Why do we even need publishers? What is stopping the scientific community from saying "Fuck this" and simply posting their PDFs on their own websites, or on an archival site? Is it simply bureaucratic inertia?
Anyone with an internet connection can write a "paper" and publish it, but that doesn't mean it is useful to the scientific community. Peer review allows the community to filter out quack papers, research which is inherently flawed, or research which has been done before.
This leaves the journals filled with novel research meeting a minimum quality standard, allowing other scientists to build upon them. If you can't get your research published it ostensibly isn't worth anything, so a lot of institutions use the number of papers published and the citations they get as a measurement of a researcher's output. There is nothing wrong with this process.
However, the issue is that journals have been captured by rent-seeking publishers who charge exorbitant fees. This is made even worse because some journals have historically been more strict than others, so getting a paper published in a strict one leads to a higher valuation - and of course the publishers charge higher fees for the more prestigious journals.
Changing this entire model is difficult. Publishing in one of those journals is literally how your worth is valued. Breaking this circle can be done, but it won't be easy.
[0] https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...
In many fields, preprints have been an established practice for a long time. That allows us to see the alternative to peer review. The main variables that predict how much attention your preprint gets are your name and the topic. With all its imperfections, peer review at least gives a second chance for less known researchers working on less fashionable topics.
That is not a good argument. It points out that research productivity has changed and then tries to correlate this with the rise of peer review, before admitting that the entire argument is confounded and pointless. Then it goes on to the standard non-practitioner approach and cherry-picks examples where peer review didn’t find flaws, which I mean, duh. Of course peer review doesn’t work perfectly to find all errors and fraud, nobody is arguing the point. You could write a similar post demonstrating that fire departments don’t fight fires, or that restaurant health codes aren’t needed to prevent food poisoning.
As a non-academic working in neurotech/sleeptech, we've seen some very questionable studies, and even in discussion with researchers, they've suggested how the study can be designed to get the result you are looking for.
I hope an open system with discussion can improve the state of research and access to research for a larger group.
It's a metric that you need to advance your career. A line on your CV, a reference in your next grant proposal or facility proposal. It shows that people are invested in your work and think it is worthwhile to carry out (regardless of the verifiability of it).
"I'll donate again when you reduce your ratio of admins to faculty to what it was in the 60's"
Then we might see some change.
Why have these companies been so successful at curating prestigious journals?
I hate our academic publishing model. But I'm careful dismissing the journals as pure rent seekers. Their is a source to their staying power beyond merely habit.
However, I suspect much of the staying power is that organizing and executing on a top tier journal, or equivalently replacing it, is real work - and it is real work with no model for getting paid for or otherwise compensated for in an academic career.
There is also some value to being arms-length. A few top universities could gang together to pay for a flight of journals, but there would understandably be concerns about acceptance policies, etc.
I’m not saying the onus is on scientists to fix the entire issue but the progress has to start by committees that hire and promote people in academia and to stop looking at publications in prestigious journals as a marker of career progression and differentiation.
And more to the point, these prestigious conferences and journals often get the best researchers in the field to peer-review for them, because doing that work (for a prestigious venue) also holds some value in the promotion/hiring process. People like to dump on peer review, scientists more than most, but in retrospect many (some) of my papers have improved through the process of getting those people to sign off on the work.
That's why these editors move is a good one. Collective action protects individuals. To support them, I've already signed up to serve as a reviewer.
It's not just inertia that keeps scientists using the old journals. Anyone can issue a preprint. The material that ends up in the journal is usually the better material. The filtering helps and so does the editing. The filtering may be flawed, but it's better than nothing.
it's quite reasonable to have a policy not to cite an original source without a literature review attached
these are not the same functions.
Every author should do this - either the final version if it's open access, or a preprint if it's an awful closed journal.
Though I prefer boycotting awful publishers like Elsevier in the first place.
With suitable metadata linking the data back to the published article, and links to archive.org included in the article, there’s little risk that the data would get lost. Authors putting things on their own websites won’t have the same success rate.
Probably cost and reach.