
Mathematicians aim to take publishers out of publishing - ananyob
http://www.nature.com/news/mathematicians-aim-to-take-publishers-out-of-publishing-1.12243
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stephencanon
Seems rather behind the times. MSP (<http://msp.org/about/>) and others seem
to have already shown that "researchers can organize the peer review and
publication of their work at minimal cost, without involving commercial
publishers".

I understand that this link is talking about something slightly different
(basically collecting links to Arxiv instead of "publishing a journal"), but I
also don't think this is as ground-breaking as Nature makes it out to be.

~~~
xamuel
The difficulty in escaping Springer/Elsevier is not that researchers are too
dumb to organize their own journals/peer review. Quite the opposite, we
already do that FOR Springer/Elsevier.

The difficulty is that existing publishers own journals which have gathered
significant prestige over decades and sometimes centuries. And hiring boards,
swamped and unable to take a closer look, often just look at which journals a
prospect has published in. That means if you're not submitting to these
prestigious journals, you're crippling yourself. And by submitting to them,
you're adding to their prestige, making it a vicious self-feedback loop.

~~~
jff
But if you get a prestigious mathematician, such as Gowers, to back your new
journal, you may get some traction.

~~~
jamessb
Or if you get the entire editorial board to resign, and start a new journal.

This happened with the board of Topology
(<http://www.ams.org/notices/200705/comm-toped-web.pdf>), who then set up the
Journal of Topology. The new journal isn't open access, but it is cheaper.
Then the editors of K-theory resigned to set up the Journal of K-theory, which
was less than half the price of its predecessor.

~~~
jacoblyles
This remains a problem - that researchers in many field don't appreciate the
utility of true open access (free to read and free to reuse).

see: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L5rVH1KGBCY>

Cheaper is nice, but free (and machine accessible!) lets us do things that
have never been done before.

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ekurutepe
There has been many open/free publications in the scientific community. The
basic idea is that if most of the work (writing, formatting, reviewing and
selecting) is done by researchers for free anyway, why should the same
researchers (or their institutions) pay for the privilege of accessing these
papers.

Such efforts remain marginal because in my experience the tenured professor
who decides which work to publish where tends to select well established
commercial outlets which supposedly have a better name/impact/reputation/fame
and all that goes with it.

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kghose
I found the arxiv server running costs astounding ($800,000/y). Could any one
comment on that? Is that typical?

~~~
tangue
This is an error. It's the total operating costs. Server costs for 2013 are
budgeted for 41,700 $

[https://confluence.cornell.edu/download/attachments/12711648...](https://confluence.cornell.edu/download/attachments/127116484/arXiv+Business+Model.pdf)

~~~
scott_s
I don't think it's an error - and if it is, they still got the right message
across. The text says it costs $826,000 to _run_ arXiv's servers. What they
meant was to operate arXiv itself, but the main purpose of arXiv is for those
servers, so I think it's valid to say "run the servers" as a proxy for all of
arXiv itself. That the physical hardware costs $41,700 is not the most
important thing. The important figure here is the total operating costs, as
that's what keeps the whole show going.

This is a good demonstration of the fact that people are generally more
expensive than hardware, and paying people to do something as their fulltime
job is expensive.

~~~
mbell
They spend half their $ on support and admin people. I can't honestly fathom
how a site like arXiv could require 3 full time user support people with part
time students helping...

They have 1.5 FTE listed as devops for arXiv proper, the extra 0.75 in 2013
appears to be dedicated to this: <http://invenio-software.org/>

The actual cost to 'run the servers' appears to be around $200,000 - $250,000.

The rest is going into support and I guess a full time person to just
'manage', whatever that means for a project of this type/scope...fund raise I
guess? I would think that you'd have volunteer advisers helping with that
given the nature of the project.

~~~
michaelhoffman
You guess? The linked report says 0.5 FTE for "management and administration."

I think it's pretty unrealistic to think that managing 7 people alone wouldn't
require even a half-time job. Yes, not to mention fundraising, as well as
interacting with the advisory board, the volunteer moderators, outreach to
users and policymakers.

It's also unrealistic to think that running an article management system that
has 6000-8000 submissions per month from users all over the world of varying
technical ability couldn't occupy three full time user support staff.

------
tokenadult
From Jelte Wicherts writing in Frontiers of Computational Neuroscience (an
open-access journal) comes a set of general suggestions

Jelte M. Wicherts, Rogier A. Kievit, Marjan Bakker and Denny Borsboom. Letting
the daylight in: reviewing the reviewers and other ways to maximize
transparency in science. Front. Comput. Neurosci., 03 April 2012 doi:
10.3389/fncom.2012.00020

[http://www.frontiersin.org/Computational_Neuroscience/10.338...](http://www.frontiersin.org/Computational_Neuroscience/10.3389/fncom.2012.00020/full)

on how to make the peer-review process in scientific publishing more reliable.
Wicherts does a lot of research on this issue to try to reduce the number of
dubious publications in his main discipline, the psychology of human
intelligence.

"With the emergence of online publishing, opportunities to maximize
transparency of scientific research have grown considerably. However, these
possibilities are still only marginally used. We argue for the implementation
of (1) peer-reviewed peer review, (2) transparent editorial hierarchies, and
(3) online data publication. First, peer-reviewed peer review entails a
community-wide review system in which reviews are published online and rated
by peers. This ensures accountability of reviewers, thereby increasing
academic quality of reviews. Second, reviewers who write many highly regarded
reviews may move to higher editorial positions. Third, online publication of
data ensures the possibility of independent verification of inferential claims
in published papers. This counters statistical errors and overly positive
reporting of statistical results. We illustrate the benefits of these
strategies by discussing an example in which the classical publication system
has gone awry, namely controversial IQ research. We argue that this case would
have likely been avoided using more transparent publication practices. We
argue that the proposed system leads to better reviews, meritocratic editorial
hierarchies, and a higher degree of replicability of statistical analyses."

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robertwalsh0
Scholastica had this functionality 11 months ago:
[http://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/17592143685/arxiv-
integra...](http://blog.scholasticahq.com/post/17592143685/arxiv-integration-
with-scholastica-scholastica)

What can a small startup do to bring attention to our solution?

~~~
mhluongo
It seems like you guys have had a marketing/awareness issue for a while. In
fact, I'd love to talk to you about it off-HN- I've wondered if we (@
scholr.ly) could find a way to collaborate.

~~~
robertwalsh0
Sure, you can email me at rwalsh [at] scholasticahq.com

------
krutulis
Could we make peer review even more valuable if at least some parts of the
_review process_ were eventually made available to the public? I think of this
especially when I hear the occasional story of fake articles making it through
the process.

I can imagine the list of "reviewers & comments" some day becoming as
important as the list of citations. Would reviewers be better motivated if
they knew that their feedback and requested changes were going to be part of
the public record? Or would the whole process degenerate into writing
meaningless sound bites for the the scholarly equivalent of dust jacket
blurbs?

~~~
gjm11
So now you're a young researcher and you receive a manuscript for review. It's
no good and you pan it mercilessly in review.

Then your review gets published, and it just so happens that the author of the
paper is a senior person at the university where you apply for your next job.
Oops.

So more-junior academics might start being reluctant to recommend rejection of
any paper. Or, if they are told who the author is (which they generally are),
reluctant to recommend rejection of any paper whose author might ever be
important to their career.

These seem like really bad incentives.

~~~
krutulis
The idea that appraisal of academic work must be made in secret does not ring
true. Perhaps universities have degenerated into political posturing over
pursuit of knowledge, but even this seems like an argument for opening the
process in order to reform it.

The young researcher should not have to be the one to tell the senior
researcher the work is crap. This is why the process is called "peer" review.
Of course, the senior researcher should not be submitting crap, and should be
told bluntly if she or he does.

But perhaps I'm missing the point and "peer review" is now doublespeak for the
process of editing a paper. In this case, the academic publishing racket
appears even more absurd.

~~~
jacquesm
Academia is rife with politics. I've seen some of this up close through an ex
girlfriend and I was frankly shocked at the pettiness and the vindictiveness
of it all. Furthering science didn't seem to be at the forefront of the minds
of those participating, it seemed to be mostly about ego. This was in the
field of biology, possibly other fields are better / worse.

~~~
impendia
I am an academic mathematician. Happily, I have observed little of what you
described. Ego, sure, but pettiness and vindictiveness, no.

~~~
jacquesm
Math may very well be a huge exception to this because all mathematicians can
test their proofs in an objective way rather than as partial opinions or bits
of understanding of a greater whole. It's a discovery process with 'true' or
'false' embedded right into the core of the science.

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mbq
This also happens organically -- for instance the best IF journal in JCR
2011's statistics & probability group is open access, CC-BY and fully gratis
Journal of Statistical Software.

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quahada
Does anyone else find it ironic this article is by Nature, one of the biggest
scientific publishers?

~~~
jacquesm
Nature is not a publisher, it is a publication by Macmillan (the nature
publishing group is a division of Macmillan).

------
jacoblyles
I would like to see them run their software project as open source. It might
save them some money.

