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Comment by krull10 | Hacker News Reader

This is a good thing overall, but it only half addresses the issue. Now journal fees to authors will simply go up to cover the difference, making it harder for researchers without lots of grant funding to publish (journals can now be over $6000 per article), and even more tax payer dollars will be going towards paying these fees for those researchers funded by gov grants (money that could be better spent funding students, postdocs and researchers). This really needed to be coupled with a requirement to cap per article charges for grant-funded work, which would have benefited all researchers.

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You're right it doesn't fully address the issue, but it does provide some pressure.

If an article is available for free immediately, there's no need to spend $6K to make it available at all.

Researchers want to be in specific locations because of their prestige. However, when all US-funded research is also available outside that location, the walled garden of prestige becomes rather porous. Especially since the reviewers typically aren't paid either.

I don’t think the promotion and prestige incentives can be fixed easily by academics. Their promotion, earnings, ability to change universities, and recognition depend on publishing in the most prestigious journals they can.

In contrast, the government could easily fix this by simply not providing the money currently required by such journals, which would force them to come up with models that can work with lower fees.

I hope you are right though!

> I don’t think the promotion and prestige incentives can be fixed easily by academics.

Well, not by most of them, but promotion boards usually contain academics. Part of the solution would be the slow one-funeral-at-the-time one of waiting.

> Researchers want to be in specific locations because of their prestige. However, when all US-funded research is also available outside that location, the walled garden of prestige becomes rather porous. Especially since the reviewers typically aren't paid either.

You are assuming researchers are saintly figures dwelling in a vacuum who don't need to constantly prove to their department head or promotion evaluation committee of their worth. That is not the case. The walled gardens are desirable for some because their social functions are not easily replaceable.

One way to decouple the evaluation of scientific output from the walled garden is simply to stop using them as a gate-keeper in making hiring and research grant distribution decisions. But apart from the constant lip service, there is no momentum in doing anything concrete about this in academia.

It will force publishers to either add real value or be swept away by new models of publishing that aren't simply rent-seeking. It will take time to change, but this is another hole in the dike. It'll probably be messy for a couple of years, but I welcome the opportunity to shake things up.

I fully agree. The US's academic system provides a lot of insulation to researchers because generally this publishing cost will be paid for by your employing company, by your university, or by a grant. So researchers are not incentivized to spend a ton of time worrying about it. At the same time, I believe the large majority of researchers don't realize how little (or negative, arguably) value they receive from paying for publication vs doing so for free (such as on arxiv).

Specifically, online academic publishing is, at its core, indexing and hosting pdf files. It is some work to do a good job. But it's also quite achievable to re-create the same service without asking for much, if anything, from authors. Given a little funding, every field could use arxiv or their version of arxiv (which is free to publish on). The bottleneck to a large-scale change is the self-sustaining prestige of a paid journal's badge.

As a first step, we can spread awareness among authors of how crazy it is to pay so much to publish.

This really needed to be coupled with a requirement to cap per article charges for grant-funded work

It'd be nice if there were just a different model. I do a lot of research in a niche field and would like to publish some of it. But the enormous submission fees are unaffordable as a non-academic with no connection to grant infrastructure. I had thought that rigor and reproducibility would be the main hurdles, but it's pretty discouraging to have or be close to publication-quality datasets and discover how steep the financial wall is. I was aware of submission fees for papers, but until recently had been under the impression that they were an order of magnitude lower.

Serious question: What do journals actually do ? Do they check the article ? Why is it important for it to be in a journal ?

I don't know much about academic research, fyi.

I think it's also a midway proposal for other reasons. The proposal merely suggests open access but barely specifies anything. I don't want to give the government personal information and enable endless tracking to them just because I want to download a paper.

The find one or more well-credentialed and cited experts in the field to anonymously review the paper and point out shortcomings in the research or drafting - this is the 'peer' part of peer review. Then they either accept for publication, suggest revisions, or reject it outright.

Note that the peer reviewers doing the work are unpaid volunteers, the people receiving the money are just middlemen.

I've heard this definitely more than I like, but is there evidence that this is true ?

Just go on academic twitter and ask, you will get a torrent of sob stories. Everyone hates the journal industry but nobody knows how to overturn it. Every so often a group in some field bands together and gets a new open-access journal going (good) but then that has to run for several years and feature heavyweight papers before it can compete with the incumbent, and it's a lot of work while making much less money.

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