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> In day-to-day, all researchers use these to stay informed on recent results. But how to guarantee that nobody hacks in and figures out how to change a few bytes in one paper that is 10years old?

Printed versions + digitally signed and timestamped PDFs. This is a solved problem in the world, at least up to the level that Springer can solve it.

> How to guarantee that these documents are available 75 years from now?

I trust MIT and Harvard to keep PDFs and printed versions available much more than I trust Elsevier or Springer to be around in 75 years.

> Many academics need publications in prestigious journals with "high impact factors" in order to get tenure because the upper-level tenure committees in older institutions use these metrics to evaluate cases. These people are not stupid: it is just hard to evaluate cases across a university when you are not an expert. Instead, you assume that certain journals represent "the highest quality work" and thus use the presence of those publications to judge researchers. This means that the top papers still end up in Elsevier/Springer journals.

I don't disagree. This is why the change and the first wave of papers will likely come from already-tenured professors, who still publish high impact papers.

> When I was a grad student at MIT, it was easy to read papers; if your IP was from MIT, every paper was 1 click away. I wonder how it is going to work now that Elsevier's catalog won't work this way...

Now imagine the same situation, except you don't need your IP to be from MIT.

Just pointing out that Elsevier is ancient in business terms, it's origins as a publisher goes back to the mid 16th century and the modern version of the company is from around the 19th century. I'd be surprised if the company isn't around when I die.

In addition to publishing, they (RELX) is one of the biggest companies you've never heard of. They provide information systems to governments all over the world and span multiple market segments. I guarantee you're in a dozen of their databases right now. And that your local, state, and federal taxes all funnel into their pockets in one form or another. Along with some of the money you pay for various insurances throughout the year. When you buy a house, rent an apartment, get a job, or basically have any major event in your life, they get paid.

> Just pointing out that Elsevier is ancient in business terms, it's origins as a publisher goes back to the mid 16th century and the modern version of the company is from around the 19th century.

The 16th century publisher has nothing whatsoever to do with the current one, which shamelessly pirated and stole everything to plagiarize the prestige (so its ideas of business ethics go right back to its founding). Apparently, it worked.

It's not so much as they aren't an established company it's that that their business model has been broken/bypassed by technology. They've been reduced to being a middle-man that obstructs value rather than providing it.

The only part of biz model left is "prestige" (very fickle), "customer lock in / inertia" (which is already going away re: OA), and lobbying government to prop up/expand their monopoly (ever extending/expanding copyrights, which is the one thing that doesn't seem they will ever lose on cause ever other bypassed dinosaur broke ass business model publisher spends tons on it).

I disagree. It seems like you only know Elsevier as a publisher of journals, but that's only about 1/3 of their overall business. They (RELX) provide a lot of useful services to companies and governments.

About half their revenue and profits come from Risk and Legal services, which are not things you hear about in the news. They offer services for police, airlines, legal firms, insurance companies, accounting firms Hell, they have an analytics tool for agricultural businesses. They also have enough money to throw around in these spaces to prevent any startups from getting large enough to be a threat.

1) So they can keep doing business in those other areas.

2) Large universities are not little startups to be easily intimidated.

Tends to be ignored but the process of extracting a profit has costs. Both internal costs and external costs. Sometimes the external costs imposed exceed the profit extracted by a large amount.

The life expectancy of long-lived companies is shorter than you might expect:

> Based on detailed survival analysis, we show that the mortality of publicly traded companies manifests an approximately constant hazard rate over long periods of observation. This regularity indicates that mortality rates are independent of a company's age.

https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2015.0120

Everyone here is imagining all the technical ways to replace publishers. That's quite feasible as you and others point out. I think there is also real work needed to solve social (people) problems, for example:

- explain to the stakeholders by preparing various text and other media about how your format/venue/website is different and better, and convince them that this solves a real problem they should care about

- solicit requirements from universities, funding agencies, various governments, about archiving and metadata requirements. Consider security, accessibility, long-term preservation, financial model, etc.

- respond to the questions and pushback from numerous stakeholders about problems (real or not) about your proposed solution, debate them in a polite and professional way in semi-public forums, converge on a solution that's acceptable (or at least not overly repulsive) to the key stakeholders. Deal with any PR backlash, response from existing publishers, etc.

- inform authors, potential authors, readers, journalists, universities administrators, students, etc. that there is a new publishing format/venue/website and that it is well managed and has a plan to be around for a long time

- coordinate and schedule a team of people to work on this with you, to figure out policies (author plagiarism, recruiting editors if needed, dealing with potential lawsuits, bad actors, copyright and IP issues, etc.)

The same way Wikipedia and Reddit manage to provide quality platforms that provide tools to address these social issues, built for longevity, and have strong community moderation.

I don't have to imagine it: https://scihub.wikicn.top/

this site doesn't even load.

Might want to change your DNS to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8

>this site doesn't even load.

Probably time to use an ISP that is less willing to mess with your Internet access, or at least use a VPN and a different DNS server.

Loads in Belgium ( no censorship )

> However, these do not maintain the "archival quality" document storage that is needed for academic scientific literature. In day-to-day, all researchers use these to stay informed on recent results. But how to guarantee that nobody hacks in and figures out how to change a few bytes in one paper that is 10years old? How to guarantee that these documents are available 75 years from now?

I have never had a link to Arxiv or Biorxiv break, and I have never had difficulty finding a copy of a paper on them either, going back to Arxiv's founding in 1991. On the other hand, on a daily basis, I struggle to get a copy of a paper published often just years or decades old from these 'archival quality' publishers like Elsevier, and they break my links so frequently that I spend some time every day fixing broken links on y website (and for new links, I have simply stopped link them entirely & host any PDF I need so I don't have to deal with their bullshit in the future). I guess "archival-quality publisher" is used in much the same way as the phrase "academic-quality source code"...

Hey Gwern, big fan of your GPT2 work. I notice I'm surprised to hear you say you struggle daily to fix broken links to the Elsevier catalog at ScienceDirect, because the links are used by libraries all over the world & they don't have the same feedback. Would you have a few examples available for me to send to the folks responsible?

Nature does it all the time. Here's one I fixed just this morning when I noticed it by accident: http://www.nature.com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp201522... (Note, by the way, how very helpfully Nature redirects it to the homepage without an error. That's what the reader wants, right? To go to the homepage and for Nature to deliberately conceal the error from the website maintainer? This is definitely what every 'archival quality' journal should do, IMO, just to show off their top-notch quality and helpful ways and why we pay them so much taxpayer money.) Oh, SpringerLink broke a whole bunch which I am still fixing, here's two from yesterday: http://www.springerlink.com/content/5mmg0gmtg69g6978/ http://www.springerlink.com/content/p26143p057591031/ And here's an amusing ScienceDirect example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632071... (I would have loads more specifically ScienceDirect examples except I learned many years ago to never link ScienceDirect PDFs because the links expire or otherwise break.)

Isn't this exactly the intended use-case for the DOI?

Your first article has the DOI 10.1038/mp.2015.225, and the resulting link (https://doi.org/10.1038/mp.2015.225) properly directs to the article's present location.

DOIs link to paywalls or temporarily-unembargoed papers, have to be hunted down (many places hide the DOIs in tabs or, like JSTOR, actually bury it in the HTML source itself!), and break things like section links as well. Adding yet another level of indirection is not my idea of a solution and hardly speaks well of 'archive-quality publishers' that we have to resort to third parties to work around their hideously broken websites which, like Nature, go out of their way to make links not just break but actively misleading.

To solve your immediate problem, just grab the DOI here: https://apps.crossref.org/SimpleTextQuery They also have an API from which you can fetch DOIs in various ways.

DOIs are a solution to the issue of having persistent, publisher-independent links that will always resolve, even if a journal changes publisher or goes out of business. Academia uses them because link rot is unavoidable across the web, but there must always be a link to the publication that resolves so that when someone in 2070 wants to follow a citation in the references of a work published today, they can do that. It's the same thinking that underlies people pointing to the internet archive in Wikipedia citations. It's a layer of redirection, but in a way that preserves accessibility for the long term. It's also the same thinking that underlies DNS. There shouldn't be one company that controls how to resolve an IP address to a domain name, and likewise you shouldn't have to go through one publisher to resolve a reference to a research article.

As a side note, Crossref is staffed with exactly the sort of web geeks that you would see at an Internet Archive get-together (#).

So I hear your frustrations, but I think you're giving DOIs short shrift.

(#) I mean, just look at this. A dump of all journal metadata on Academic Torrents. Is that not cool? https://www.crossref.org/blog/free-public-data-file-of-112-m...

Do Nature's spinoffs have any prestige any more? Anything in a Nature spinoff related to batteries comes across as PR Newswire level material. If that.

Journals do transfer among publishers, go out of business, etc so you shouldn't expect a direct link like that to be stable. The recommended practice is to use the DOI. Would using a DOI meet your needs?

Digital archival of PDFs weighing a few hundred KBs to a few MBs is definitely a solved problem. And there are already arXiv overlay journals out there, and platforms supporting them. Tim Gowers' (Fields medalist) blog posts on this topic are quite informative:

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an...

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2019/10/30/advances-in-combinat...

Highlights: $10 per submission, plus some fixed costs, including archival with CLOCKSS. No Elsevier extortion ring needed.

Impact factors are of course kind of a chicken and egg problem. Need to have enough high profile journals move off Big Publishing, or have enough high profile ones started.

> When I was a grad student at MIT, it was easy to read papers; if your IP was from MIT, every paper was 1 click away.

When I was a grad student at <institution of similar caliber>, or an undergrad at <another institution of similar caliber>, accessing papers was rather painful off campus. One either has to use EZproxy, which might decide to block you if it doesn't like your IP range (say in a foreign country), or use some godawful proprietary VPN client that I would stay the hell away from unless necessary.

Today it's much easier, practically all universities participate as Identity Providers in SAML Federations and digital libraries participate as Service Providers. So you can just use your institutional login credentials to the identity provider page of your university. The service provider receives a signed SAML assertion that, well, asserts that you belong to your university and you are, say, a student. Most popular software is Internet2 Shibboleth (IdP and SP) in the academic field. It all works very well and has been for some time.

In the country where I live, you get access to office365, (physical) books, digital libraries (including Elsevier :)) and a wide variety of other services all via your institutional login.

> But how to guarantee that nobody hacks in and figures out how to change a few bytes in one paper that is 10years old?

Trusted timestamping.

https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3161.txt

It also happens to be very widely deployed and supported by well-established companies, because it's an integral part of executable cross-signing. That is, this exists right now.

Wouldn't saving the hash of the document on some blockchain be a more simpler solution to proving the integrity of a document?

No, because you need to convince 3rd parties to participate, and you need to convince a majority of these parties to be honest.

> Many academics need publications in prestigious journals with "high impact factors"

It wouldn't surprise me if this is a massive part of the problem. Any new system to replace Elsevier may be perfect in lots of ways, but it doesn't count as prestigious, which means everybody will still want/need to publish with Elsevier. How do you magically grant a new publishing platform this 'prestige'?

When they mess up is when it changes. When you look at old institutions and powerful people, sometimes their rule ends abruptly because of scandal, bad decisions, or corruption. Bear Sterns, Enron, and Nixon are examples of this. For a new publishing platform to succeed, the old one needs die. For an organization built on prestige to die, it needs to be mired in scandal wrapped up and packaged in the political zeitgeist at that moment that not only affects its small community but also develops the ire of the entire society. At that point a new platform will emerge, likely backed by, and inheriting its prestige from, another institution.

Edit: I realize, unfortunately, this post doesn’t give anything actionable that anyone can enact. It at least offers hope that things can change.

"Flipping" journals is an option, but doesn't happen often because it's risk for the editors with little personal benefit.

The answer the project I volunteer for [1] is that the prestige of a journal comes from the researchers who submit or review for it, so we can also employ their reputations without the middleman - by having them endorse works, thus having their names instead of the journal names attached to the works.

[1] https://plaudit.pub/

When the prestigious expert editorial board resigns at the same time and creates a new journal. It has happened several times, e. g. Glossa for linguistics.

Also JMLR in machine learning is independent and still well regarded.

I’m also an academic. Hash each paper, then hash the hashes. Publish the result with the proceedings. After year one, include the hash of the prior year(s). Problem solved.

Recently I downloaded one of my old peer-reviewed papers. The “archival” service added a spammy logo to the bottom left corner of each page.

I’ve been meaning to find the original and put it on my web page. Honestly, I might just add a list of all my papers with links to SciHub instead.

I’m allowed to post them on my personal web page according to every copyright agreement I recall signing.

>Problem solved

Not at all. There are corrections and amendments. It isn't as complicated as in law, but still.

Corrections and amendments are separate (but related) documents. Preventing them from being retroactively applied to the original version of the source document is the specific thing that a archival-quality document storage is supposed to do (as opposed a non-archival-quality storage, which only needs to protect against data loss (as in turn opposed to a cache, which can rely on a backing storage)).

Looks like you agree that an archival-quality document storage assumes a bit more than hashing papers. That was my point.

If that was your point, it was very poorly made, since you appeared to be claiming that archival-quality document storage required much more than hashing papers.

Archival-quality document storage requires two things: 1, hashing papers; 2, guaranteeing that the preimages of those hashes (ie the papers) remain available despite accidental and deliberate forces toward their destruction.

Non-archival-quality document storage already requires thing 2, we just want to add more nines of reliablity to those guarantees, which is a fundamentally technical endeavor that the likes of Springer/Elsevier don't particularly help with.

Signed declarations of amendment, then amended papers being added as new one with proof of amendment and link with the original. Kind of like how a keyserver deals with revoked keys.

> But how to guarantee that nobody hacks in and figures out how to change a few bytes in one paper that is 10years old?

Mostly you should stop worrying about this. Other people have explained various countermeasures that could be used, which are very cheap, but mostly nobody cares.

And already today, without anybody altering anything, it is very common for papers to use misleading citations. You take a paper that found some clowns like cake, you write "Almost all clowns like cake" and you cite that paper. It's possible a reviewer will notice and push back, but very likely you will get published even though you've stretched that citation beyond breaking point. Why "hack in" to change the paper when you can just distort what it said and get away with it?

Just about the bandwidth costs: You can rent a server at Hetzner.de for 40 EUR with 1 Gbit/s. Let's say each PDF is around 100 kb, then you can serve 1000 PDFs per second. Say there are 50 million active research students in the world, then the single 40 EUR server can serve them about 10 PDFs/week on average.

With that requirements you can do much cheaper even. 1000 PDFs of 100KB is just 100MB. You can put them on a 1Gbit VPS for just $1.5 to $5/month.

https://www.serverhunter.com/?search=PLJ-9TW-TWN

A dedicated box would cost just $7/month.

I don't mean to be rude, but I think you are greatly exaggerating the technical and cost considerations behind this effort.

From my brief time working at Springer, seeing how their business model shifted towards services and processes aimed at enabling as many publications as possible -

I think basing tenure decisions on the fact papers were published there is based on archaic notions and misguided.

These are valid concerns but in 2020 very easy problems to solve. There’s little reason why a small consortium of institutions couldn’t build a very robust system to accomplish all that. Use digital signatures and distributed mirrored storage and problem solved. Charge a very modest fee to members to cover fixed costs and make it free to the public. Heck a few we’ll organized S3 buckets with a search engine attached would be better than a lot of what’s out there today.

Not to pick on academics but the commercial publishing houses basically prey on the stubbornness of the academic community here. In the pure private sector someone would come along tomorrow and make Elsevier and others obsolete and they would go bust quickly. MIT is making the moves that might just whip something into shape to remove Elsevier’s role in the market.

On “high impact” if the top universities in the world en-mass unsubscribe from the commercial players that will change quick.

I heard the archiving argument before.

But I can't imagine that this is an expensive role for an organization like library of Congress or similar to take on. Many counties have a national library of sorts.

Bandwidth/storage costs are limited, we're talking about PDFs.

> I wonder how it is going to work now that Elsevier's catalog won't work this way

MIT alum here. In my experience you can always request a copy directly from the author by e-mail. There is ResearchGate which aims to make this easier, but doesn't because the fundamental problem is academics don't have time to respond to every e-mail, much less every ResearchGate notification. So yes sometimes you have to ping them by e-mail about 2 or 3 times.

I think ResearchGate -- or even Google Scholar -- should add a feature to allow manuscript requests to be auto-replied with a copy of the document instead of waiting for the author to manually send a copy.

This is the first blockchain example that makes sense.

> how to guarantee that nobody hacks in and figures out how to change a few bytes in one paper that is 10years old?

You publish hashes of all the documents. It's trivial to distribute lists of hashes. You can even put them into existing blockchains, which guarantee they won't change.

Re: hacking, preservation - - does Elsevier make reasonable assurances in this space beyond being a strawman that can be torn apart in a lawsuit? Is there a reason an open access platform could not make technological assurances that are as good or better?

This really seems like a good and fairly low-risk opportunity for universities to form a consortium of sorts to make their own publishing platform. And then maybe "impact" would be built in because they'd all be getting high on their own supply. But these institutions are strangely prone to silos despite the collaborative spirit of academia writ large so I don't see that happening.

I think there are field-specific differences. In biology / bioinformatics world the "high impact factors" journals are the norm for tenure or even confirmation of work. But highly influential computing related papers are rarely from those journals. Bioinformatics is an interesting exception because it's bridging these fields and you'll see references from both highly reputable journals and biorxiv.

> But how to guarantee that nobody hacks in and figures out how to change a few bytes in one paper that is 10years old?

I can't believe I'm going to say this, but this sounds like an actual problem well-suited to a blockchain solution.

>But how to guarantee that nobody hacks in and figures out how to change a few bytes in one paper that is 10years old?

And how Springer/Elsevier guarantee that? Is it written into cintracts?

Even if it is... who enforces it? Who checks it? What does that guarantee worth? Who cares really about papers getting numbers changed...

90% of them are absolute crap and only max. 10% of the remaining 10% replicates just based on the text of the paper alone.

>When I was a grad student at MIT, it was easy to read papers; if your IP was from MIT, every paper was 1 click away.

Isn't this predatory pricing?