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Comment by Jerry2 | Hacker News Reader

I used to donate to a lot of "tech/free/open-source" related and free speech non-profits to the amount of about $5,000 per year but this past year I ended up paring down my choices and only donating to Archive.org, Archive.is, FSF and Sci-Hub. I still feel like Sci-Hub is the least robust of the orgs and I feel like they need most of the help. I also use it at least once a day.

My only child, a 5 year old girl, has a fairly rare degenerative disease and I've been reading the latest research on it and have been using this knowledge to inform her physician about possible treatments. She ended up in a promising drug study because I kept on top of this field and ended up talking to researchers about it. In a large part, this is thanks to Sci-Hub.

Nothing in this world is free. If you depend on some "free" or non-profit service that you use often, consider donating to them. You'd be amazed how far even $10 goes when put in good hands.

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> Nothing in this world is free.

Apparently academic peer review is. I've been told they can't be paid for that work because of conflict of interest concerns.

The whole point of journals is peer review. That's what distinguishes them from random blog posts. So why can't reviewers just start working independently? Just boycott these copyright monopolists and it will be the end of them. There's really no reason for these paid journals to even exist anymore.

Not exactly. A good journal needs a good editor. The role that the editors play (while putting their reputation on the line) is really poorly understood and under-appreciated by most within and outside academia.

Can you elaborate on this role and why it's important for some research on a rare degenerative illness to be known by people who are suffering said disease? (Genuine question, I don't know editor's role in academia at all)

Editors basically make sure that the good research get published and the bad ones are thrown out. They invite submissions, do basic QA, find potential reviewers and send the submissions out for review, make final accept/reject or revision decision. Only after that the publishers do the actual work, e.g. copy-editing, proofing, printing and distribution of the research.

Top journals usually have distinguished professors from reputed institutions in the editorial panel. That's why we can rely (somewhat) on peer-reviewed articles in those journals instead of random blog posts or arXiv submissions.

> why it's important for some research on a rare degenerative illness to be known by people who are suffering said disease?

Well I can only imagine the pain and suffering such person and their loved ones would go through, but I guess it will give them some glimmer of hope and respite. Most people lack the expertise to understand and follow cutting edge research, so someone in a position to understand the research and simultaneously benefit from it personally should have access to the said research by all means.

Many (most?) academic journals don't do a significant amount of editing. They leave that to the author and reviewers.

Article selection itself is editing, as is setting up the processes for review and acceptance.

That said, I think academic publishing is a criminal industry and Alexandra Elbakyan a modern day superhero.

Fully agree. We were having a heated discussion last night about this in my grad student circle. In the end we felt pressure must be put on the big players in the industry, such as Elsevier, to move away from the profit maximization model. It will take a lot of hard work and sacrifice from many in the academia to do so, not just because Elsevier is so big and influential, but also the fact that the stakeholders like the researchers- professors, post-docs and grad students are such a diverse community with very wide range of purpose and motivations. One avenue could be through the authorities in Netherlands and EU where they are based. The other solution would be to remove some anonymity from the peer review process- make the reviewer comments public at the least, to somewhat improve the quality of science that is being generated these days.

If you focus solely on the publishers, your impact will be minimal; they can ignore you. But publishers get all their money from institutions. So you could focus your energy on forcing institutions to stop using the publishers. But you will find that institutions don't want the model to change. They want to pay less money for publishing, but they don't actually want to lose the paid journals, because their whole research funding model would collapse, as it's built entirely around the reputation of the journal. Either institutions have to completely re-invent how they fund and organize research, or someone has to get paid to do the actual work of maintaining journals.

The publishers' profit margins are one thing; anyone could start a competing publisher tomorrow and take a fraction of the profit. But people are not asking for reduced profit, they're asking for abolishment of paid publishing, which is like saying, let's abolish the entire system of scientific research.

This.

Journals are gatekeepers to funding, prestige, academic disciplines, careers, advancement, etc., etc.

A good editor can make or break a journal. Some of the ones who are the best at what they do are amazing.

Yup. They shouldn't exist. It's an outrage that they do.

They don't pay the reviewers. They charge the authors (who pay the ransom typically from taxpayer funded research grants), and they charge the readers, who are either the public or said academics again.

But the reason they do exist is that they have the monopoly on issuing the only acceptable currency that dictates the life and career of academics: publishing their work in "high impact" publications.

Not all journals charge the authors. Indeed, one of my annoyances is that the open access movement has moved the burden of paying for journals from institutions to individual PIs, which hurts new PIs worse.

You mean you want journals to exist only for peer review, but that's not their actual function today. They actually exist today to prop up an academic research industry driven by cash and reputation. If they disappeared tomorrow, there would be a breakdown in institutional funding, there would be chaos in editing, publishing, discovering and vetting information, and it would actually be harder to access information.

Sci-Hub distributes information that paid journals have already done the work to curate. Once paid journals go away, Sci-Hub will end up like GitHub: a million random repositories maintained by random people with no index. Only there's a whole host of new problems that scientific research needs to solve that is more complicated than some poorly written lines of code. The stakes are different; the errors lead to worse outcomes, rigor is much more important, and finding relevant information in the vast array of available research is much more important.

I'm not saying publishing today is great. It very much isn't. But throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't a better solution. It's like saying, this government is corrupt, let's throw out the government! Look how well that works for countries that don't have a new government prepared to replace the old one.

> They actually exist today to prop up an academic research industry driven by cash and reputation.

Just yet another problem with academia that needs to be solved. This system leads to all sorts of academic dishonesty such as reviewing rings. It's at least partially responsible for the sheer number of bad papers being published today. Disrupting it is a good thing.

> If they disappeared tomorrow, there would be a breakdown in institutional funding, there would be chaos in editing, publishing, discovering and vetting information, and it would actually be harder to access information.

It's okay. Just let the whole thing break down. Eventually it'll sort itself out.

> Sci-Hub distributes information that paid journals have already done the work to curate.

This curation is just gatekeeping done by peer reviewers. All they need to do is set up a blog and start gatekeeping it. Good papers get posted there, bad papers don't.

I really don't see why it has to be any more complicated than that.

> But throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't a better solution.

It's certainly better than sitting around waiting for a multi-billion dollar industry of copyright monopolists to get even richer and powerful.

> It's okay. Just let the whole thing break down. Eventually it'll sort itself out.

This seems like one of the worst ideas ever

Can't be worse than allowing this archaic copyright industry to go on.

It could be much worse. Much much much much much much worse.

Some things are incredibly complicated and messy. And not just with the current publishing issues–even getting them to the imperfect stages they reside in now was game changing on an absolutely massive worldwide scale.

With some things, expecting perfection is not only ridiculous, but it leads to thinking such as “it can’t get worse…” and that’s the point at which the _thing_ says “oh yeah? can’t get worse? hold my beer.”

In my experience, when discussing things which are this complicated, on this level, anyone who doesn’t already know a dozen ways things can actually get much worse I immediately recommend they take some time to understand the actual subject better, because this means they have little actual understanding of the topic. I’m not saying this to shame you, I promise, I’m really really not. But if this is something you’re passionate about, then you owe it to yourself to have a better grasp on what the terrifying outcomes look like.

Does any of the above mean things can’t be improved? Of Course Not. There are serious problems with many things, but serious problems means it can have very serious outcomes. We should always look for ways to improve. But only with an accurate understanding.

And to be very clear, there are very serious problems in the academic publishing world, no question.

“It’s too complicated to fix it” is a near cousin of “it’s too complicated for you to understand”, sometimes this assertions are true, but some other times are just driven by the person fear of change. In a chess move, when it has not a very obvious outcome, the ramifications are so numerous that only the keen eye of an expert with thousands of games on their back can predict how it is going to affect the game and ending. In fixing the academia publishing industry there currently exists 0 experts that can predict that so any random guy’s guess is as good as anyones

>In fixing the academia publishing industry there currently exists 0 experts that can predict that so any random guy’s guess is as good as anyones

I'm not sure how you can look at political discourse in the United States today and say "yep, let's just blow up academic gatekeepers". Just one anti-vaccine paper from almost 30 years ago (that wasn't even accepted into any publications) and fueled an entire generation of luddites.

The value of academic journals today is trust and the internet has not solved that. Pretend if GP had been searching Google, rather than SciHub. There are millions in the US who have used Google to deduce that placing rocks around your house can cure your migraines all because an enterprising individual had gamed SEO.

"It’s too complicated to fix it" is not what the parent poster was implying. If you take a second to breakdown the actual value that journals provide then one clear way it can become much worse is a model similar to the open web where anyone can publish anything with very loose standards for reproducibility or rigor.

> Just one anti-vaccine paper from almost 30 years ago (that wasn't even accepted into any publications) and fueled an entire generation of luddites.

Ok, so you admit that the journals aren’t even able to accomplish what they purport to. So if this is already a problem, yet good research is inaccessible, what again is the point of the paywalled journals?

No? The journals did their job - the paper wasn't published. The broader internet (and largely a single celebrity) then became vector for a con-man to amplify his misinformation for profit.

I'm using that as an example of something that could become commonplace if you blow up the journal system. Then every paper becomes "I feel this is right because blog-A which aligns to my beliefs says so". Institutional legitimacy is not something that is built overnight.

I’m not sure where or how you inferred something akin to “No one should do anything.” from my comment, but it is absolutely not what I said and absolutely not what I implied.

As botverse pointed out, you offer numerous apologies for the current state of affairs while issuing dire and vague warnings against modifying it.

The approach taken by the machine learning community succeeded and incurred absolutely none of sky-is-falling shyte you moan about.

I think your reading of what I posted is both pulling things out of the context of what I actually said and a bad faith reading. Please dont pull things out of context when you’re trying to have a discussion, when you do this, it implies you’re not getting full comprehension of what was actually said. It’s not a herculean task to keep all points from a couple paragraphs in context. It’s not difficult.

I make it very clear that academic publishing has issues. I state it plain as day, I even literally finish my comment with “And to be very clear…:

> And to be very clear, there are very serious problems in the academic publishing world, no question.

However, changing something without even an understanding of what could go wrong is a very serious mistake. As I said in my comment, this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t seek to change and improve things. But if one can’t even imagine what could go wrong, than this person either hasn’t though much about it, or they clearly do not understand the subject very well.

If something needs to be fixed, don’t fall into amature hour. Take the time to actually understand the subject first. Then start fixing.

Now don’t pull bits and pieces of what I said and separate them, please. It’s only a couple paragraphs, It’s not difficult to hold onto the entire context of a couple of small comment paragraphs.

Sticking with a blatant bad system due to fear of uncertain and analysis paralysis. Let us not leave our caves because the light can burn us!

There's nothing wrong with staying with the status quo if the only alternative proposed is to burn it all down because it'll figure itself out.

I didn’t say or imply any of that. I’m beginning to question if any of you responding even read my comment.

So if Journals don't pay the reviewers and the reviewers are what filters out the garbage, then what necessary function are the journals filling? Do they vet the reviewers? Index the studies?

I've never had much trouble finding what I need on GitHub or scihub. Seems to be indexed pretty well.

And if there is a conflict of interest for reviewers to be paid, then isn't their a conflict of interest for those selecting and vetting the reviewers?

A couple things:

1) They do indeed vet reviewers, both their reviewers and also who ends up on their editorial boards, which for most people on them is just "Yeah, you're going to get more review requests." Editors should - but often don't - also evaluate the quality of the reviews themselves.

2) Some journals do copyediting and layout. Several times this has markedly improved the paper, including one that remade a figure.

3)They also handle some backend stuff. For example, for most medical journals, you just have to check a box saying "This was funded by the NIH" and they'll handle putting it in the appropriate repositories, etc.

Actually, an editor once told me that a lot of papers (50%) are rejected without consulting reviewers. So the garbage is already filtered by the journals. Reviewers can often disagree with each other as well, so a judgement call is needed in those cases.

I agree with your point that payment does not necessarily mean conflict of interest.

Preprints and blogs should be the default. Instead of peer review, which sometimes (often?) turns into gatekeeping or dismissing new ideas, we’ll judge research on reproducibility. The github model for science sounds better than what we have now. Journals to curate research is pre-internet tech, it’s outdated.

You're right that journals have many important functions beyond peer review, but you're wrong that this has anything to do with their closed-access paid nature. Fields such as computational linguistics have a healthy ecosystem of journals and conference proceedings, all free and open access.

What ways are better?

The baby is dead. It's time to bury it and mourn its passing.

There are better tools and technology to "curate" science - the only reason for these journals is rent extraction and gatekeeping.

> Once paid journals go away, Sci-Hub will end up like GitHub

more like we get arxiv.org?

> But throwing the baby out with the bathwater isn't a better solution.

It is not a baby, it's a teratoma eating scientific world and society from inside, the time to cut it out is now!

> The whole point of journals is peer review. That's what distinguishes them from random blog posts. So why can't reviewers just start working independently?

It's happening slowly in some fields. Well, not quite independently, but in loose professional associations. It requires pretty coordinated action and still has a chance of failing though. One early successful case is that almost the entire editorial board of the Springer journal Machine Learning resigned in 2001, and threw their weight behind a community-run, non-profit, open-access alternative, the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), which is now considered by most people to be at least as prestigious as the Springer journal.

Open letter with their rationale from the time: http://www.ai.mit.edu/projects/jmlr/statement.html

Because reviewing is difficult, time consuming and, if you want anonimity of the reviewer, needs a third party to select the reviewer and coordinate the operation. I am not sure if most people are aware but peer reviewing is not paid. The journals that charge for access to the papers only do coordination and publishing (which is vanishngly cheap these days). All the work is done by the authors and the reviewers and they get nil from that pile of money.

Peer review worked (mostly) when most researchers had tenure in an university or research institution and volume was low. They were able to manage their time and allocate the necessary to that function. The situation now is that journals spray and pray review requests' emails to anyone who has ever published a paper regardless of their position or even if their work is related. This is a consequence of the volume and the mess that research positions are where the focus is on grants, money and power with science a distant fourth.

> anonymity of the reviewer

I review my colleague's code every week. Yet it seems they are not out to get me and actually thank me for the feedback.

Why doesn't the same apply to scientific research? Why do reviewers want to be anonymous?

Different incentives, I assume? Otherwise, it would be easier to form insular groups promoting questionable science, especially in the softer sciences. Tit-for-tat reviewing, promotion through citations, etc. While programmers (in companies with well-run engineering environments) are incentivized and rewarded for reviewing code, a group of them can't just form a cabal that mindlessly "approves" of each other's shitcode for long without someone finding out none of it actually works. The same is not true of a lot of science. See; 5-HTTLPR [0]

Just a guess; I'm not plugged into the environment.

[0]: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/07/5-httlpr-a-pointed-rev... is a good run-down of the controversy. TL;DR, a seratonin transporter gene was suspected to be involved in basically every mental issue and hundreds of papers were published in agreement. All of them are basically bullshit.

>So why can't reviewers just start working independently?

because trust and reputation in institutions is stronger than trust in individuals (which is ephemeral) and fields like scientific research consist of communities who only really can function under high levels of trust.

Journals, just like physical universities exist because they can accumulate that degree of trust and it's why top researchers go to Oxford and not to Khan Academy. It's also why corporations exist and we're not all freelancers on the internet.

I know editors of journals and they all get paid. However it is recognized that it is low and not expected to seriously complement their income. Think in the order of $2-5K p.a. All of whom I know have permanent university roles.

It is considered prestigious for the editor/reviewer in the sense of service to their intellectual community, and to their resume; and their university to have their brand in positions of influence. Most tend to leave after only a few years and this is considered normal. The role of reviewer/editor is not significant enough to earn promotions - this must come from their research & teaching.

They are required to declare any conflicts of interest for any papers under their review and they are simply passed to another editor. While the person who reviews your paper is usually unknown (through the review software/pool of reviewers) there's really little incentive to cheat on this as there exists sufficient high quality readers who can call out obvious bias/unusually low quality publications for the tier of journal.

The most burdensome class of problem is the mass of papers submitted of insufficient quality for publication in the journal. These are quickly rejected but the volume is so high, and rejected authors often attempt to challenge. Sometimes they are rude. (I can't estimate the size of this from memory, sorry.) The upside is fortunately these don't require deep/secondary review.

Jerry, I am so very sorry to hear about your daughter. My toddler son is affected by a very rare cancer, and while I can't put myself in your shoes, I know that feeling, that it's upon you to go through all the biomedical knowledge to figure it out.

The company I co-founded, Epistemic AI [0], was built to accelerate biomedical research especially in rare diseases and cancers. I would love to connect and give you free access to our platform, and to extend it to any researcher working on your daughter's condition.

Feel free to shoot me an email at info at epistemic.ai should you find that useful.

In the meantime, best of luck to you and your family.

[0] https://www.epistemic.ai

Hi Jerry -- thank you for sharing your story, and for your note about donating to those organizations; they are all doing incredibly important work.

I know it isn't fun being advertised to, but I really believe that what we're building at scite.ai will be directly useful for you in staying on top of the research in that field.

I wasn't sure how best to reach you, but if you drop me a note at the email in my profile, I would be happy to give you access to our platform (and run through how you can use it to stay up to date).

Ashish

Have you had any troubles donating to scihub ? (From bank refusing wiring to warnings from officials)

Best of luck with your child.

Donate with bitcoin so that your payments can't be interfered with.

a nice use of btc

If there were a legal subscription service with the convenience and breadth of Sci-Hub I’d pay for it. It’s an incredibly useful tool when researching a topic whose articles are published across a multitude of paywalled journals that aren’t accessible on JSTOR (using its 100 free articles).

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