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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

Again, it would be interesting if these academics just refused to publish in these journals. That would kill their business model very quickly.

But they won’t.

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The academic world is too entrenched in the established order, and while many inside it would agree with you, the incentive structures in place often work against individual action like this because the first priority is usually publishing in high impact-factor journals, open access second.

Despite some laudable efforts, academia as a collective has proven themselves incapable of fighting the publishing cartels. As a result, it's turned out that the only viable pathway to true open access is large-scale civil disobedience on the part of sci-hub and its users.

This is a very interesting case to watch though as it could finally provide a legal basis on which sci-hub can operate, even if only in India.

I thought funders requiring that results be published in open access journals was making some progress on this problem?

My PhD program (EU-funded) requires to publish only in open-access journals. It’s not going to change overnight, but I see more and more important publications in journals like F1000 and eLife.

> EU-funded

If it was funded by the taxpayers it should be accessible to (all the) taxpayers. This is something that EU (usa,...) should regulate and make it mandatory. If you expect Johnny the Plumber to pay for research, Johnny expects to be able to read what you did with his money.

Important to mention here open access can also mean "authors pay the journal thousands of dollars to enable open access to their paper" (e.g. 4.5k for Science advances). Given that arxiv.org runs with about 16$/paper according to their latest report and most of the important things like peer review, editing etc. is handled by volunteers, I hope the EU will add limits on the amount of funding going to the journals soon to kill this type of rent seeking.

> only in open-access journals

That's usually just a deflection, you have to pay $5000+ to publish in those newly-established open-access-offshoot journals or pay equivalent for the open access privilege in the old journals.

Prestige still has a hefty price.

Refusing to publish in a top journal is academic suicide. Why would any individual researcher do that?

If all the tenured professors published directly to arxiv only for a year, what would happen to them?

In most fields, tenured professors coauthor their papers with their PhD students and/or early career postdocs. So what would happen is that they would be throwing those people, whose career depends on publishing in a hyper-competitive environment, under the bus. Apart from losing the funding with which one can renew contracts to students and postdocs, etc. As a tenured professor myself, I have thought about this often (1), but there's almost always someone more vulnerable that I would be harming with that decision.

Honestly, this kind of discussion comes up very often, but it is really difficult, if not impossible, to get out of this situation via bottom-up action. Top-down measures for governments are pretty much needed for any meaningful change.

(1) Actually, to be more precise, all my papers are already open-access, but many of them are in for-profit publishers that charge the author thousands of dollars to publish open-access, which in my view is also a parasitic model and a scourge for science like paying for subscription. The specific thing I've thought about is not publishing in any for-profit publisher at all, but anyway the shackles that keep us tied to publishers are the same in both cases (modulo whether you have funding to pay publishing charges or not).

Because it’s the right thing to do? Lmao, right? Who would be stupid enough to even consider doing anything but playing the clout games.

Doing it means you will have to leave academia is the point. Your performance is measured in published papers - how much you published and where.

Not publishing means you are not producing which means not being hired after.

I don’t think it’s that black and white. What you publish is more important than where at least in some fields.

If you don't publish it in the right venue nobody will read it, which means nobody will cite it, which means you did the work for nothing. At least in all fields where I know people.

There’re also articles in prestigious journals that aren’t getting any citations. There’re other ways to engage people with your research.

Sounds utterly insane.

More then that. Academia is hyper competitive. It is kind of pyramid with huge amount of smart hard working people falling out on every level.

It is difficult to get position, so if you want to stay in, you need to keep your record perfect.

I don't think anyone who's done research would argue that, but a lot of research isn't mirrored on arxiv/etc when it could be. So I see a lot of these as education campaigns for researchers themselves.

Many/Some(??) journals now allow to publish a pre-print to arxiv and alike and do not count that as previous publication... So you don't get the paper in the "journal"-format style, but the content is the same.

So you can still continue to publish in journal, while the research is also still freely available. Usually you are also allowed to share the published article via email, just not put it publicly available on your website...

I think the arxiv / pre-print workaround could have so much more potential if more researchers were motivated/educated on it. I'd love to see an effort to simply email the top 10k authors to request preprint copies to be hosted. If all they have to do is send a pdf, I think most would be happy to do it.

My impression is that a huge - but little-recognized - supporter of the status quo has been the National Science Foundation, and similar outside providers of academic research funding. If the big boys in that neighborhood decided that real open-access publishing was clearly superior, then most large universities would quickly adopt the new orthodoxy. Those which did not would soon be hit by brain drains, funding droughts, and "going down fast" gossip.

NSF is not a legislative body. So what exactly can they do ? The congress ain't doing squat. Even the UC system that tried some hard ball negotiation ultimately failed and gave in to most of Elsevier's demands.

"With an annual budget of about $8.3 billion (fiscal year 2020), the NSF funds approximately 25% of all federally supported basic research conducted by the United States' colleges and universities.[4] In some fields, such as mathematics, computer science, economics, and the social sciences, the NSF is the major source of federal backing." - Wikipedia

Let's say that the NSF, during a typical fiscal year, received requests for research funding which totaled far more dollars than the NSF actually had available to grant. And that the NSF had a long-established system of paperwork, procedures, and preferences - to decide which researchers would receive how much from the NSF's limited funds.

Now, if the NSF's preferences were inclined against supporting closed-access publication of research results, and if some universities were not so flush with research funding from other sources that they could happily maintain a "principled stance" and ignore the NSF's crass, self-serving bias...

They won't because their entire career hinges on publishing in these journals. Blaming them for not publishing is like blaming aspiring programmers for grinding leet code. Yeah it would be great if everyone stopped at once and suddenly it became useless, but that's obviously never going to happen. The blame lies squarely with the Universities and Governments at this point for allowing faculty to publish in paywalled journals.

If Universities stopped recognizing work published in paywalled journals when making hiring considerations, this debate would be over in a year. Parasitic journals like Science and Nature would lose their product and the business model would basically fall apart.

What benefit do these journals provide? Is it entirely professional prestige (and the career advancement that follows) or are there other upsides to it?

Yes, plus very expensive web hosting of published papers.

There is also peer review. But the peer reviewers typically don't get any money or even recognition for the time they invested. And that peer review happens before the paper is potentially published and then it will be in its final form.

Sites like Arxiv allow you to update your paper if there is feedback (aka post-publication peer review) which allows for a much larger audience of (constructive) critics.

Meanwhile SciHub and Arxiv host papers for free. So yes, it's pretty much only prestige that makes the difference.

> very expensive web hosting of published papers

A problem that only needs to be solved because of copyright. Get rid of restrictive laws and watch people take care of storage and distribution for a fraction of the cost using decentralized peer-to-peer technologies like torrents and ipfs. Plus there's always the internet archive.

It's an example among many, of something with a technically clear solution but which seems trapped in a hard to exit equilibrium and collective action problem. The major journals confer prestige and are nearly all paid access. Those who benefit most from the current system will tend to either be the most vested and or least concerned about improvements. This gap creates an opportunity for cheaters to break rank and improve their individual prospects in any collective action scenario. What reinforces the trap is cheaters don't need to be malicious, they can be anxious or have low risk tolerance (perhaps stemming from lots of responsibilities).

Also important to note that "prestige" here isn't a vanity thing; it's what makes or breaks your career.

> academics

> business model

In a perfect world, we should be able to say: pick one.

Heck, even in our imperfect world with us mere human beings, I still believe that it would be for the better of academia to keep any "business model"-aspects out of it.

Most of these academics are phonies and are running citation rings. Many of them are the editors and reviewers and so on. So it is in their interest to publish the research in these phony journals.

these academics being the indian academics supporting sci-hub? or just academics in general?

anything to support your claim? or just a bad generalization?

I don't think Indian academics have that kind of power.

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