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Comment by mukaiji | Hacker News Reader

RANT: Anyone here interested in the underlying issue of academic publishing? To me, the very notion that publicly (or privately for that matter) funded academic research gets locked behind paywalls of organizations that have not contributed financially to the research endeavor published, seems like irony to me. In short, they pay not a single dime to produce the content, charge the researchers to have their submission reviewed and published, publish the content and make money off of the subscription they sell, and sue the hell out of anyone who tries to wrestle it back out of their control.

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I agree. Researchers should stop entering into contracts with organizations like Elsevier.

Moreover, taxpayers should be upset that they're paying for research for which the copyrights are readily handed over to private organizations.

JSTOR has spent a substantial amount of money and time digitizing and indexing publications that were created before computers took over the industry.

The same is true for LexisNexus.

Soooo, if they did actual work, they deserve to be paid fairly for that work.

They certainly do not deserve to be paid for things they didn't do, nor a perpetual monopoly on others' work, simply because they've managed to lock-in their customers for historical reasons.

Rent-seeking is rent-seeking, and is bad for society.

organizations that have not contributed financially to the research

charge the researchers to have their submission reviewed and published,

As you point out, they are providing a valuable service. The research is peer-reviewed and published.

You can argue that they aren't needed in the modern peer-to-peer wikiresearch napster world, where anyone can just publish their research wherever they want.

If the researchers don't want their research behind the paywall, they are not forced into the transaction. They must be finding the value-add of the "peer-review and publish" significant enough to give up publishing rights elsewhere.

The journals do not provide the peer reviewers, it's _peer_ review after all. The reviewers are more unpaid academics. The journal's involvement is running an automated submission system that passes draft publications between authors and reviewers, and maintaining a list of reviewers (mostly built from previously published authors).

Some journals have paid editorial staff however, that do useful things like copyediting. In exchange, the public has to pay $15-$30/ea (or whatever, it depends on the journal and field) for access to your papers; probably forever.

It's a rent seeking industry that would make even the the music recording companies blush. Yes, they do some useful facilitation, but it's not commensurate with the (completely externalized) cost.

Unfortunately, this is something that has to occur as a systematic change. Individual researchers are not to blame, necessarily. When you are told by your university that you must publish or face not getting tenure, what they mean is that you must publish in a peer-reviewed journal (or conference, since most of what we talk about here is CS and CS is still a conference field mostly). We could realign the review process so that it was something taken on by universities, for example, but this will require a major systematic change.

Peer review is important. It will not stop being important, but unfortunately the service of peer review is currently only being offered by mostly for-profit organizations, which is the primary problem.

So true. It's not like publishing your paper on your lab's website will satsify the "publish" requirement for obtaining tenure. Why can't we separate the process of peer review from the process of letting a journal handle distribution of the paper?

My pet peeve when downloading articles from journals is that it is a chain of needless HTTP redirects and elaborate cookies. If you are accessing the network from an approved IP address, is all that really necessary? Why can't it be a simple direct download? Answer: Because they've commercialized the process of reading publicly-funded research results. And with that comes the usual mindless hoop-jumping for even the simplest things.

Many investigators will just post a copy on their lab's website anyway. And that's the link that they will often give to students who need a copy of the paper. So the whole scheme of commercializing the publishing of noncommercial research just looks silly.

Don't question it, just follow along.

I've heard a number of times of people starting "open access" peer-reviewed journals for various fields. The persistence of journals that demand permanent exclusive rights means either those fields are still waiting for some enterprising person to do the heavy work to create the new journal (and manage its reputation), or that the old-fashioned journals are still providing some value that the new guys can't replicate.

Even Nature, one of the most awesome-est journals in the world, demands certain restrictions, like not publishing in another journal. They don't want to do all the work of vetting the article only to find out that it's also in Joe's Fishing And Particle Physics Papers.

It's the researchers themselfes who edit and peer-review the content. And academics are kind of locked into those journals. Just starting your own free publication is not easy because as an academic you are forced to publish in the established journals who demand exclusive content. Only those journals have a high impact factors which are the basis of the arithmetic formula used to measure their academic success. The whole system is rigged...

The research is peer-reviewed and published.

IME, those organizations generally don't provide the peer-reviewers and the peer-reviewers aren't paid.

> As you point out, they are providing a valuable service. The research is peer-reviewed and published.

How is that a valuable service? Millions of people do that for free on the web every day. Hell, I'm doing it right now.

For cutting edge theoretical research, there are only a handful of people in the world with the knowledge to review the research. And having millions of people that really don't have a clue about it doesn't produce anything worthwhile.

So it is a valuable service to provide.

Yes, but those who carry out the peer-review, are the researchers themselves: at times, at little to no cost to the publisher, simply because the reviewing scientist (and the postdoc she/he usually assigns to do the grunt work) get the "prestige" of being a reviewer/editor for a given publication.

And? That's the definition of a peer.

There seem to be two issues here that are being conflated.

The first is the value of peer review. I don't agree with the arguments that having a select group of people, who are experts in their fields, reviewing papers is a bad thing. Nor do I think that opening it up will result in anything other than a terrible amount of noise.

The second argument is over the necessity of for-pay journals. Here, I think there could be a lot of work... if the new journal still provides the same amount of review and scrutiny as the current ones.

Just to add a data point that I usually find is missing in this discussion: US Academic Libraries spend nearly $2 Billion/year on serials[0]. And if you look the rate with which that expenditure increases is pretty amazing.

[0] http://library.tumblr.com/post/16817715155/rising-cost-of-se...

Here's a previous discussion on HN. It begins with a summary of what's already going on with open access to academic papers -- a lot has already happened, far more than many people are aware!:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3174407

Reply on news.ycombinator.com