The Dangerous "Research Works Act" | Hacker News Reader

The Dangerous "Research Works Act"

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97 pointsRichardPrice31 comments

> The journal industry already has a vice-like grip on the research institutions. They can keep raising the subscription prices, and, to stay alive, the research institutions have to pay up.

While it's generally true that research institutions aren't generally willing to consider declining to subscribe, they aren't entirely helpless. A couple years ago, in response to huge price increases from the Nature Publishing Group, the University of California system organized a (moderately effective) boycott, where scientists would not submit papers to any NPG journal [1].

[1] http://chronicle.com/article/U-of-California-Tries-Just/6582...

You're right, there are cases of boycotts like this.

Another interesting case was when the whole editorial body of the journal "Topology" resigned in 2006 because they thought that its owner, Elsevier, was charging too high a price for subscriptions. Those editors then set up a rival journal, called Journal of Topology.

There is an interesting letter here from the editors of the journal explaining their reasoning behind their mass resignation http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/topology-letter.pdf

How was it effective?

Apparently it brought NPG back to the negotiating table:

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2010/08/nature_and_california_m...

Unclear on the details, but presumably UC got a somewhat better price. (Note that UC was getting a better price than most libraries to begin with.)

I've seen no article indicating anything actually came out of this. Ongoing? Fizzled out? CA backed off?

It seems for me like this would be an great new market for Google: they know research and they know how to automate the process so the subscription price can be kept ridiculously low.

Though the gov't might want research to be distributed, the underlying problem here has more to do with the scientists themselves than anything else. We've had ArXiV around for a long time and yet I ask who's adopted it other than mathematicians and (many, but not all) physicists? Why hasn't it been adopted by NIH-funded life scientists?

The fact that years ago, life scientists easily could have adopted an ArXiV-like model for publishing, and chose not to, is quite telling. It suggests a far deeper problem with incentives in (general) academic culture to publish and that article availability is not going to affect that at all. As someone who spent >6 years Ph.D./PostDoc (bioinformatics, stats and CS), I can say that the vast majority of researchers have no genuine incentive to take action. Protesting against Elsevier online in the comfort of your office is one thing, but having to publish X>10 papers/yr to get tenure/brownie points within your department is another.

You're absolutely right that academics are torn between two things that they want:

1. open access for their research (both for altruistic reasons, because they want to spread knowledge as widely as possible, and for selfish reasons, because greater access to their research means more citations of their research, which helps them with career advancement)

2. publishing in the most prestigious journals they can, because that helps with career advancement.

The NIH, which funds all research into biology and medicine in the US, just cares about 1. above. They just care about maximizing distribution for taxpayer-funded research, as long as the distribution is done so in an economically sustainable way.

The NIH drove the open access mandate in 2008. My sense is that in the short term, driven mainly by the demands of funding agencies, all journals will move to 'open access models', where publishers pay to publish their research in the journals, and for readers, it's free to access. This satisfies both 1. and 2. above: academics get both open access and the validation of being published in prestigious journals.

Longer term, I think alternative credit metrics will replace the credit metric that's governed research for hundreds of years, i.e. the brand value of the journal you were published in.

I think when that happens, the power of journals will disappear altogether. Right now, the journals' role in driving the discovery of research has been disrupted a lot. In the pre-web days, people used to walk down to their libraries, and check out what had been published in the journals recently. In those days, the journals used to drive a lot of research discovery.

Nowadays, pretty much all research discovery happens online, and it's driven by things like search engines (Google, Google Scholar, Pubmed), and social platforms (Twitter, arXiv, Academia.edu; general communication technologies like email and IM are also used a lot).

The journals still have a strangle-hold on the validation of research. Which journal you were published in is still incredibly important, as far as the validation of your paper is concerned.

Other credit metrics are emerging, however. Citation counts are one metric, and that has a big role in driving research discovery on search engines like Google Scholar. Hiring committees are starting to look at the kinds of credit metrics that apply to general web content, e.g. page views.

As alternative credit metrics emerge, there will come a point when they do a good enough job at the validation of research that academics feel they no longer need to submit their papers to journals.

I wrote up some further thoughts on this here http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/05/the-future-of-peer-review/

If pre-publication peer review goes out of fashion, then another possibility if that the brand of major journals becomes more important. We still need a quick gauge of the quality of an article, other than its Google rank or number of page views. Nature can retract popular articles that are later proven flawed; I don't think Google would attempt to wield that kind of authority.

Relevant example: You published these two posts in TechCrunch to get a wide audience. (And I'm glad you did!) I read them partly because they appeared in TechCrunch.

What about the page charge? Some of these journals charge the author (or her institution) by the page for papers they accept. They get ya coming and going. Nice racket. Check it out.

http://support.elsevier.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/252/~/tp...

Yes, that's right. Some journals charge on both ends: they charge academics to submit papers, and they charge academics to read papers.

Does anyone have a good form letter for telling your representative that you're prepared to start walking around the voting district stopping people on the street and explaining that Carolyn Maloney is trying to restrict access to publicly funded research?

Carolyn Maloney is my Congresswoman and I don't give a shit that the alternative is a conservative, this is ridiculous.

An important first step is to call her office and tell them how this personally affects you as her constituent. Then, organize professors from the universities in the district to call her and tell her how this personally affects them.

If you want to organize people on the street, I would recommend asking people on the street whether they support their tax dollars going to pay overpriced publishers whose tax base is in Europe when the articles could be published at low cost, on the web, in the US, while universities get to save more of their money for education.

"The way the research process works is like this:

1.) An academic does some research, often funded by a government grant. 2.) The academic writes up a paper and submits it to an academic journal. 3.) The journal publisher adds some value to the paper, mainly formatting and secretarial services, and then publishes the paper.

The journal publishers believe that the public funding of research stops at step 2, where the academic submits the paper to a journal. At that stage, the journal publishers argue, the academic is free to share their paper with the world."

Why don't the researchers just format the papers themselves and publish their work independently online? It seems like a trivial amount of work compared to the actual research that they are doing. I understand that many people believe that they shouldn't have to do this, but after reading the article I see nothing stopping them from distributing their work to the public.

They forgot that part of #3 is peer review, which is managed by the journal, but actually performed by academics for free. Oh, and the researcher usually has to pay a fee to get the paper published once the journal accepts their paper. So, most of the hard work in #3 is free, and the academic still has to pay the journal (usually from a government grant).

Obviously for your work to be validated it must go through the process of peer review. However, I am suggesting that even after they become published in a scientific journal that the researchers should go about publishing their articles online themselves or through a third party site. I just don't see how the data can be easily locked away behind a pay wall if researchers can do whatever they please with their work. If they want to make their work available to the public there are many ways to do so.

When publishing at one of the paid journals the researchers must give away their copyright to the journal too. This means they cannot republish the paper on a different place (sometimes there is an exception for the personal website though).

You might not believe this at first but yes, its really that stupid.

The reason is that academics need the validation of being published in a prestigious journal. See the comment below http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3597125

This article is already a little bit out of date: It strikes me as unusual to describe 6,094 as "over 5,500" :)

good point - that part of the post was written yesterday, and since then the boycott numbers have gone over 6,000!

"In particular, it thinks that, with the open access mandate, research institutions will stop subscribing to the journals, and instead decide to wait 12 months to get the research for free."

So? That would be a sign that the value the journal adds by selecting what get's published is apparently not worth the price they are charging. In fact, why wait 12 months? If that leads to journals going out of business, there work wasn't worth the money. Of course there will be a need to organzie journal access, but I am sure that will be figured out super fast and the result will be cheaper and better, than what the Journals are doing right now. After all it's a problem we are solving on the Internet all the time.

I think the author is not looking deep enough. Universities form and fund consortiums all the time for one reason or another. The US Government funds even more and has more resources. If either the universities, or the US government, wanted academic research to be public by default, they could bypass the publishers entirely and do so with comparatively little effort. In this case the "publishers" are merely the fall guys. Something much more important is going on.

It isn't true that the US government could easily bypass the publishers. They want the research to be distributed, and peer reviewed, and have historically relied on the publishers to do that. The NIH (the federal agency that dispenses the bulk of academic funding in the US) took the view that they could get better distribution terms on behalf of the US public, with their open access mandate in 2008. It's this policy that the journal publishers are trying to reverse. Distribution, and peer review, are evolving, but they haven't evolved to the point where the US government could easily bypass the publishers.

I understand where you are coming from and I see your point. However, I'm not saying it would be "easy" just "relatively easy", as compared to the work and cost involved in legislation, investigation, and enforcement of the act which has been proposed.

Setting up a new system would not be without hurdles, of course, however if the initiative is properly funded and is pushed from the cabinet-level (i.e. US DOE) down and the use of the new system is tied to federal funding for universities, then it will gain traction and prestige.

It might take a generation for the old guard to fall away but eventually we'd have a better, more transparent, fairer system.

While the public does have an interest in research becoming public after a reasonable period of time, I think the government is going to have a hard time declaring that it wants to unilaterally sidestep a multibillion dollar industry that is crucial to science as it is practiced today, and an even harder time getting scientists to accept whatever solution it comes up with, since publishing in high quality, peer-reviewed journals is key to job advancement in most of academia.

1 -- I don't see what you're trying to imply, could you come out and say it?

2 -- Actually, the publishers do have a lot of power. The universities are stuck in a bad equilibrium (in the game theory sense) -- if any of them individually deviates (by not subscribing to popular/restrictive journals and not publishing in them), that university is going to be the one to get hurt.

The only way out for universities is if they all cooperate and decide to ditch the restrictive journals. There are movements toward this right now (against Elsevier, for instance), but it's very difficult to gain traction. You can't just pick up the red phone to every university president and say, "hey guys, stop publishing in these journals, I set up a whole different process over here!" The journals have the prestige, so they have the power for now.

Response to #1: I don't know any more about it than you do, with any degree of certitude. But I do know there's more at stake than protecting publishers.

Response to #2: Good points. But don't forget that the government has the "Power of the Purse". If they tie funding to open access to papers, then some amazing things will start to happen.

So your argument is "there must be some deep conspiracy which I cannot explain yet I will suggest with ominous tones, so let's do nothing." Classic muddying the waters.

"Conspiracy"? I don't recall saying that. But if we take the literal definition of the root word (conspire) then every legislative act would fall into that far too broad category.

Conspiracy theory aside, you have to realize that no law ever gets passed, or even makes it to a full vote, unless multiple parties are successfully convinced that they, their constituents, and their campaign contributors will benefit from the proposed bill.

No muddying of the waters intended. And you're right, I don't know exactly what the real motivations behind this are - however I am sure that there is more than simply the profit margins of publishers at stake here.

Online publishing has only recently (in terms of university and government policy) become viable. There's still no real killer platforms, though there are a few good niche ones.

The universities and government are looking to ditch the journals, and the journals know it. But it's a slow process.

The major non-governmental funding agencies recently banded together to solve the problem roughly the way you suggest, by creating their own open-access journal which they will enourage their grantees to submit their work to. It will be called eLife:

http://www.hhmi.org/news/elife20111107.html

It would probably be considered dubious/anti-competitive if NIH and NSF launched their own journals, but because of the Open Access Initiative (which RWA attempts to reverse), NIH is able to host articles that have already been released to the public via PubMed Central.

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