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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

I don't know what field you're in, but in my field, nobody pays to publish, and everyone just puts pre-prints on their websites and everyone seems totally happy with that. Is pre-prints on websites or arXiv not an option for you for some reason?

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In Physics, I was told that pre-prints were only useful if you had no other way to access the canonical version of the paper (in my university, we didn't have access to a bunch of large journals and there's no way I'm paying hundreds of dollars for papers for a summer research project). In my experience, pre-prints often have different information than that actual published version (though I made sure any papers I co-authored would have identical versions in both).

I obviously found this quite concerning, given that I also work in the world of free software and I know how much of a benefit public access has in a field as opaque as software (let alone something as important to human development as science). But it is the reality, because there is still a view that pre-prints are only meant to be a place to stash away your first drafts of a paper and that the actual journal is where the real paper is stored. Luckily the journal I submitted to (MNRAS) didn't care about submitting pre-prints to arXiv (some do).

(Don't get me started on the fact that some journals still require you to pay them for papers written in the early 1900s. The authors are long-dead, and you've made more than enough commission on Feynman's papers on positrons.)

Because in most fields, preprints count for nothing. Not for priority, and certainly not for tenure decisions and the like. In fields like biology and chemistry an actual journal article is required (at least at present; there are attempts at preprint sites for biology at least but only enthusiasts use them at present). And publishing in a journal costs money one way or another. Either you expect your audience to have a journal subscription (which can cost tens of thousands of dollars per year meaning that only large universities may subscribe), or you have to pay the costs of publishing your article yourself so that it is available for free. Neither are great options, but for most non-physics/math fields, those are the options.

Note that Plan S also states that the funders aim to push for academics to be recognised for the value of their research, not the name of the journal it was published in. Wellcome explicitly added to its requirements [1] that organisations they fund must also sign the San Fransisco Declaration on Research Assessment, meaning that they should commit to this.

(Disclaimer: I work on a project that also has this goal.)

[1] https://wellcome.ac.uk/news/wellcome-updating-its-open-acces...

Note that this money goes to the journal editors; the major effort in publishing is reviewing which is a volunteer job.

Not very editors are well-paid either. Most of this money goes to publishing companies.

I don't consider reviewing to be volunteer work, like say, running an after school club at the local middle school to teach kids how to program. I wouldn't list reviewing under the "service" section of my CV, but rather the "professional development" section. The reason being is that as an academic, I expect and require someone to step up and review my work when it comes time to publish it. If I don't want to pay for that work, then I better be willing to do it for free when someone asks me. You see, I'm getting something in return, so I don't think reviewing a paper is a very selfless thing to do.

> reviewing which is a volunteer job

No it's one of your paid professional responsibilities as part of your job, if you work in academic or industrial research, which is almost all reviewers.

Is that paid for by the journal out of the publishing fee?

No it's not. That doesn't make it 'volunteer' work for the researcher. You can count it as part of the fee the institution pays to the journal if you want, and I can understand not liking it, but it's not volunteer work.

When I was a referee (physics), it was most definitely not considered part of my job. I did it entirely voluntarily, was not paid for it, and no-one at my institution cared whether I chose to do it or not.

> and no-one at my institution cared whether I chose to do it or not

Are you speaking as a grad student, or faculty? Because if you don't review, sit on an organizing committee, or otherwise participate in the academic process in your field, you're not going to make it very far in your career. Our disciplines are smaller than you think, and people take notice, especially in your own department. Are you sure you don't have a reputation?

Thanks for your viewpoint. It is so different from the one that I saw (which field are you from btw?)

Both times I was asked to become a referee for a journal (during phd and then postdoc), it was because someone I knew was fed up of doing it, and wanted to pass it on to someone else. I volunteered because, like you, I knew someone ought to do it and felt that I should 'give something back' - especially because I liked the journals and had published in them. It was a (minor) distraction from my research (a couple of days every few months). The definite impression that I got from my colleagues (including more senior ones) was that it had little or no relevance to my career, compared to publications. It is not impossible that I misread the situation, but I doubt it. I would prefer the situation that you describe.

Interestingly, an economist I worked with (they tend to have a very slow review process) told me about an economics journal where you had to sign up to referee 1 paper for every paper you submitted, and pay a bond to ensure you did it. Just how one would expect rational economists to do it :)

>pre-prints on their websites

People don't realize how inadequate this is long-term. Hundreds of years from now when scholars look back at the early 21st century, it's going to look like the dark ages.

Institutions with pro-OA policies will either require their employees to shove stuff into their own archive, or they'll automatically crawl their staff's sites to add to the archives. Those archives are usually controlled by the same department as the university's library, people who already have some idea about preserving things for "hundreds of years from now".

In the UK the funding mechanism for (some?) academic research hinges on publication data so there's a rationale for bean counters to ensure the archive is properly funded - if you build this Open Access archive you get the data for your funding paperwork as an output. So this creates an incentive even in fields where Open Access is not normal.

(e.g. big swathes of Physics are OA, same in Computer Science, but for all I know Paleontology is a desert for open access)

You can publish in the conferences and journals, which maintain the archives and (I think?) still physically print and deposit in libraries of record.

But still also put the pre-print on your website.

the Internet Archive may prevent this from happening, despite retroactive robots.txt declarations and other such nonsense

A pre-print is what it is: a version you put online before actually publishing your paper in a conference or a journal. In no field whatsoever an online pre-print is considered equivalent or sufficient compared to a peer-reviewed publication. I wonder which field you are talking about. We're talking about pay to publish here, not pay to read.

The pre-print loophole is exploited by people who publish in IEEE (electrical engineering) and ACM (computer science) which require assigining exclusive rights to the final article but not the final pre-print. After the final article is accepted but before publication a new clone is put up on their personal website with the name “final pre-print”.

It’s understood in these two fields in these two journals that IF the article was published, the “final pre-print” is identicle and is a “pre-print” in name only for licensing circumvention reasons.

Don’t know about other fields. But CS and EE are particularly prickly about this issue. See for instance Matt Blaze’s discussion: http://www.mattblaze.org/blog/copywrongs

For similar reasons Guinea Worm Wrap-up, the main publication about global progress on the eradication of Guinea Worm (a parasitic worm, like not a microbe, not virus, an actual worm, that bursts out of people's legs if they're infected - disgusting and, of course, painful) has a bit of text at the end that says this:

Inclusion of information in the Guinea Worm Wrap-Up does not constitute “publication” of that information.

My perception is that CS is the only field which has generally normalized and accepted pre-prints in lieu of formally peer-reviewed articles. I can say that in my field (Health Sciences), biorXiv is the most applicable pre-print site, but in my experience, none of my colleagues have heard of it.

The final sentence of GP's comment actually mentioned arXiv being most practical.

Yes I meant with a pre-print - it sounded like they meant putting them on arXiv instead of trying to publish in a journal at all?

Arxiv is not open to all fields.

I was responding to a comment asking whether arXiv was an option in response to someone saying arXiv was most practical, so I'm sure that person's field is welcomed on arXiv.

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