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Comment by esfandia | Hacker News Reader

> You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business.

That's right, and that's also why the prestigious researchers and universities, those with an already established reputation, have a responsibility: collectively leave the editorial boards of for-profit publishers, set up alternative venues with the help of university libraries. Share the archival, indexing and discovery effort among universities via peer-to-peer digital library federation.

All the tools are there. The same way that places like Stanford, Berkeley and MIT made MOOCs a thing, they can revolutionize scientific publishing.

There's already such venues such as JAIR for AI research (and that was set up looong ago without all the tech we have today), so it's certainly possible. It just needs to become the norm rather than the exception.

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The problem is that the vast majority of established researchers do not care that the system is broken. Why work against the system once you're at the top? Most of them haven't ever thought about it, and the ones who know usually don't do much, because, hey, that's the way it was always done, they are used to the current journals and conferences being prestigious, and they don't want to bother with the unglamorous work of setting up HotCRP or coordinating reviews. Plus they usually want to push their career further and they know perfectly well that fighting against established venues isn't the right way to do that.

As a young tenured academic I have been systematically refusing to do reviews for non-open-access journals. (I'm certainly not senior enough to create a new journal and be taken seriously.) I hoped that this might give some ideas to my peers but it's seen at best as a weird quirk, at worst as a selfish move (because "the community" needs my help to review papers). Usually the answer is some variation of "yeah the system is not perfect".

The only argument I have seen which motivates researchers to care about open access is when it's mandated by funding agencies (e.g., in Europe, the ERC). Researchers really want to get these grants, so when these agencies talk about open access, they listen very carefully. It both makes me somewhat optimistic and quite cynical that the only way to move towards open-access seems to be via funding agencies (as opposed to researchers caring about the problem). Plus, for many agencies, "open access" here means "gold open access", i.e., continuing to work with the usual publishers, who make the articles available online, but move the "costs" (and huge margin) to the authors, with "article processing charges" of $1000-$2000.

This. I used to be an academic a few years back and most of the top academics thought everything was peachy. Also, certain subfields are much worse compared to others. I was a biology transplant from physics and I was shocked that preprints were actively looked down upon in biology and generally in biomedical sciences. The publishing fees often went into several thousand dollars per publication and mostly bothered only the junior academics. Oftentimes, grants would have a separate budget for publishing or if you were powerful you could get the university to pay your fees. The people who it impacted the most were those with the least power so it didn't matter. I knew postdocs who paid publishing fees from their meagre pockets because the PIs said they wouldn't or put onerous conditions like adding themselves or other members to the author list.

> the vast majority of established researchers do not care that the system is broken.

I've been arguing that it's a coordination problem.

Aspiring scientists don't have the pull to change the system (if they move individually they only bear the individual disadvantages without bringing about the big collective benefit), and established scientists generally don't care or are too busy with other things [1].

That's why a concerted ("political") move like this cOAlition S thing is so important, and I find it very disappointing that academics speak out against it. I will read more to understand why.

[1] With notable exceptions, like Don Knuth getting the editorial board of the (Elsevier) Journal of Algorithms to resign and move to a new journal, taking the reputation with them.

My problem is that I'm being continuously evaluated on the basis of my publications and the future of my position literally depends on this evaluation every year.

I have to get as many publications into as highly reputed international journals as possible if I want to have any chance at getting a permanent position, and the vast majority of all reputable journals in my area are behind private paywalls. There is a maximum of 3 reputable, fully open journals and they are still not as prestigious as the established ones.

If I decided to only publish open access journals from now on, that would be immediate professional suicide. According to our institute's internal regulations, I'd be gone in two years from now, maybe even in one if they interpret their rules more strictly.

I agree with you and particularly with the funding agencies being the most effective catalysts for change. The good news is that it's working. STM publishing is moving toward open access, the momentum continues to build (most recently with Plan S) and we're moving toward a future where government-funded research will be OA. It'll still take time to get there, but I'm pretty confident that's where we'll get. And yes, that future will likely involve those funders paying a few thousand dollars per article in APCs. And that future will continue to be dominated by the large publishers, Elsevier in particular. But access will be better, so I'd call that a huge win.

MOOCs don't compete against traditional university education.

You're talking about eliminating, or at least sidelining traditional academic publishing. It's a completely different proposal.

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