) I'm engaging cognitive biases in my brain/mind that'll keep me from seeing alternative paths. This led me to realize learning to choose my beliefs wisely is a skill progression necessary for crafting the life I want for myself.

I like to say "there's no wrong ways, only long ways." I think I've figured out quicker ways to achieve internal changes leading to dramatic external effects than society teaches/enables/encourages. In the future, they may wind up being long ways. If you choose to not believe anything I'm saying or otherwise dismiss it as lecturing or whatever, ok. You do you & I'll do me.

In the meantime, citizen science exists. I invite the refugees of capitalist academia's psychosocial enslavement to free themselves of their bonds and transform into more free researchers.

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