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Comment by dougmccune | Hacker News Reader

I didn't mean engage with the publishers to work together with them. I meant engage in the conversation to really understand why changing the behavior of academics is so hard, so that you can be more effective at doing whatever you are trying to do to put publishers out of business. There are a lot of things that publishers don't like about academic publishing (journal impact factor is highly contentious within the industry), and yet changing the behavior of the academic community is incredibly difficult.

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Respectfully, it troubles me a bit to see the burden of responsibility being shifted to "the academic community." On my docket for the day is completing a referee report for a 500-page academic book manuscript. It's my second time reading this ms and making pages of comments on it, and the publisher is paying me $80 for my time. That works out to pay of about $2/hour.

As I get further into academia I am amazed at the amount of work we do that is uncompensated yet required of us by the antiquated system of prestige that you mentioned in your parent comment. Perhaps it isn't so much that academics are stubbornly committed to an outmoded system, it's that we literally have no time or energy to do anything beyond the bare minimum of meeting that system's constraints.

Given that the public for-profit publishers are reporting profit margins that put tech companies to shame, I don't really buy the argument that it's the academic community who are holding things back. The perverse incentive here is clearly concentrated on the publisher side, not ours.

I really appreciate that you are taking the time to respond to comments in this thread though, thank you for posting.

I think there's enough frustration to go around. I don't doubt your story. The life of an academic (especially a young, non-tenured academic) is brutal.

To provide a frustrating anecdote from the publisher's side: we'd love to heavily invest in launching new open access journals (which we do, but we'd love to do even more). The problem with launching a new journal (either subscription or OA) is that nobody will publish in it if it doesn't have an impact factor. Impact factor is controlled by a private, for-profit company (Clarivate) that's owned by a private equity firm. Getting an impact factor takes 3-5 years and also relies on the total crapshoot of what Clarivate decides to list or not list. So the prospect of launching a new OA journal is one where you are guaranteed to lose money for the first 3-5 years and then you have to put all your eggs in the impact factor basket, hope you get listed and receive an impact factor, and only after all that will academics choose your journal over any established legacy brand. And all this because at some point academia decided that they'd outsource academic career assessment to the magic number that is Impact Factor.

I also want to thank you and the other commenters for some good discourse here. This has been refreshing and I was only called an asshole once the whole time! But jokes aside, a sincere thanks :)

>> Impact factor is controlled by a private, for-profit company (Clarivate) that's owned by a private equity firm

In the first year of my PhD the final-year student on "our" project, who I shared a bench with, told me all about impact factors and which journals he was hoping to get his paper published in.

I think there is plenty of engagement in that conversation, via new alternative publishing models, but putting that aside for a second, I think there are two separate issues here:

1. Academia has a broken incentive model. I agree with you, I think this is a valid point.

2. Academic publishing is an exploitative monopolistic business.

I don't think the big publishers will be able to do much about (1), because they haven't done anything about (2) - which seems to me to be a much easier problem to solve, as the power is in your hands to immediately start paying reviewers for their time, as a simple example.

I hear you and it's a totally valid point. We could start paying reviewers tomorrow. I'm not convinced that adding a monetary incentive to the peer review process doesn't have its own serious negative consequences, but I'm certainly open to the idea that that's a potentially better version of the system than what we have now. It's certainly a difficult business decision to push through, given the universal lack of anyone doing so industry-wide, but that doesn't make it the wrong thing to do, and it certainly could be a differentiating factor if done well (ie by speeding up the review process a publisher might be able to increase author satisfaction and also increase article output, which in an OA world has a direct revenue impact).

I do have an issue calling it a monopoly, however. At best you can call it an oligopoly. The top 5 publishers publish about half the total articles each year [1]. So half the research is published by a combination of hundreds of smaller publishers (both for-profit and not) or independent scholarly societies. And then within the top publishers, they are absolutely in competition with each other, which becomes readily apparent when you dig into the royalty deals that publishers offer scholarly societies for the rights to publish their journals, which continue to get richer for the societies (which poses a whole different interesting problem in terms of the collateral damage to modern-day scholarly societies if or when the business model blows up).

[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

That is a sobering article.

It's clear that Sci-Hub is the only viable strategy.

Other disciplines do indeed pay reviewers - a friend's partner told me about being paid in the humanities. So it can work as a model.

Regarding the monopoly comment: firstly, you have (usually) a complete monopoly on the content you provide. The same paper is available from one publisher.

If we talk in more general terms, then we're in the classic situation where the monopolist (or oligopolist, which is often used synonymously nowadays) pretends they don't have a monopoly, because they don't want to be punished or reformed. But, even if we took your viewpoint, that strength of market power - 5 companies controlling 50% of the market - is overwhelming.

In practice, Elsevier and Springer control nearly all Computer Science publishing (for example), so the situation is extremely bad.

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