
Is the business of scientific publishing bad for science? - a_w
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
======
HarryHirsch
In the old days there were the journals from the scientific societies and the
Elsevier-Pergamon duopoly. Society journals were respectable, generally
speaking, and subscriptions were affordable. Elsevier/Pergamon was expensive,
pretty bad, and something you could do without if you had to. If the library
wouldn't subscribe you'd ask for a reprint. Things weren't great 30 years ago
but manageable.

Several things have happened since. The society journals have mostly been sold
to commercial publishers, and prices have gone up steeply, Elsevier is as
sketchy as always but even more expensive, and the various open-access
journals have popped up, with a quality even worse than Elsevier. Finally,
even academics at teaching institutions are forced to publish thanks to
clueless administrators and a general shortage of funds.

Scientific publishing is fully out of control. Librarians thought they had it
bad in 2001, but look at it now!

~~~
FabHK
Sorry, I really meant to refrain from it, but having read the article, I'm
again forced to say:

 _Ceterum censeo Elsevier esse delendum._

(Could be Elsevierum, depending which declension - it's an accusativus cum
infinitivo)

------
darawk
Yes, definitely. Is this even a discussion? Scientific journal companies
extract enormous rents and add literally zero value. I'm not using 'literally'
in the not-actually-literally sense that people sometimes use it. I mean
_literally_ zero value. They either don't pay, or barely pay, the peer
researchers who review the material (the only valuable part). Aside from that,
they do what, exactly? Publish it? The thing that costs effectively zero
dollars to do on the internet now? It's disgusting that this business still
exists.

~~~
Fomite
A number of journals provide copy-editing and layout services. My own papers
have been improved by both.

~~~
averagewall
Why is this even relevant? Few people actually read published papers compared
to, say, blogs, so the standard needn't be so high - inconveniencing 100
people is better than inconveniencing 1000. Yet nobody pays for copy editing
and layout of their blog. It's not only trivial but also not important if it
isn't quite right.

If readability is important for journal articles, then layout is the least
important way to achieve that. The whole style of writing needs to be changed.
They're notoriously hard to read even for other researchers in similar fields.
I'm not saying dumb it down but, for example, perhaps they could be structured
a bit like a newspaper story with a quick overview using common vocabulary
first, then more details and more precise language later. That's just one idea
but my general point is that readability is not what they're aiming for anyway
so why bother making it look pretty?

~~~
jeffwass
This is already the case. Every scientific journal article I've seen starts
with an abstract, which is exactly the summary you desire.

~~~
averagewall
That's a start but doesn't go nearly far enough to relieve the burden of
reading papers that researchers have to suffer through. An abstract usually
has a high density jargon and undefined terms that are specific to the niche
they're working in. What's easy to read is news articles that are based on
scientific papers. The fact that journalists write articles instead of just
copying and pasting the abstract shows that abstracts aren't very readable.

Also, once you're past the abstract, it's still heavy going. Compare that to
text books which tend to be a bit easier to follow.

I'm not saying these are the answers. Just highlighting the problem of
readability. That seems more serious than not having a space between a unit
and a number, or a formula having a disproportionately big fraction. Even more
important than spelling and grammar which humans can mostly correct as they
go.

~~~
Someone
_" The fact that journalists write articles instead of just copying and
pasting the abstract shows that abstracts aren't very readable."_

No, it shows that journalists write for a _different_ audience.

 _" What's easy to read is news articles that are based on scientific
papers."_

That shows journalists wrote for a _wider_ audience.

The articles that journalists write are considered better by laymen, but
typically, they provide insufficient information for experts to see what
exactly is new in the article and/or simplify so much that experts find the
information presented downright _wrong_ (search HN on battery or fusion break-
throughs for examples)

But yes, it is true that quite a few scientists could do with a good editor
that helps them write text that is easier to understand for experts. The
current citation-happy culture doesn't help there, with abstracts that have
more "(Newton, 1754)" phrases than actual text describing the work done.

------
robertwalsh0
I'm excited about the increasing frequency in which articles on this topic are
showing up on HN. I believe that many of the problems in academic publishing
can be remedied by giving the scholarly community affordable tools to manage
and publish journals. After all, they are already writing and peer-reviewing
the material themselves. Full disclosure: I'm a founder of a company called
Scholastica ([https://www.scholasticahq.com](https://www.scholasticahq.com)),
a peer-review and publishing platform used by hundreds of journals across a
variety of disciplines ranging from law to mathematics. Sir Timothy Gowers,
the Fields Medal winner and Cambridge Mathematics prof, launched a high-
quality ArXiv overlay journal on the platform about a year ago
([http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/](http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/))
which I think lends credence to the idea that the scholarly community can
write, review, and publish work without relying on the current corporate
publisher status quo.

~~~
tehwalrus
How is your business tackling the current "impact factor" protection scam?

(I am a fan of projects like yours, just much more pessimistic!)

------
aj7
We haven't even addressed the distortion that negative results, such as the
results of failed experiments, are never published, yet are extremely
valuable. Perhaps scientists wish to condemn their peers to fighting battles
already lost.

~~~
jabl
IME, scientists have wildly different outlooks here. Some are all flowers and
unicorns "we're doing it to better humanity" etc., others are fighting vicious
(if imaginary?) battles against their scientific peers (=competitors) about
who can publish the most (impactful) papers.

For the latter group, if you manage to trick your competitor into a year-long
wild goose chase, all the better.

------
comstock
Yes, next question.

More seriously, it's hard to see what value publishers possibly be adding to
the publishing process. Beyond tier one journals, full time editors don't
really seem to do very much.

But I'd love to see some data supporting the argument that they're of value.

------
jogundas
My feeling is that the misery is inhomogeneously distributed when it comes to
scientific disciplines.

In physics the situation does not seem too terrible. The American Physical
Society is a nonprofit which runs a family of go-to subscription-type
journals. Preprints on arxiv are the standard.

Publishing innovations are popping up from time to time. A prominent example
is scipost.org, which is funded by national funding agencies and is free to
both publish and read. Also, their peer-review is public.

Full disclosure: I have published in various APS journals.

~~~
mjn
Parts of computer science are not too bad either. In my field, AI, the top-
tier journals and conferences are all open-access and run by nonprofits. I
mention conferences because in computer science they are important as well;
the top peer-reviewed conference proceedings are as important as journals.

* The top two journals are probably JMLR (machine learning) and JAIR (AI in general), both open access and run by nonprofits. No publication charges either.

* The top two general AI conferences are AAAI and IJCAI; the top two machine learning conference are ICML and NIPS. All four of these publish open-access proceedings (including archives of past proceedings) and are run by nonprofits.

Of course this didn't happen entirely by default, it's taken some effort over
the years. AAAI has always been nonprofit, but its digital library has not
always been open access. And in machine learning, the top journals used to be
run by the Elsevier/Springer duopoly, which was solved in the early 2000s by
40 editors of _Machine Learning_ journal, which included a large proportion of
top researchers in the field, resigning en masse to start an open-access
alternative:
[http://www.jmlr.org/statement.html](http://www.jmlr.org/statement.html)

~~~
soulbadguy
The resignation letter is actually a great read. I think the author summarized
the situation quite well :

"We see little benefit accruing to our community from a mechanism that ensures
revenue for a third party by restricting the communication channel between
authors and readers."

------
justicezyx
There should not be an industry for scientific publishing in the first place.

~~~
Aeolun
Of course there should be. Scientists can't publish and format their own
journal articles for printing.

Having dedicated reviewers to decide what enters the journal is also great.

You also need someone to coordinate the peer-review so it's as painless for
the involved scientists as possible.

The question is whether those things are worth the exorbitant cost that's
currently being charged.

~~~
new299
> Of course there should be. Scientists can't publish and format their own
> journal articles for printing.

They already do! Many (most?/all?) journals require authors to format the
paper in journal style.

> Having dedicated reviewers to decide what enters the journal is also great.

In the vast majority of cases (non-tier one journals, basically not Science
and Nature) this doesn't happen. They just look at the tick boxes the referees
select (Accept with minor revisions, accept with major revisions etc).

> You also need someone to coordinate the peer-review so it's as painless for
> the involved scientists as possible.

You need a website where reviews can be uploaded. These already exist, and are
not a huge infrastructure burden.

> The question is whether those things are worth the exorbitant cost that's
> currently being charged.

It's clear to most scientists that they're not. What you're paying for is the
lockin effect these journals have by virtue of having a high impact factor.

~~~
Fomite
> They already do! Many (most?/all?) journals require authors to format the
> paper in journal style.

Not in many biomedical journals where Word is the standard format for a paper
to be submitted in.

> In the vast majority of cases (non-tier one journals, basically not Science
> and Nature) this doesn't happen. They just look at the tick boxes the
> referees select (Accept with minor revisions, accept with major revisions
> etc).

I've appealed and/or argued successfully with editors to change a decision
from "what the referees ticked" on a number of occasions.

> It's clear to most scientists that they're not. What you're paying for is
> the lockin effect these journals have by virtue of having a high impact
> factor.

It should be noted its not _just_ impact factor that goes into prestige. For
example, at it's height, PLoS ONE had an impact factor comparable to several
major society-level journals that carried considerably more weight. "I publish
all my work in PLoS ONE" versus "I publish all my work in Epidemiology and
AJE" would likely result in _very_ different yearly evaluations.

~~~
new299
> Not in many biomedical journals where Word is the standard format for a
> paper to be submitted in.

I don't know about all journals. The ones I've submitted to usually provide a
Word or Latex template.

> I've appealed and/or argued successfully with editors to change a decision
> from "what the referees ticked" on a number of occasions.

In almost all journals editors are not paid staff. They are volunteers.
Personally I've never seen a paper will all negative reviews get accepted by
an editor, but they have some sway it's true.

------
rgejman
I think about this problem a lot because the whole biomedical publishing
industry is so backwards.

One of the reasons why scientists are currently dependent on the journal
industry is because the journals control peer review. Unfortunately, instead
of merely reviewing manuscripts for correctness, the journals link peer review
to "impact," which is a prospective measure of importance (i.e. whether they
are likely to get many citations). Every journal you submit your manuscript to
will put it through a new round of peer review looking for both correctness
and impact. Massive amounts of time are wasted by working scientists and
journal editors attempting to prospectively "grade" manuscripts on how
important they will be (along with checking the correctness of the
manuscript). Upon rejection for either correctness or impact, authors resubmit
their manuscript to a lower tier journal (+/\- revision) and wait for the next
round of reviews. Rinse/repeat. Eventually, assuming the paper is not awful,
it will be published.

How could we do it differently?

One idea is to disentangle impact from correctness and eliminate the journals
from peer review. Scientists already review each others manuscripts pro-bono,
so here's a proposal: Scientists submit manuscripts to bioRxiv as "pre-prints"
for a nominal fee (say $1000) and request peer review. An editor selects 3-4
potential reviewers and reviewers are paid a nominal fee (~$150) to perform
the review. The money paid by authors covers the reviewer fees and editors
salaries. After peer review, authors can decide whether they want to submit
their articles for additional peer review and fancy publication in a journal.

Impact is thereafter judged only by how many citations a paper gets, not which
glossy magazine it gets published in.

~~~
new299
It's true, but the review process (while not the publisher) does add value.
It's really useful to highlight the gaps in an authors work and suggest
additional analysis they could do to support the work and make it more useful.
Or even highlight areas where the work is not reproducible (algorithms not
sufficiently well described, data not available etc).

~~~
rgejman
Agreed. That's why I'm arguing that peer reviews should be handled separately
from publication or any consideration of impact.

------
arcanus
Betteridge's law be damned, the business of scientific publishing is bad for
science. Scientific publishing is a complete mess. We have a large scale
business built around an industry funded by public money.

This creates barriers to scientists getting access to research papers. As
research papers are the lifeblood of discourse in the sciences, we are
artificially limiting the effectiveness of our scientists.

In case you were not paying attention, science and engineering is ultimately
responsible for _all_ economic growth, so the public has a vested interest in
enabling successful outcomes in this space.

------
6stringmerc
Anything with an emotional component of drive that exceeds rationality with
respect to holding out for money will of course be exploited.

That's a really high minded way of saying "For every Artist, Musician,
Scientist, or Teacher trying to make $1, there's a Shitty C-Student there
making $5 before letting go of the rest downstream."

It might sound harsh but it's a fundamental human truth in the US business
model of Art-as-Commercial.

------
matthewmacleod
Jason Hoyt (of PeerJ) wrote an interesting commentary on this article:
[https://twitter.com/jasonHoyt/status/879624241817296896](https://twitter.com/jasonHoyt/status/879624241817296896)

Ultimately it's a bit more complex than "all publishers are evil". There are a
while slew of low-cost, open-access journals out there, but the wider academic
community still places far too much weight on individual journals' impact
factors.

Is it the responsibility of publishers to try to effect a wider change in
attitudes? It seems doomed to failure to try and make them, and it seems like
pressure from within might be the only way to deal with the problem.

------
zenkat
Why haven't PLoS and Science One eaten Elsivier's cake? Their model makes
perfect sense in a web-based world. Why are scientists still playing
Elsivier's game?

~~~
kem
Pay-to-publish has its own problems.

I think the current model has issues, and there should be a movement in
general toward open dissemination of research, but I'm not sure the PLoS model
is much better in a lot of ways. Maybe not worse, but maybe not better.

Where this is all headed is anyone's guess. If I had to, eventually most
scientific research will just appear in blogs, being treated like personal
journals or something, or in research society journals, kind of like what is
referenced in the article, basically run by academic research organizations.

My experience with the second model is that there are organizations that would
like to run things that way, but run into problems with copyediting, layout
and design, and reviewing infrastructure. They kind of think it's something
they can just do on the fly but as they do it they realize it's more work.
Maybe a company that just provides the tools is the way to go, but at some
point that would probably basically become a publisher.

~~~
jabl
> Where this is all headed is anyone's guess. If I had to, eventually most
> scientific research will just appear in blogs, being treated like personal
> journals or something, or in research society journals, kind of like what is
> referenced in the article, basically run by academic research organizations.

I'm somewhat hopeful about stuff like "arxiv overlay journals". E.g. see
description at [http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/for-
authors](http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/for-authors)

------
nnfy
If I'm not mistaken, many publicly funded studies end up behind paywalls.
Terrible model. Especially in the age of wiki based media. Combine this
problem with low quality science necessitated by the publish or perish
doctrine, failure to incentivize publishing of negative results, p-value
misuse, and the reproducibility crisis of soft sciences, and it is almost a
wonder that we make any progress at all! Also ironic that an institution
dedicated to order and objectivity suffers from problems with both.

Loosley related commentary: perhaps it is illustrative of the difficulty in
bridging the steep impedance mismatch between idea and practice.

------
honestoHeminway
I think, its a artificial status symbol for universitys- if you cant afford it
- you are not really a scientistic institution.

Like all statussymbols, it could easily be replaced with something more
pragmatic - and will never be, because ironically - in something as
meritocratic as the sciences, the caste longs for the aristocratic.

------
lallysingh
Wasn't the point of the web to be a replacement for this? Nobody's done the
meta level work of making reviews of URLs easy to access in a relevant way, I
think.

But that would be the best replacement, right?

------
guscost
Corrupt institutions are trying to claim ownership of science? What a
surprise...

~~~
HarryHirsch
More like rent-seeking. Everyone wants a piece of the action, everyone wants
to be a middleman, especially when the taxpayer pays the bill.

~~~
convolvatron
the really funny thing is that they have found a strategic position, a local
minimum, so deep that apparently they cant get dislodged. even though everyone
hates them. even though they provide no demonstrable value. even though,
arguably, the process they embody is detrimental to the host (science,
humanity, the progress of knowledge).

this is the inarguable sign of a corrupt process - 'eh, i know its wrong, but
what are you gonna do?'

i hate the fact that i pay acm membership so i can read papers when i want. i
still do every year.

------
dang
Savvy headline writers flip the bit on Betteridge.

We detached this comment from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14658308](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14658308)
and marked it off topic.

