Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jancsika | Hacker News Reader

I'm probably missing some finer points, but I just cannot make sense of the problem here.

Editors of $prestigous_journal are the most prestigious professors in their field themselves, no?

So let's say $prestigious_journal is one of the journals that the university students/faculty get access to from Elsevier. University pays Elsevier, university gets access. Fine.

Now, suppose the editors of $prestigious_journal care about open access. But given the current arrangement with Elsevier they cannot become an open access journal tomorrow.

Is that the problem?

If so, the obvious next chess move I see is this:

Editors of $prestigious_journal resign from $prestigious_journal today. Tomorrow, they start $prestigious_journal1 (modulo some new name-choosing scheme) and post a website or whatever.

Granted I'm biased-- is the problem that the editors don't know how to publish content on a website?

If so, then the obvious chess move is to use whatever turnkey open source journal publishing system exists.

What is it, and why hasn't every prestigious journal already changed its name and started publishing there?

The argument cannot be, "Well, no one would know where to find the new journal." They are the most prestigious editors-- their field will know immediately where they went. Everyone else will follow from there.

The only sticking point I can see is that $prestigious_editors can't take their previously published work with them to redistribute over their new website. But they still get career credit for their previous publications, and they/students/faculty can still access that through Elsevier. And all their new publications can be accessed and redistributed under a liberal license by all, for a publishing fee approaching zero dollars.

We have a rich history of big software projects making much more disruptive changes in a single day. E.g., Mambo became Joomla. The fact that prestigious journal editors haven't done likewise in droves leads me to believe they are saying one thing about open access in public and saying something much more important by doing very little to change the status quo.

This has happened many times, just not enough times yet. Here is a list: http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Journal_declarations_of_indep...

That was a for me surprisingly long list.

No, your premise is mistaken.

The most prestigious journals (Nature and Science) are professionally edited. Editors may have PhDs in the field they edit, but are not professors.

Science and Nature are outliers. The overwhelming majority of scientific papers are in specific journals (as opposed to these generalistic journals) and editors are almost always professors.

By the way, the Science editorial board can be seen here, under "Board of Reviewing Editors". They are professors as well:

https://www.sciencemag.org/about/editors-and-editorial-board...

Neuron’s editors are professional editors as well. As far as I know, that’s the norm for Elsevier journals. (My wife was one for Neuron and many of her work friends were professional editors for her or other journals.)

Reviewing editors are not editors -- they're more like reviewers on retainer. Reviewing editors exist specifically because the professional editors at Science will often be handling manuscripts they are not qualified to understand.

The parent comment was about $prestigious_journal, not the central example of a scientific journal (which I agree is an academically edited specialist journal).

In my experience, al least the top 3-4 tiers of Springer/Nature journals are professionally edited. I doubt Elsevier is any different. It only gets worse as the publishers continue to generate new branded specialist journals and mega-journals trading on the prestige of the flagship publication.

> Editors of $prestigious_journal resign from $prestigious_journal today. Tomorrow, they start $prestigious_journal1 (modulo some new name-choosing scheme) and post a website or whatever.

This exact thing happened e.g. there https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Algebraic_Combinato...

https://declaring-independence.org/

Interesting! thanks for the link

It has been done. For example, a case I know is $prestigious_journal = Lingua, $prestigious_journal1 = Glossa. http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=22162

And there have been some more cases, e.g. in mathematics (a field where single authorship is common, see below why this can be relevant).

But why is this the exception and not the rule, at least for now? I can venture several contributing factors (probably not the whole picture, as it's a quite complex issue, but I think these are at least among the most influential factors):

1. As an academic, I can tell you that a universal characteristic of academics (and even more so of those relevant enough to be in prestigious journal editorial boards) is that we are starved of time. Most of us are already quite overworked and there is no way in hell we are going to find time to inform ourselves about web journal publishing systems and set one up.

2. To officially be a "prestigious" journal in some countries, including mine, you have to be in the ISI JCR impact factor list. And that list is for profit, among other requirements journals have to pay to be there. So there is the additional hurdle of figuring out how to get the money.

3. Even if you can solve points 1 and 2 (which by the way could definitely be done if universities or even states got involved, providing support for open access journals), there is still the problem that establishing "prestige" (impact factor) takes time (a journal takes several years to be indexed). During this time, your community will lose a journal to publish in and get points in your CV. For a senior academic this might not be a big deal, but the problem is that senior academics typically work with PhD students, postdocs, young professors looking for tenure... and for these, the major journal of their specialization suddenly imploding and having to wait 4-5 years for the new one to get an impact factor can be a huge deal for their careers.

Believe me, the overwhelming majority of academics aren't happy about the status quo. After all, we are working for free for these journals, spending hours and hours of our time writing papers, polishing them and especially reviewing, only to see how they reap the profits and even try to charge us to read our colleagues' papers. I don't know any academic who likes that. But in the hyper-competitive arena of academia, where not publishing enough papers can pretty much mean the end of your career (and if you have reached stability, you almost always have other people that depend on you whose career is at stake) they pretty much have us by the guts.

In my view the solution has to be top-down. It has to come from university boards and governments, who are the ones controlling the incentives that make publishing in profiteering journals pretty much mandatory. Set up public open-access journals maintained by universities or states; change the requirements for hiring, tenure, etc. so impact factors issued by private companies are not taken into account and to incentivize publishing in said public journals, and the problem would pretty much be solved. But there doesn't seem to be the political will to do it (although at least the EU and some universities, as seen here, are pushing a bit towards it, which is good news).

I agree with the bulk of your post, but I feel the need to point out your statement that you have to pay to be indexed in ISI and get an impact factor is false. I've never heard of anyone paying for getting a ranking.

I would swear that I was told that a few years ago by someone who managed a journal, but indeed from some Google searches it doesn't look like it's true.

I guess they probably said something else and I misinterpreted. Perhaps they said that getting indexed cost them money in an indirect sense, e.g. because it required more frequent publication and they had to spend money to achieve that, or something similar, and I thought they meant that they had to pay the indexing company.

Sorry for the confusion.

One of the solutions to the €journal-implosion problem is to publish in both €journal as well as the new, open access version and to make this known in the article. Make this an institutional requirement for publishing in €journal in the first place and require Elsevier/Springer/Wiley/... to include the reference to the free version (no reference means no publication in €journal). The versions published in €journal might be better edited (or it might not, depending on the journal) but the science published is identical. Do this for a few years and the open access version will have built up enough of a corpus and a reputation to become a feasible replacement for €journal. Now you can either drop €journal cold-turkey style or start off by having the established names publish exclusively in the open access version while the up-and-coming still have the choice of publishing in both. Once it becomes known that the most revered names exclusively publish in the open access version it'll be game over for €journal. Once this becomes the norm in enough fields it'll be deemed irresponsible to publish through the likes of Elsevier and the world will be a better place.

What you say is kind of being done with open-access repositories like arXiv (minus the requirement to include reference to the free version), and it has been a step forward. But publishing the same article in two journals is severely frowned upon in the scientific community. And even if this changed, journal publishers like Elsevier, Springer, etc. require authors to sign a copyright transfer agreement and forbid publication in any other journal. There is no way they are going to relinquish this.

> publishing the same article in two journals is severely frowned upon

Posting copy to arXiv or similar is a norm and not regarded as publishing in another journal.

In some areas like theoretical physics people read mostly arXiv. It does help to shift content control away from publishers.

> "require Elsevier/Springer/Wiley/... to include the reference to the free version"

And they refuse as long as they can. Because they hold the copyrights and universities have no leverage.

The only way to break it is to help their faculty make their journals academic owned. Unfortunately, no official help to record that far... https://twitter.com/Dmitri145/status/1074571804113399808

Not only does Elsevier have a very permissive preprint policy, but they own a network of preprint servers - SSRN.

Just this morning, I've replied to several factually incorrect statements you've made. What can I do to help you get the right information?

Quote from https://svpow.com/2016/05/22/elseviers-increasing-control-ov...

"it’s simply unrealistic to imagine that Elsevier, in controlling Mendeley and SSRN, will do anything other than what is best for Elsevier."

And here are some responses from editors: https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/blob/master/...

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