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Comment by refurb | Hacker News Reader

I’ve never quite understood the hate against journals. Sure, they might be charging too much for subscriptions based on the effort, but plenty of products do that.

My understanding of positions are:

Researcher: I want to publish in your journal because it’s prestigious.

Academia: You better publish in prestigious journals or you won’t get tenure.

Journal: My journal is expensive, but very prestigious.

Researcher: I want what you offer (prestige) but don’t want to pay your price.

Seems like the researcher should be pissed at academia not the journals? If researchers just published elsewhere, these journals would have no choice but to change.

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The current shareholders and editors of the prestigious journals contribute nothing to it being prestigious. It is historical accident and network effects that now let some journals charge $10k for $100 of work, which many rightly perceive as unjust profiteering.

Moving away from Elsevier and Springer Nature is a coordination problem just as difficult and just as desireable as moving everyone in your school off WhatsApp or iMessage or Facebook towards some less odious alternative...

It's a bit naive to think the editors of these journal don't contribute.

I actually think these fees are an easy problem to solve, but they can’t be solved by academics themselves due to the incentives (i.e. publishing in these journals plays a big role in promotions and possible future grants being awarded).

If funding agencies capped grant publishing fees at say $250 per article, while still requiring open access, that would be the end of these insane page charges. The journals would have to adapt. No one is paying $11,000 out of pocket to publish in these journals…

I’m not sure shareholders contribute anything to companies other than capital, so your point doesn’t make sense.

The editors most certainly contribute to prestige. You don’t get big name editors unless you matter.

And the prestige isn’t guaranteed. Several journals that were prestigious when I was a grad student no longer are.

So I reiterate my point, the journals provide something of value, people just don’t like the price.

Yes. And academia is made up of fellow researchers. We are putting the blame on a private company putting a price on a product that researchers will still continue to pay.

The hate should be against other fellow researchers and hiring/grant/tenure committees. They cannot judge the work of a researcher without counting the number of Nature papers they have in their CV.

I can guarantee you that if these committees did not care about the number of Nature papers a researcher has, nobody would pay that price or even go through the brutal review process of publishing in the top journals (or in CompSci: the top conferences).

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