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Comment by justinpombrio | Hacker News Reader

Don't conflate peer review with paid journals, they're very different things. The money received by paid journals doesn't go to the reviewers. The reviewers are mostly professors who have their own funding. I reviewed a paper recently; I certainly didn't get paid for it!

Some disciplines are switching to open access journals, meaning that anyone can read the articles for free, and there's no big publisher sucking up tons of money. But there's still peer review.

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In my experience open access still includes a big publisher sucking up tons of money. It is just money paid up front by authors. Do you have an example of open access were that is not the case?

Some disciplines have started moving to Arxiv. And all the major programming languages conferences (PLDI, POPL, ICFP, more) switched to PACMPL, which is open acess and I expect is cheaper but am not sure how to check. I don't know much about this; mostly just wanted to make the point that peer review != publishing.

Late but there are many. This is called diamond access. A possibly familiar example is the ACL.

That is fair, I have no reason to paint all academic publishing with a single broad brush. Personally, I am strongly on the side of free and open - probably in the direction of things like the Open Data Institute (ODI).

But data, including academic papers published by scientific societies, being free and open has nothing whatsoever to do with the communication protocols underlying those societies. You can have free, open and peer reviewed journals distributed by email, by FTP, by carrier pigeon, etc.

So if your beef with academic societies is merely the cost or the closed nature, federated protocols needn't be part of the discussion at all.

You are on point: paid journals bring nothing to the table, except that they have somehow established reputations (of varying levels), where people publish their papers. But the journals themselves do very little. It's largely or entirely volunteers who review papers and select the ones that get publish.

The journals are completely replaceable. You could also just designate a simple website as the publishing destination. The volunteers would do exactly the same work. Obviously, the website requires some funding, but a tiny fraction of what the journals take.

I'd really hoped Octopus would fix this, but it doesn't seem to have really had much traction

https://www.octopus.ac/

> You could also just designate a simple website as the publishing destination.

Just as a quick counter - you'd want to base this on something more permanent. CLOCKSS[0] or something similar is a necessity with DOIs pointing to the papers. Otherwise you're back to "the source code is here: (broken link to old academic site)"

I agree that the use of journals for the literal job of publishing seems antiquated.

(disclaimer, worked previously for the parent company of FigShare, other providers are available)

https://clockss.org/figshare-preserves-with-the-clockss-arch...

> You could also just designate a simple website as the publishing destination

I had an idea[0] about this last week on here!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38412554

Last time I read such an HN comment thread, one poster claimed that Sci-Hub was morally wrong because “how will peer reviewers get paid if people just pirate the papers?”. Tell me you don’t know anything about academic publishing without telling me you don’t know anything about academic publishing. Seems to be a widespread misconception.

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