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Comment by kwyjibo12345 | Hacker News Reader

The common life cycle of a paper is as follows:

1. Academics write and submit papers -> university/tax money pays 2. Academics review papers -> university/tax money pays 3. Academics organize and attend conferences -> university/tax money pays 4. University buys published paper from publishers -> university/tax money pays

So university/tax money pays for writing the paper, quality assurance via reviews, conferences, just to finally buy the paper via some insanely expensive subscription.

For a rational environment like science this model is simply insane.

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Somewhere between step 3 and 4, I assume the publisher gets hold of the paper and acquires a license to resell it? How does that part work and why do universities/academics support it if they could just distribute it for free or via an open journal? Is it solely to get the "kudos" of being in particular publications?

Funding is dostributed based on citation counts and the most "prestigious" journals.

"Prestigious" is completely arbitrary and heavily lobbied for by the publishers.

The authors give the rights over to journal when they submit the paper. The authors depend on publishing in high impact-factor journals for tenure and continued funding.

Not all academics support it and several groups have opted out, publishing in open access only or organizing their own journals and conferences.

I can see a possible future where only a few holdouts rely on 'prestige' as a decision criteria, while a majority of academic fields/groups have switched to open access... and the former get only more and more vocal about the decline of science, or some screeching point.

It's 100% due to the traditional model of measuring academic performance through the number of published papers weighted (very, very strongly) by the "reputation" of the journal they're published in, justified by the importance of curation and peer review to provide quality control.

Historically, this model grew because the journal publishers provided the necessary infrastructure to print and distribute copies of the articles.

My impression is that it is a offshoot of the metrics mania of the 1990s

I am one person watching the world go by but I think that there was, is, far too much emphasis on things that can be counted.

People became afraid to make subjective judgements of quality. They demanded data. So whatever was the thing they counted, it got maximised. Quality is a slippery concept and it is harder than counting.

Judge scientists by the number of papers they publish, and they will publish a lot. A manifestation of the quantifying fetish.

Not in academia, but have watched the debates over the past decade or so...

It really seems like it's the inertia of existing administrators that haven't shifted away from judging papers based on the prestige of the journals they get published by.

Once the prestige factor goes away, and authors are judged primarily on the quality of their work, the publishers will lose their stranglehold.

Of course, that means a lot of entrenched interests losing revenue streams, so it's going to be a long struggle of grassroots change vs regulatory capture combined with reactionary pushback.

Judging papers based on the prestige of the publishing journal is not necessarily a bad thing. Everybody does it, consciously or unconsciously.

Having those journals owned by publishers that engage in rent-seeking behavior is.

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