Governments fund universities, people donate large amounts of money to universities, and a large portion of the population has student debt because of how expensive tuition is. Why are they charging for access to research at these institutions then?
The current system doesn't provide much value in terms of printing and distribution (even though some journals still do printing). The thing that keeps these journals alive is their reputation as filters for bad science. But even that is questionable, as proven by a lot of bad science making it into top journals.
And lastly, science needs funding. If you say: My science is published in journal X, then the funding agency will think it is good science/bad science without actually trying to understand what your science is about.
But they’re not expecting monetary reward with risk for issuing a grant like a VC.
Also, as you mention, newcomers need the reputation given to them by journal, but I don't understand how this is a stable system. In theory, well established scientists, who give the journals its reputation, should be able to easily migrate to an open journal, and therefore make the whole system collapse, no? Do these large publication have any sort of deal to give big researchers on their journals?
Even established, tenured scientists will often need to obtain grants and will still be judged by where they publish. Though there's also, of course, quite some institutional inertia and people just not caring, since it doesn't affect them personally. And of course, there are also a lot of (established) academics who do care.
I didn't say they get paid, I'm talking specifically amount the money flow to these journals. Does the funding from the research/scientists come from the profit the journals make, or from outside funding?
Funding flows from those organisations to the researchers, and from the researchers to the publishers. And from the publishers to their shareholders.
If someone decides that their group won't publish in top journals, they're hurting their own students, which probably discourages people from doing so.
No. And most of the time, if you want a paper that's behind a paywall, email the corresponding author and they'd be delighted to know that someone on the planet actually cares, and then email you a pdf, copyright be damned.
Honestly, sci-hub is the best website of the last decade; I use it every day. It works better than the publishers' websites (that I have legitimate access to). It's just excellent. It's founder should be made a saint.
What? Do the journals get copyright over the authors too???
One data point: we were 3 authors who worked for several months on a chapter of an authoritative book in our field. We got €100 to split. Of course, we get fuck all for our papers.
Many (most?) books through publishers don't earn out their advance which is probably low 4 figures in most cases. In practice, writing books is either a hobby or it's a reputational side-gig for you day job whether self-employed or employed by some organization.
Just because some bad science gets in doesn't mean it's 100% useless; perhaps the bad science we're seeing now is 1% of what we would otherwise?
I have no real insight in this, so I can't really judge how useful it is, but it's not an on/off switch, and as you've stated here it strikes me as a fallacious argument.
The result of getting rid of the reputation system of prestige journals isn't obvious. It's possible that without the incentive to get into the most prestigious journal possible, many researches will lower the quality of their research. But I think it's more likely that without the hope of getting into a prestigious journal, researchers will try other tactics to coax others into reading and citing their work, and one such tactic is doing better research.
My main concern with abolishing journals is that the need for prestige in science wouldn't disappear overnight, and instead of trying to get into prestigious journals, to only way to get that prestige bonus will be to do the social climbing to associate yourself with prestigious researchers.
Or clickbait and algorithm gaming. And social networks would be even more important. You already allude to getting associated with big names. It is already common to get one in the author list to get accepted in a “good” journal.
There are already too many papers being published on many subjects, so you tend to follow closely what comes out of a smaller community, and recommendations from the bibliography databases. Honestly, the problem is more with how research is evaluated by institutions and funding bodies than with the publishers, as greedy as they may be.
There are plenty of cases where good researchers can't get published because peer reviewers either don't understand or misunderstand the work being done (even Geoffrey Hinton has complained about this).
Then on top of that we have vast amount of research that cannot be successfully reproduced, and this has been happening for decades. Largely because we have created a culture of 'rubber stamp' science.
The correct publishing paradigm has lead to blander and at the same time quite often garbage science.
It'll be a long time before the traditional journals lose influence, but lots of the newer journals that arose were scams or ways for professors to publish what they wanted. It's a mess.
Not only is this correct, but it is the origin of peer review as we know it today.
Despite what most academics assume, peer-review itself is a relatively new concept in science. Nearly all of the most incredible scientific discoveries were not subject to peer review as we know it today.
Peer review was in fact created in as a response to a decrease in scientific funding in the 1970s. It was a deliberate attempt to create credibility in order to bolster funding.
I find it somewhat absurd that the current state of peer review is considered a pillar of "good science", when not only has most of the greatest science done without it, but double-blind peer review and a culture of publish or perish has lead us to things such as the reproducibility crisis. And in general the vast majority of publish work being questionable garbage that only remains unquestioned because of a culture of fear around question the corner stone of artificial credibility created solely to increase funding.
The "reproducibility crisis" is that we recently realized that ~half of published results in many fields fail to reproduce, presumably because many of them are false. My impression was that this goes back as far as you care to look, and that old results are just as likely to fail to reproduce. So the only new thing is that we noticed this, which is a step forwards, not back. Is there reason to believe that older studies tended to be more accurate?
This is how science was done up until some time in the 1970s. This is how real groundbreaking science is still done. The publishing prestige economy is of little actual value.
Old system had to certify a certain level of quality to exist due to structural constraints (fragile business, cost of production/operation). Now that the costs are fading away, the danger is to end up like bad social networks who just do whatever because it's free and people waste years until it's obvious it doesn't provide any value anymore.
That's exactly what has happened with the Copyright/Patent industry. They convinced the world that these should be called "Intellectual Property", even though they are the opposite of property rights.
It's rotten to the very core (like slavery, there is no reasonable term limit—the whole idea should be abolished). About 1% of the population understands the truth (like SciHubs), but the rest go along with what they are told. Understandable, the brainwashing begins young and is pervasive (all Disney children's movies, for example, start with an FBI Warning threatening jail time if you go against the system).
Some of the journals are naturally more prestigious than others. Academics want to publish in these famous journals. The name of journals they publish in carries lot of value for an academic's career. (That's what matters for the big head dudes who manage funds / promotions, they don't understand all these open access stuff.)
Thus, the publisher has a monopoly or oligopoly on high value journals, new open access free as in libre journal cannot establish itself.
Even if you're a well meaning academic who wishes not to contribute to this oligopoly, when you are young you don't want to risk your career. When you're old there are other young people under you and you don't want to risk their career.
The big ~~head~~ belly dudes in positions of power are ones who need to understand this.
As more professors developed the ability to typeset their own work with LaTeX and email/ftp/http, the costs of the old system have started to become more difficult to sustain. Some researchers do the typesetting themselves but the richer ones hire their own production team to produce better LaTeX reports. You can think of this model as "writer pays." Either with time or money.
I think both sides have strong points. The old system is expensive and slow, but it does produce a very well-curated record of what happened. The new system is generally cheaper, but only because the researchers handle much more of the workload. I also worry that research will disappear when people retire or move on. A professor's web page may be really convenient, but they tend to disappear or die from bitrot after time. I also think the "writer pays" model tends to encourage over-producing some basic research notes that might not be ready to publish yet.
Sounds like Ghislaine wasn’t the worst whoremonger in her family.
Student tuition does not fund research (at least in STEM in the US). DARPA, NSF, NIH etc. fund research. Professors at research institutions are to some extent evaluated based on the the size of their research grants.
If what you said is correct (which I'm sure it is), it's only reduced my understanding (in a good way - thank you for your explanation). So - the government pays professors for their research, and then this very research is put behind a paywall, from which....publishers (?) make money?. I apologize, but it simply does not make sense to me, it seems extremely counter intuitive.
The situation exists because it just evolved into what it currently is, and until recently no one seemed to care. Before the internet for example, it made a lot of sense for publishing to be handled by a private entity. There were real marginal costs to the production and distribution of journals and demand was relatively low.
Today this is very much changed. Demand is high and marginal costs are zero. So I imagine we will move towards an open access model.
Most professors care mostly about prestige (reputation for being smart, wise or innovative) and would prefer to ignore or disdain the economic and legal aspects of life. OK, that is a little unfair: most profs want to focus on their specialty and sometimes don't pay enough attention to how their actions interact with the law and the economy to affect university libraries far away.
Academic publishers, e.g., Elsevier, give professors prestige in exchange for the professors' assigning copyright (legal ownership) of the professor's writings to the publishers with the result that a university library (which is typically far away from the publishing professor's own university) must pay the publishers to give its students and faculty access the academic literature without constantly running into the paywalls that people who are not students or faculty run into.
But when the journals that literally define their field are monopolized by Elsevier, there's only so much they can do for the time being. To avoid them, they'd have to accept their research being ignored, their careers stagnating, and their ability to continue to do their jobs properly being threatened.
One might call it a mistake, but is remarkably suspicious that the spam regularly arrives exactly one year (to the day) after I most recently unsubscribed.
There are the financial aspects to their exploitation, but I guess this struck a nerve because it is scummy behavior that affects me more personally.
If that reliably then has a new list added exactly one year later, it is a strong signal that it indeed based on you unsubscribing. But, if it instead happens at 11 months, it is a string signal that new lists are added at a specific month/day.
I mean, I would not be surprised if it happens one year later, due to Elsevier tracking when you unsubscribed, but this is a testable hypothesis, so testing it would be a Good Thing.
Some young researchers often claim that they feel pressured by the system to choose the so-called prestige journals. This pressure is coming from older researchers who are making a decision from their experience. They don't need to reward journal writers but they do. Indeed, the open access professors could announce that they will penalize the tenure reviews for those who publish in copyrighted journals. But they don't, and I think it's because they realize that, for all of the costs, the copyrighted journals do a good job curating the information.
Sure, it's not the publishers themselves that are de facto forcing researchers to publish with them, but they do make use of the fact that they're being put in a position of being a rent-seeker, and they lobby a lot to keep it that way.
Of course, the question is not "who's to blame?", but "how to change this"? And indeed, the publishers aren't too relevant to that question - it's the incentive structures that should change.
(Disclosure: I contribute to https://plaudit.pub, which aims to change these incentive structures.)
>But they don't, and I think it's because they realize that . . .
They don't realize any such thing: they're just doing what benefits them personally (e.g., surviving as a professor or apprentice professor) at the expense of the broader ecosystem.
It is a problem of coordination: if the professors, students and the governments and foundations that fund research acted in unison (and were sufficiently informed and clear-thinking), then the entire academic literature would probably be available without restriction (like, e.g., Wikipedia is) on the internet by now.
Such an arrangement would satisfy the values of the professor, students, etc, better than the current system does. But it is hard to get there because it is hard for 10s of 1000s to act in unison.
University administrators, grant-writing bodies, and others pressure professors and graduate students to publish with specific publishers. It is not because those publishers are more trustworthy; it is simply inertia, institutional tradition, and credentialism. It is the same attitude that leads some companies to turn away candidates who never completed a bachelor's degree. To give an example of just how bad this situation is, we sometimes hear complaints about people citing the IACR eprint version of a paper rather than the "officially published" version -- not because they are any different, nor because there is something better about the official version (in fact the eprint version typically includes details that are absent from the official copy), but simply because European universities use citation counts to judge professors and only consider citations of articles published by specific publishing companies.
Academic publishers have raised their fees even as their costs have greatly declined. The number of journals that are actually printed and distributed on paper has been shrinking, and the cost of distributing over the Internet is almost a rounding error. Yet in that same period of time the publishers have increased subscription fees to the point where some university systems could not justify paying for the subscription. These companies have outlived their usefulness and they know it -- now they are trying to extract as much money as they can before the business model completely fails.
The problem is still as you say — the only way to do so reliably is to give up your ownership to a prestigious journal (because prestigious journals are widely read by the relevant folk).
Ultimately the fix is up to the top universities. If Stanford suddenly says all CS papers are now being published on SciHub first (or through some new filter), who’s going to argue? Every CS researcher will immediately add it to their reading list... because they want the good shit
Unfortunately, if they have staff that also intend to, or should prepare for, working somewhere else after Stanford (which is very common in an academic career), then those are likely to revolt.
You could see this happen with the introduction of "Plan S" in many European countries, where researchers were afraid that "top" journals were no longer accessible to them and that that would hurt their standing in the field and future opportunities in, primarily, the US.
The two are one and the same. What you call "Universities" is simply "professors at the universities". Department policies for tenure are set by a bunch of professors. The dean of the college is always a professor. There's no "us" vs "them".
The dean serves a different master than the researching/teaching professor. It would be absurd to assume their incentives and goals are always the same, or even aligned.
There is no external pressure on these people. NSF grantors don't value Nature publications because they have to answer to the public. They value it because they value it.
If a professor becomes a dean or head of NSF, and they decide to make changes to what is considered prestigious, the only opposition they'll get is from their peers.
Whenever I am being compared with my peers -- for raises, for possible grant funding, if I apply for a job at another university -- people will look at publication lists and see who has published in "good" journals.
And when you say that "prestigious journals are widely read" -- honestly, journals aren't really ever read as such. Researchers will look for individual papers they're interested in. The choice of journal is a signaling mechanism and little else.
It is true that universities want prestige... but, honestly, tenured faculty don't often care too much about what their employers want. What a panel at a granting agency thinks of my record, is more important than what my department chair and dean think.
Your idea that e.g. Stanford should order their faculty to publish on SciHub is an interesting one. For better or worse, university administrators don't tend to have or exercise much authority, and any attempt to order faculty to do anything is likely to be met with fierce resistance.
A university (and its faculty) sign a contract to publish only in open-access journals. But the contract doesn't actually go into effect until it has signatories of n% of top universities (ivies, UCs, etc).
Therefore, the awful transition (of an individual university being disadvantaged) can be alleviated. Once the contract goes into effect, the pressure is directed towards the other party: those who don't publish open access will need to justify it.
Of course the bar is lower for arXiv, and the papers are often a little shoddier. But my point is that journals are no longer central to process of keeping up with science.
Now for these publishers journals are basically constant cash-cow. Typesetting is done in India (nothing against that) for the lowest possible rate (lots against that). The rest of the work is done by academic volunteers.
The EU has launched a huge open access initiative to the extent that in the future no funding will be available for research published in closed journals, but this doesn't help researchers like me when in their area almost all reputable journals put their articles behind expensive paywall.
You can buy yourself out of this extortion by paying 2000 - 3000 USD per article, but only universities from rich countries can afford it. In a sense, the current situation makes it worse because it increases the imbalance between research in rich and poor countries and sometimes even between privileged and disadvantaged researchers in one and the same country. (For example, some of the researchers at our institute get open access fees paid because they know the right people. The system is not based on merits of the researcher or publication.)
I live and work in Portugal. We have some paid access to a way to small selection of journals. To be honest, I don't even know how to access them from home during Covid times, our IT department doesn't know how to setup a VPN. Even at work it often fails to work, and the accessible journals change from year to year. Everybody uses Sci-Hub for everything anyway.
Without Sci-Hub I could just give up my research - currently on explainable AI, metaethics, nontraditional decision making - and become a waiter.
Sometimes it's crazy how incompetent reputable publishers are in academic publishing. The for-profit publisher of my forthcoming book has agreed to accept a LaTeX manuscript. It's written and almost camera-ready. But now they told me they don't really know how this works yet, and so the typesetter has to "open it and convert it" to something else, which will be "time-consuming." After three years, they suddenly changed their mind and want me to provide the manuscript in Word!
TLDR: it made sense as recently as 50 years ago.
So, there's no real answer beyond "capitalism."
Squeezing as much profit as possible for shareholders while externalising costs. It’s a poster child when you think about it!
The copies on the author's pages and in open repositories are obliged to be pre-publication drafts, so you cannot cite them.
In fact, under control of large publishers journals have become fairly inventive about making pre-publication manuscripts unusable. For instance, I recently published in a prestigious journal that had an online editing system so that all final revisions stayed in the system - no author copy of any kind, every proof marked with author name and large watermarks -, and they made lots of small, sometimes unnecessary changes in the very last editing step. They also don't paginate the final versions that are published online first, so you can only know the real final pagination a year or so after the first version has been published online.
A bearded man calls this "surplus". Scientific journal business is the pinnacle of capitalism, what every company strives to become, including the ones fellow HN people here work at and start up.
The designation that combinations of words are a form of property that can be owned, which then become assets naturally funneled towards those interested in playing the capital meta game and away from those doing the actual work.
To a scientist, the ability to copyright their paper is a vulnerability. Get rid of the concept of imaginary property and there is a lot less for Elsevier to demand from them.
But if you ask why they choose to, they mostly don't have that much choice. Often, rules say "publish in magazine with impact factor at least X" and that's it. The publishers are the gatekeepers of that.
And what do you mean “gatekeeper”? It’s their journal and they created the impact factor, no?