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Comment by jhbadger | Hacker News Reader

Basically the ASA (and ACS, and lots of other scientific societies) make money selling journal subscriptions and are against open access in general, because they see (to be fair, probably correctly) that not many institutions would subscribe to a journal if people could get the papers for free without a subscription. But obviously free access is better for science as a whole and will have to happen eventually. Scientific societies would be better off thinking about how they can stay funded without the journal subscriptions rather than rage against the incoming tide.

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> Scientific societies would be better off thinking about how they can stay funded without the journal subscriptions rather than rage against the incoming tide.

Some of this depends on who you think the readership will be. Those scientific societies provide a sort of floor on the quality of what they publish, which allows non-experts like me to read the papers with some level of trust in the results.

Or, a layer of indirection away, it gives science journalists a source of stuff to write about that's at least somewhat validated. I do worry a bit about what happens to science journalism, which is already generally of poor quality, when they start reading random junk on arXiv.

Of course, there are alternatives where the papers could still be free. The government could fund the journals, arXiv could implement do their own peer review system with quality indicators. Probably more I'm not thinking of off the top of my head.

Based on what you have written, it kind of sounds like you are conflating the peer review process with scientific societies. Can you be specific about what kind of (productive) gatekeeping the society brings to the table that is not and cannot be fulfilled by a peer review process outside of their purview?

I have no first-hand experience, but my intuiting would be that a lot of the gatekeeping these societies do is focused on reputations, organizational hierarchies, and funding considerations. Which I would not really consider productive, especially in light of the abysmal state of reproducibility and the apparent lack of incentives to tighten things up.

"what kind of (productive) gatekeeping the society brings to the table that is not and cannot be fulfilled by a peer review process"

I don't think "cannot" should be the standard. If the same or better standard of peer review isn't provided (empirically) by some other system, then that's a legitimate criticism of the other system.

> Can you be specific about what kind of (productive) gatekeeping the society brings to the table that is not and cannot be fulfilled by a peer review process outside of their purview?

There are certainly other ways of getting to the same thing, but what I think a peer review process in isolation lacks is a sense of trustworthiness of the peer review.

I.e. as a layperson, I'm not particularly qualified to gauge the quality of an arbitrary paper. I am implicitly not qualified to gauge the quality of peer reviews, because I can't gauge the paper itself.

I can defer to the opinion of experts, though. These societies unify the diffuse expertise of who knows how many people. I.e. I don't work in sociology, so I have no idea who is a reputable sociologist, but I have some degree of confidence that the peer reviewers they choose aren't total quacks.

It's a useful heuristic for non-experts. I don't know anyone or anything in rocket science, but I can defer to what NASA says. I'm not a marine biologist, but I can defer to the NOAA. Etc, etc. There's value in that heuristic, even if it's not perfect.

> I have no first-hand experience, but my intuiting would be that a lot of the gatekeeping these societies do is focused on reputations, organizational hierarchies, and funding considerations.

This is indirectly useful to my thinking. The society is focused on funding and income, which is largely predicated on them being trustworthy (theoretically), which gives them an incentive to provide quality peer reviews. I would imagine a society with 0 standards loses subscribers pretty quickly.

arXiv could certainly do the same thing, but my impression is that arXiv is more focused on making papers available than being an authoritative entity on anything. "This paper is on arXiv" doesn't imply the same level of trust that being in a journal does. They derive value from being open rather than from being trustworthy.

arXiv definitely has value as well, I don't mean to imply that it doesn't or is bad in some way. It just has different goals, from my limited knowledge. It's likely invaluable to people in their field, especially for those qualified to gauge the trustworthiness of an individual study.

arXiv could definitely build some kind of trust system like that if they were interested, but I really think their primary audience is experts who don't have a need for a trustworthiness score simple enough for a layman.

"But obviously free access is better for science as a whole"

That's not totally obvious without sorting out the details. Similar to copyright, it seems to be inefficient (in the sense that it artificially restricts supply) but certainly a lot of people think it helps improve the overall supply of creative works.

But that's not how science publication works (and I say this as a scientist). When someone makes a creative work they may (or may not) want to get paid for it, and copyright helps in this regard. Scientists don't get paid for their articles -- the only people who make money off of scientific publications are the publishers. This was needed in the days when dead tree journals were the only way to get scientific papers distributed, but this isn't true any more. And even if you are talking about peer review, it is important to understand that the reviewers aren't employed by the journals -- they are unpaid volunteers. It is really unclear what if anything journal publishers contribute to the scientific ecosystem at this point.

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