Comment by xaa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xaa | Hacker News Reader

As a scientist, it is so funny to read about the "valuable contributions that the scientific publishing industry provides".

The scientific publishing industry does not write, review, or edit any of the content it publishes -- volunteer scientists do that. It literally takes a pre-formatted PDF or Word document and sticks it on a website, and maybe into a print edition. It charges multi-thousand dollar fees to authors to publish the articles, fees to institutions to access them, and still litters the website/journal with ads. And their profit margin is in the 40% area.

This industry is an absolute scourge on human progress, and a 12-month embargo does not go nearly far enough. 12 months is an eternity in science.

I will say that the publishing industry does do some very minor but useful things, like linkification of references, management of submitting the publication record to PubMed, etc. But the cost is exorbitant, and the government could provide these services for a fraction of the cost.

Edit: Oh, and journal prices are rising much faster than the CPI. While at the same time most have reduced or eliminated a print edition, and increasingly require reformatting to be done by faculty. Hmm...

Have you ever looked at the budget of an academic journal to see where the money goes ?

The average journal profit margin is 20-30% and that's roughly the same whether you're talking about an open access journal like PLoS or a closed access one. They also have roughly the same operational (staff, etc.) costs. Most new journals tend to be run at a loss for a number of years being subsidised by the more successful ones.

Marketing is another big cost, journals don't magically build reputations, they have marketing budgets to achieve mindshare and to establish a reputation.

There are good reasons for open access, but lets not pretend that journals are cheaper to operate than they actually are.

I'd argue that the open-access model is not much better than the traditional model, because as you point out, it incurs basically the same expenses, but simply charges the author more to recoup the lost institutional subscription.

Now that systems like ArXiV exist, researchers and taxpayers should not be paying for marketing and typography.

But the real reason journals persist is because readers and promotion/tenure committees want a credibility filter. A really good technological solution to this problem hasn't been found (AFAIK), but I don't see that it would be too hard to build some algorithm to rank articles according to author prestige, institution prestige, number of citations, reader interest, etc. If people want a "hard" metric of article impact, they would be better off using number of citations than journal impact factor anyway.

> A really good technological solution to this problem hasn't been found (AFAIK), but I don't see that it would be too hard to build some algorithm to rank articles according to author prestige,

You're hand-waving away one the driving forces not only of the publishing industry, but much of the whole economy. Signals, filters, and branding account for the existence of everything from Louis Vuitton to hiring practices based on school prestige to Asian parents that push their kids to get into MIT. Signaling makes the world go around and you hand-wave it away by saying it shouldn't be hard to replace the branding with "some algorithm."

Right now, "I published in Nature" is simply a proxy for "I published an important paper." or "I am a productive faculty member." I certainly agree that these are valuable messages to signal.

My entire point was that better and more objective ways are being developed that can signal this same message, while cutting out the cost and inconvenience of the journal middleman. The exact recipe for these better ways is still an open question, but I do know several people who are working on it, and I listed several specific examples.

Branding no doubt plays a role. But there is already a major trend towards downplaying branding in favor of more objective metrics like impact factor and the H-index. And I do hope that science can be held to a slightly higher standard of objectivity than the general economy (maybe that's too idealistic?).

> And I do hope that science can be held to a slightly higher standard of objectivity than the general economy (maybe that's too idealistic?).

Doesn't sound to idealistic to this science-oriented engineer. With the field of scientometrics, the feedback loops look like they can be closed entirely within the domain of science instead of needing to extend outside of it to be closed.

There is no reason to think that actual experimental studies can't be brought to bear on the matter of what ranking/organizing metrics of papers/research best (for various definitions of 'best') help scientists do their work. Also no a priori reason I can see why various fields would converge to the same measures; or that those most used within science would be the ones that the press, students, people external to the fields, and such would find most helpful.

Google does a better job of cataloguing the journal records; i fear you are giving to the commercial publishers too much credit. I agree that their net contribution is negative and at this point they have become an impediment to scientific progress. The reasons they still exist is because they maintain an image of authority among scientists, and indirectly determine their career prospects (in the life sciences at least). This image is cultivated through marketing, lobbying, and vast connections to the mainstream press and media.

What's needed is a single day of coordinated action. Where all scientists and researchers move to free publications in one big move.

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