Comment by ScottBurson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ScottBurson | Hacker News Reader

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I think you're mistaken about why the authors are doing this. It's not fundamentalism; they just don't like to see the effort they invest in writing and reviewing these papers go to enriching the publisher while they, the mathematicians and scientists, don't see a dime out of it.

Basically, the publishers have figured out a way to insert themselves as parasites into the system, based on the fact that many academics must publish or perish. They charge substantial rents and contribute little if any value. Mostly, they coordinate the peer reviews (for which they don't pay a dime) and handle the actual printing (of little value anymore).

It's very difficult for any individual actor in the system to opt out of using them. Untenured professors need to publish ("or perish", as they say); they are not in a position to take a stand on this issue. Libraries are disincented from cancelling individual journal subscriptions by clever bundling by the publishers.

I can understand why people wouldn't want to continue to be taken advantage of in this manner. I wouldn't either.

The journals offer a service: branding and aggregation. There is nothing devious about it like you're implying (not any more devious than Google making money from aggregating other peoples' news articles). Your disagreement seems to be with the value of the service, and I think that's just a matter of you undervaluing branding and signaling. There are a lot of people who write a lot of tripe. Kooks, quacks, etc. Any of them can put their crap up on the internet (they're called blogs). What the journals offer is a branding that certain articles rise above a minimal level threshold of value, and a central point of accessing such articles.

Nobody is forced to use their service. Your point that untenured professors must "publish or perish" doesn't fully analyze the situation. Tenure committees have no intrinsic reason to favor these publishers. They care only to the extent that these publishers have the brand that signals to them and others: "hey, this author doesn't completely suck."

Now, the publishers largely inherited these brands, from back when publishing was a more involved process involving paper. But there is nothing nefarious keeping them in the system. Any open access publisher could rise up tomorrow and as long as they could develop the brand and signaling power they could take on the publishers. But regardless of anything else, branding, sorting, filtering, and signaling are things people want, even more than free and easy access to information. And the publishers stay in the loop because they offer those things.

So you agree, then, that this is just a business situation and has nothing to do with Stallmanesque ideology or Swartz-ish liberation of information, despite the superficial similarity to the latter (universities and journals are involved). You may not agree with the boycotters' perceptions of the situation, but that doesn't change the fact that they are acting in their own perceived self-interest.

Your comment that opened the thread is therefore off the mark. (For the record, I agree with your replies to 'clicks. I just don't think the argument you're having with him/her is relevant to this boycott.)

This is mostly right. This is certainly not about the boycotters believing all information (or even all academic publications) should be free, as the other branch of rayiner's thread assumes. And if Elsevier was more reasonable in their rates, this issue might never have come up or gained momentum.

However, as academics look around and see that the costs of publishing and hosting have become negligible compared to the value of their volunteer contributions, most of them feel that their own works should be freely available online or even that other academics ought to make their works freely available in accordance with culture of academia.

This is perfectly reasonable (of course it is -- look at the people involved) and I agree with you that rayiner is off the mark on this one.

As you acknowledge, the branding is almost nothing to do with the publisher itself though. Nobody cares a jot that journal X is from publisher Y (I don't even know who publishes most of the big econ journals I read papers in).

The 'branding' (and I think most academics would prefer the term reputation) is developed over many years by good decisions on the part of editors and reviewers — generally academics working for free — and by others making citations. The publishers contribute negligibly to this, which is why the substantial rents they subsequently extract — and the exclusivity of knowledge this promotes — are so annoying to people.

Well, for what it's worth publishers are responsible for maintaining those editorial boards, over time periods much longer than academic careers. They care about the long term sustainability of the journals for commercial reasons, of course.

I guess so. Though do the same journals stay at the tops of their fields for that long?

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