Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think the idea is that these journals should be secondary sources, rather than primary sources, for papers. Sure, your paper is in Nature, and that's neat and all and gives it more visibility, but people should be citing the arXiv copy that came out either in parallel to, or before, the for-profit journal copy did. Journals should just be serving as aggregators of content, not hosts of content†.

It's the same idea as how public companies' earliest issuance of any potentially-stock-affecting news, has to be through equal-access public channels that investors can subscribe to for equal-timeliness reaction to news (rather than, y'know, Elon Musk's Twitter feed, where Twitter gets to control who sees what when.)

People should be able to follow a citation from one paper to another, without having to pay to do that. Not being able to doesn't just discourage reading papers, it discourages ad-hoc peer review—the precise point of having journals in the first place. (Specifically, it discourages the part of ad-hoc peer-review where you check a paper's citations to see if the claims you find hard to believe, but which are cited, are actually backed up by something you can believe in the cited paper.) When the citation is to a closed-access journal, you have to happen to coincidentally have a subscription to that journal in order to be able to find out what the citation really says. If the citation's source journal is both for-profit and obscure, then you probably don't have that subscription—so the given citation could have been entirely made-up, and you'll never know.

† Journals being aggregators of content also implies that a paper should be able to be published in as many journals as want to carry it, because none of them "own" the resulting content anyway. In that sense, scientific papers would be a lot like news-wire releases: something that any distributor can pay for the right to print a copy of.

Hmmm, the 'journal are aggregators' model sounds really interesting. It essentially captures the concept that the value of journals is 'legitimizing' papers.

> People should be able to follow a citation from one paper to another, without having to pay to do that.

I really like that, but what about citing books? It seems like sources that are paid for should still be used. We shouldn't hamstring science / scientists. Similarly, we shouldn't just pass of ideas from payed sources as our own ideas. Instead I would propose the slightly weaker rule:

'Where available, cite the free version'

This obviously needs to be complemented with strong reasons for people to create free versions.

I see another issue though. Sometimes, there are significant differences between the ArxiV version and the journal version. I've seen stuff where the journal had better figures, etc. In that case, a reader would be better of reading the journal article than the ArxiV version.

Preprints are great & everyone should post a preprint as soon as they're ready to share what they've been working on. That said, there's a big difference between journals and preprints, not just in the production quality or the improvements made after review, but in the whole hidden infrastructure that supports the discovery of artcles, the indexing, preservation, linking, etc.

It's worth pointing out that running a preprint server isn't exactly cheap, either: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/biorxiv-preprint-ser...

> I really like that, but what about citing books?

Public libraries! Good enough to cite, good enough to ask your library system to carry.

The exception is textbooks, but these are 1. frequently also considered secondary sources, and 2. have their own weird economics that are just as bad as that of paid journals, and so need a separate fix.

> Sometimes, there are significant differences between the ArxiV version and the journal version. I've seen stuff where the journal had better figures, etc. In that case, a reader would be better of reading the journal article than the ArxiV version.

Yes, in fact, there are always at least minor differences; this is because, right now, the IP of a journal paper belongs to the publishing journal, so you can't publish exactly the same version of the paper anywhere else. (Just like a freelance writer who sells a short story to a magazine can't also publish that short story on their own website.) Paper authors get around this by publishing pre-prints—literally, the final-minus-one draft of the paper, rather than the final draft. Sometimes the changes between versions N-1 and N are trivial, but sometimes they're substantive and change the citability of the work.

In a world where journals didn't own, but rather licensed, the IP of the papers they "carry", this wouldn't be a problem, and paper authors would be publishing final prints of their papers in arXiv, because they'd have no reason not to. (Specifically, they'd likely publish the pre-print, and then—if there are substantive changes—they'd publish an updated version as well, and modify the metadata for the preprint so the paper's web-indexed DOI-metadata page would mention, and link to, the updated version, as well as the previous version.)

> 'Where available, cite the free version'

> This obviously needs to be complemented with strong reasons for people to create free versions.

And that's the problem, your weaker version removes all incentive for authors to actually change their behaviour. If that wasn't needed then we wouldn't be discussing this now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com