Comment by dougmccune | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dougmccune | Hacker News Reader

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Not sure if you're asking about the role that academic journals play in general, or about what specific actions publishers do.

Journals in general serve to curate an ever-increasing body of research and provide a crude method of gauging scientific quality, relevance to your field, and importance. They provide a crude method of judging the impact of scholars without having to read every single paper ever published.

Publishers specifically put in grunt work to make the curation process function. That means hiring people to coordinate the peer review process, identifying new fields that are in need of new journals to help disciplines form and mature, ensuring standards of the scientific method are being followed, and of course there's the commodity service of hosting digital content.

I think a more interesting question is how much the role of a publisher is worth (as opposed to whether it should not exist), and whether there are ways to fill the same role with a cheaper alternative.

What you say about journals is correct.

But what you say about commercial academic publishers is a relatively recent development. Traditionally, universities and professional societies ran journals. As you say, publishers did the grunt work. However, they did it on a work-for-hire basis. It wasn't until the 50s or so that profiteers took over the academic publishing industry.

This is true. Someone else in this thread posted the long-form article about the history of Robert Maxwell, which is absolutely worth the read. I'm definitely not of the opinion that the existing publishing system is the only way (or the best way) for science to be conducted.

Yes, and the article that you cited. Thank you for that :)

out of those identifying new fields that are in need of new journals to help disciplines form and mature, ensuring standards of the scientific method are being followed are things that really should be done by academics and not by hired professionals.

if commercial publishers are doing that now, it means that academics have dropped their responsibility on this.

Yes?

The only tangible benefit I can read into that is peer review, which isn’t paid for by the journals at all. Open access journals have demonstrated the ability to have effective peer review journals without the middlemen.

Otherwise you haven’t mentioned anything of actual value.

OA journals are a middleman too. They typically charge, just in a different way. In fact, popular OA journals can have much higher profit margins than your average subscription journal. If you're advocating for free publishing (whether OA or not) I'd challenge the belief that a system can scale to the current needs of the academic community without charging someone (institutions, governments, authors) and fees of some kind. You can certainly make the argument that the world would be a better place with all actors in the endeavor being non-profits, but that still doesn't at all mean free publishing.

“Open access journals have demonstrated the ability to have effective peer review journals without the middlemen.”

Open access journals are basically the same as traditional journals, they just charge authors up front, rather than readers later. I don’t understand what you mean by your sentence above - they haven’t demonstrated anything close to what you claim.

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