Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bruce511 | Hacker News Reader

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Right now, today, nothing stops academia from publishing every paper they write to be open to all. The internet is there and publishing is free.

The fact that they don't implies that they perceive some value is provided by publishing in the traditional way.

Assuming that journals die as a result of your law (why would people pay for a journal anymore?) is it worth considering that value (perceived or real) before advocating it is gone?

For example, consider a news article which starts with "a study published in Nature shows that..." versus "a study posted on Joe's blog on the internet indicates..."

For better or worse (and often with mistakes) journals act as a filter. Researchers in a field can "keep up". They can spend their time on "good papers" rather than trying to sift the dross of the internet.

Researchers, and by extension the place they work, gain karma points when publishing in hard-to-publish papers. If other papers cite their work they get even more points. Ultimately academia (employers and peers) ranks people using these points.

Does this mean your idea is bad? Not necessarily. But it's worth understanding that your proposal would "fix" one problem, but introduce a bunch of new ones.

Another (equally flawed) approach to solving the problem is that the govt simply pays for journal subscriptions to anyone who asks. This means "open access", with benefits limited to "their" population. But the values offered by journals are preserved. Of course this incentivizes journals to increase fees.

> they perceive some value is provided by publishing in the traditional way

Yes, but it provides value only for scientist careers, not for science.

well it also gives some indication of what to read too, hard to filter a firehose on top of your dayjob, but it’s hard to believe that it needs to be this expensive

>> Yes, but it provides value only for scientist careers, not for science.

That's a very definitive statement. But perhaps it is untrue?

It would seem yes, that it's good for scientist careers.Are "good" careers versus "bad" careers good or bad for science? In other words, is it useful to rank scientists when allocating grant money? Do good scientists make better use of the money than bad ones? Are there other ways you could suggest to rank scientists?

Perhaps there are other groups that benefit as well? What about people issuing grants? Is it useful to them that there is industry recognised feedback regarding the scientist and her work? Is this useful when allocating limited funds to an unlimited demand?

What about people following the science? Let's take industry. Say I want to make a commercial product. Should I start by paying attention to the field, understanding the science? Or is it ok to just read any unvetted thing?

What about media, and by extension the population? Can a media outlet run a story based on "something someone wrote on the internet"? Or should they prefer credible sources? Should the public have some interest in the truthiness of something? Should the public (via the media) understand the difference between a result published in the New England Journal of Medicine, or what my homeopath down the road published on their blog?

What about say doctors keeping up with "current ideas"? Should they believe everything, every "study" posted on a blog? Or should there be a system of gate-keeping, sifting the valuable studies from the chaff? Presumably knowing that a study is well formed, and not paid for by say big pharma, might lend it more weight?

Of course publishers benefit (financially) from this system as well. But they don't matter right? So we'll ignore that. But even if you remove them from the equation, I'd suggest that "science" does indeed get value from the system, beyond just scientist careers.

Now, could all these benefits be gained in an alternative way to expensive journals? Almost certainly so. But in order to build such a system it's important to understand the strengths of the current one. A "simple" law might solve one part of the puzzle, but at the same time have very foreseeable consequences in other parts of the picture.

It's a local minima. The big journals were bought up in the 70s and 80s and scientists were hoisted on their own prestige petard. I get the Chesterton's fence thing but this is not a case of that.

Many of the prestigious journals do require an exclusive license:

https://www.springernature.com/gp/open-science/policies/jour...

Under the Springer Nature Subscription licence agreement Share the final published work with peers: Limited sharing for research and career advancement allowed

And it's typically quite expensive to publish under the OA license. I still see no problem with the proposed law. One of two things would happen: 1) Federally funded researchers publish elsewhere or 2) Springer changes their ridiculous agreements, there's no reason they must be granted exclusive rights to a paper just to publish it especially when taxpayers funded the research.

I'd be willing to bet that 1 will lead to 2 in short order.

>> Many of the prestigious journals do require an exclusive license

Of course they do. But nothing forces the researcher to use those journals. So the question becomes why do they? Perhaps there's prestige involved?

>> 1) Federally funded researchers publish elsewhere

That's my point. Since researchers already have this option why are they not exercising it? Why are researchers happy, indeed prefer, publishing with Springer? Only by understanding why they currently choose to use Springer et al, can you understand what is lost by requiring free publishing.

>Only by understanding why they currently choose to use Springer et al, can you understand what is lost by requiring free publishing.

Because we're stuck in a local sub-optima. Those journals are currently prestigious because top researchers publish in them and top researchers publish in them because they are prestigious.

A high acceptance bar may play a role but that is easily achievable and generally does not work anyway based on the number of fraudulent papers that have been accepted. Reviewer comments should be published alongside as should the data.

There are very cheap arXiv overlay journals where the processing fee is about $10 per submission.[1] And that’s with a for profit entity providing the platform. Reviewing is already unpaid, editing is often unpaid even with traditional journals.

Your “journals die as a result” assumption is faulty.

Not to mention for quite a few fields you can already find every remotely worthwhile paper on arXiv. Those fields didn’t collapse.

[1] https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an...

so, given that all scientists and all fields have not immediately adopted this journal, can you elaborate on why some have chosen to not take this approach?

By understanding their reasoning it's perhaps possible to understand what benefits are missing from this model?

If this cheap publishing approach is better for grant providers, why do they in turn not place more weight on previous papers published this way. Presumably if they "prioritised researchers who do this" they would driver behaviour - no law required? Is big-journal leaning on them?

Inertia and prisoner’s dilemma. If an entire field decided unanimously that all existing editorial boards of for-profit journals will resign and form a corresponding Free<OldJournal> overnight and somehow with an inherited impact factor, then everyone except the leeches in for-profit publishing wins. But that’s an impossible ask. Right now, even when an entire editorial board resigns and starts over, the new journal needs to build reputation from scratch, and anyone submitting work (that qualifies for leading journals) to the blank slate instead of leading journals is committing career self-sabotage in a cutthroat environment. (And the publisher can hire a new board to keep the name going, the number of people willing to sit on the board for prestige is proportional to the journal’s prestige.) That leaves tenured folks who don’t need to worry about climbing the ladder, but they tend to have younger coauthors too. That really leaves tenured profs flying solo or collaborating with each other, and who’s fed up enough to do something about it even though they probably won’t have the network effect for a long time, if ever. It’s no coincidence that I linked to a Fields medalist (mathematician).

The next best thing without legislation is publishing preprints to open platforms while leaving the money sucking journals intact. Which has indeed happened in every field I’m familiar with, no idea what’s holding up the others, it’s not like any academic is living on royalties from papers. Inertia perhaps, and negotiation power?

And legislation may actually make a difference here, but hey, politicians don’t typically mess with big money.

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