
MIT can honor Aaron Swartz by fighting to make journals open to everyone - RyanMcGreal
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/01/aaron_swartz_jstor_mit_can_honor_the_internet_activist_by_fighting_to_make.single.html
======
impendia
> Third, MIT should instruct its deans and other officials to no longer look
> favorably upon the mere fact of publication in a “prestigious” journal when
> making hiring and tenure decisions. Instead, promotions should be based on
> the quality of a person’s work, wherever it’s been published. (This sounds
> obvious, but most people in academia will tell you that where you publish is
> just as important as what you publish.)

I wish I liked this article, but it seems that Manjoo has failed to appreciate
why this problem is difficult, and therefore, why it has not been solved
already.

~~~
pseut
Yeah, the casual suggestion that MIT should try to badly damage the careers of
most of its faculty (presumably causing them to leave) suggests that he hasn't
thought about this problem very long or talked about it with many people. As
much as I dislike academic publishing, the last thing I want is to have deans
and their staff evaluate the merits of research on a case by case basis. It
sounds nice in theory, I guess, but they're people with agendas and biases
too, and even setting that aside, they don't have the time or the training to
do it. (as an, I hope, neutral example: could a dean trained as an economist
really evaluate the relative merits of 15 different experimental physics
papers? Could a trained physicist really evaluate the contributions of 15
different economics papers?) (note that this all applies to deans at _other_
universities. The deans at _my_ university are of course exceptional and above
reproach).

So, on the one hand, even MIT probably can't unilaterally make a lot of
progress on this issue. On the other hand... almost every recent paper I've
ever been interested in is available from the author's webpage (making this
quote: "much of the work produced in academia is never seen by anyone outside
that cloistered world, because everyone who’s not affiliated with a university
is cut off from access" ring hollow to me), all of the work to produce the
journals is done for free or nearly free by researchers, and (anecdotally)
everyone prefers electronic copies of the journal articles anyway. It seems
like open access publication is almost inevitable.

A more manageable (but less sexy) step might be for MIT and other universities
to defray the admin costs for some of these flagship journals that want to go
open-access. The article mentions the _American Historical Review_ as having
annual (editorial) costs of about $500k [1], which is tiny for a university.

[1] From this post: [http://blog.historians.org/news/1734/aha-statement-on-
schola...](http://blog.historians.org/news/1734/aha-statement-on-scholarly-
journal-publishing)

~~~
RichardPrice
You're right that the central challenge here is helping academics evaluate
each other's work without relying so heavily on journal titles, closed access
journals or otherwise. There is some movement here. Increasingly hiring
committees are taking other reputation metrics into account when evaluating
work (inbound citation counts, readership metrics, follower counts - anything
that may make the job of an evaluation committee a little bit easier).

The fact that papers you are looking for tend to be available on author's
webpages is atypical. A very small percentage of the 2 million papers
published each year is available online for free. Institutions pay $8 billion
a year to subscribe to journals, and they would be only too glad to cancel
those subscriptions if they could.

~~~
pseut
>The fact that papers you are looking for tend to be available on author's
webpages is atypical. A very small percentage of the 2 million papers
published each year is available online for free.

I'd love to see data on this, so I can see _why_ my experience is atypical:
are conventions different in some fields than others? Do I just have good
luck? Am I misremembering or just wrong (which is possible)? The original
article states, "Much of the work produced in academia is never seen by anyone
outside that cloistered world, because everyone who’s not affiliated with a
university is cut off from access" and I'd really like to know exactly which
articles Manjoo has looked for and been unable to find w/out a university
license. Institutional access needs to be a lot more comprehensive than what
almost any individual needs access to, so I don't think that their
subscription costs really are compelling evidence against my experience.

I'm kind of surprised that no one's pointed out an easy and really effective
step MIT could take unilaterally: make all of the journals the MIT Press
publishes open access (MIT is also a publisher). Some of them are among the
best journals in their fields (e.g. the _Quarterly Journal of Economics_ is
one of the 4 most prestigious journals in econ and the _Review of Economics
and Statistics_ is very very good).

------
snowwrestler
I'm not a fan of linking major cultural or ideological issues to specific
tragedies in this way. If open access is a good idea on the merits, then the
merits are where the battle will be won or lost.

The article points out one reason to not provide open access: the difficulty
of financing peer-reviewed publishing if subscriptions are free. If there is
not a good solution for that problem, the emotional appeal of "do it for
Aaron" will not be enough to win--especially because the people who feel the
greatest emotional attachment to Aaron are the people who already agreed with
him.

The rallying cry "do it for [person]" is usually only effective at rallying
the troops who are already on your side, not convincing the other side.

~~~
tehwalrus

        | the difficulty of financing peer-reviewed publishing if subscriptions are free
    

note, though, that scientists are not paid to edit journals nor peer-review
articles in them; the publishers collect their cut simply for hosting the
article on a website (and printing physical copies, but basically nobody uses
them anymore.)

If the publishers were more honest, and allowed people to download papers for
the cost of the bandwidth plus a small contribution towards a sysadmin's
salary, say 20 cents, and charged the full $10 wack for physical
subscriptions/prints, we would have app-store economics and much, much less of
a problem.

Of course, people with a monopoly don't tend to reduce their prices
voluntarily (apart from Amazon..) and full, free, open access (at least for
publicly funded research) is a very reasonable demand.

~~~
pseut
This doesn't affect your argument at all, but academics _are_ sometimes paid a
small amount to edit journals; not enough though (AFAIK) to affect their
decisionmaking.

------
hect0r
I don't think there is a moral argument for "freeing" existing content since
all parties to the "paid journal" business model, including the paper authors,
seem to have entered into these arrangements with coercion. The authors of
papers are, in fact, paid; they are paid with the prestige that comes from
being published in such a journal and do so willingly and fully aware that
someone else will make money from the work via selling subscriptions etc

A better idea would be to invest the effort and money in building free
alternatives based on alternative business models and working out how to
incent authors to use them. This doesn't involve the breaking of any contracts
or dishonouring agreements and is actually addressing the root cause rather
than engaging in journal by journal skirmishes.

~~~
betterunix
"I don't think there is a moral argument for "freeing" existing content"

Well I guess that depends on what you base your morality on. I am of the view
that it is inherently immoral to base a person's access to education on their
wealth, because it ensures that wealthier people will have an easier time
remaining wealthy and that poor people will have a harder time becoming
wealthy. That applies equally to grade-school mathematics and reading texts as
it does to academic journals.

"all parties to the "paid journal" business model, including the paper
authors, seem to have entered into these arrangements with coercion."

Failure to publish means losing your job as a researcher; how is that not
coercive?

"The authors of papers are, in fact, paid; they are paid with the prestige
that comes from being published in such a journal"

Which is detrimental to the quality of research, and by extension harmful to
society. By making publishing so prestigious, we have encouraged researchers
to tackle only smaller, safer problems, to avoid questioning the validity of
commonly used research techniques, and to waste resources by publishing minute
variations on a single idea over and over again. Since copyright itself exists
"to promote the progress of science," it would seem that correcting those
problems would be of paramount importance -- and the prestige associated with
publishing in a "big name" journal is one of the factors that created this
situation.

~~~
hect0r
On your first point about access to education being based on wealth: education
and knowledge are products just like any other and cost money to produce.
Hence, it is perfectly moral to charge for access and indeed it is necessary
to ensure that others invest the time and incur the opportunity cost of doing
things that further human knowledge. If we make education and all knowledge
free, how do you propose that the costs of producing this knowledge are
offset? Taxes? Personally, I would rather that research and knowledge is
entirely funded by private money and the private sector than by government
fiat.

With regards to your second point, failure to publish may mean losing your job
but then that is because publish is part and parcel of your job. Failure to
teach, turn up in the morning, wear decent clothes and a plethora of other
things could likewise cost one their job but this still doesn't constitute
coercion because the person is still free to work elsewhere.

As for your last point, I fail to see why this is an issue. Publishing is
prestigious because it is a proxy for the endorsement of ones peers and a form
of validation in an "industry" where there are few objective measures of a
person's relative performance as a researcher. Maybe the issue isn't
publishing per se but rather that journals are not exclusive enough and hence
accept lower grade research. Maybe there is a market then for a journal to be
even more selective -- and therefore even more prestigious than its
competitors -- and by doing so incent a higher level of research.

~~~
betterunix
"education and knowledge are products just like any other"

Not in a democracy. For a democratic system to work, the entire population
needs to be educated well enough to make a rational choice when they are asked
to vote.

If you want a system where knowledge is a "product," what you want is a
plutocracy: a system where the wealthy rule, because only the wealthy are
educated enough to rule. I cannot speak for you, but I live in a country that
was founded on a principle of representative democracy and which has a
constitution that is meant to prevent the establishment of any sort of
aristocracy, plutocracy included.

"it is necessary to ensure that others invest the time and incur the
opportunity cost of doing things that further human knowledge"

That is not what the subscription fees for academic journals are for; the
authors of scientific articles are almost never paid by the publishers who
collect fees for access to those articles. The purpose of journal fees is and
has always been to monetize the publishing industry itself; once upon a time,
before there was an Internet or a Web, that was the best known method of mass-
distributing scientific journals and other academic writing.

The "opportunity cost" of research is paid for by the government and by the
researchers themselves. The overwhelming majority of professional researchers
are being paid less to do their research than they would to work in private
industry. Graduate students, whose work constitutes a sizable portion of the
research work that is done, are paid almost nothing -- barely enough to live
on. There is no "return on investment" to speak of; all a researcher gains
from publishing a paper, in strict economic terms, is a padded CV that _might_
help that researcher advance their career (but which will do little to help
them make as much money as they would in a corporate job). Researchers are
willing to forgo a higher salary for various reasons, but there is a common
theme, which is a high philosophical ideal: the work is more intellectually
interesting, there is a chance to contribute to the greater pool of human
knowledge, working as a university professor allows one to impart knowledge
onto the next generation, there are bigger problems to solve than what
corporations are doing, etc.

"I would rather that research and knowledge is entirely funded by private
money and the private sector than by government fiat."

There are two problems with that:

1\. The private sector tends to focus education on vocational training. There
is certainly a place in the world for such training, and we could not have a
society of specialized workers without some form of vocational training, but
we need more from our education system than job training. Again, if we want to
even pretend that we are a democracy, we have to at least have a populace that
is able to read and understand the implications of major political issues.

2\. Private sector research tends to shy away from big, risky lines of work
that may have no payoff at all. There are few exceptions to this rule; the
most prominent is Microsoft Research, which is one of the only "academic"
research labs in private industry and which is a place where researchers are
doing things nobody else is willing to touch. The development of things like
the Internet, nuclear power, the space program, genome mapping, and other "big
ideas" would almost certainly have not been possible without government
funding, because the key, foundational work of these things had _no commercial
value whatsoever_ , with commercial value being realized only after a great
deal of risky research.

"failure to publish may mean losing your job but then that is because publish
is part and parcel of your job"

Except that people are not paid to "write papers," they are paid to "do
research," which is supposed to be reported on by writing papers. Researchers
who are under pressure to publish more papers can always use "old tricks" like
taking a single good result and splitting it into multiple small results that
can be published one at a time, or publishing a good result and then
publishing multiple tiny variations on that result. As I noted above,
researchers do not generally choose their careers because of the pay; it is
equally true that researchers do not choose their careers because they are
excited by the idea of publishing a lot of journal articles.

"this still doesn't constitute coercion"

I think you should look up the definition of "coercion" in the dictionary:

<http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/coercion>

Threatening someone with unemployment if they fail to do a particular thing is
coercion _by definition_.

"validation in an "industry" where there are few objective measures of a
person's relative performance as a researcher"

Counting the number of journal articles a person published is not even a
remotely objective method of judging their performance as a researcher. It is
on the level of counting the number of lines of code a person writes as a
measure of their performance as a programmer. The only reason it is used as a
measure of anything is because the people in charge of hiring decisions often
lack the time or expertise needed to closely examine a researcher's work, so
they just combine the number of papers published with the perceived prestige
of the journals those papers were published in and use that as an
approximation. I have seen good work get rejected from top journals, and I
have seen mediocre work get accepted to those same journals, just like I have
seen 10 lines of code that does more than 1000 lines of code in the same
language.

I doubt there is a market-based solution to this, because it is not an
economic problem. It is an academic problem that stems from the policies and
approach we take to judging the quality of research for employment purposes.
When a university is considering hiring a professor, they do not ask their
faculty to read that professor's published work thoroughly; instead, they ask
the faculty to judge whether or not that professor will bring in grant money
(it is unlikely that private sector funding would truly change this; you see
similar patterns of behavior out of the private sector, on both sides), if
that professor can increase or maintain the school's prestige, etc. Teaching
is low on the list of priorities, and a person who spends all their time
chasing after big, difficult, and risky problems has a lower chance of being
hired than a person who follows tried-and-true approaches to research
strategy.

------
gm
I say screw the existing journals and encourage publishing academic work on
new, free journals.

There's nothing that says "existing journals must change or we have no other
option"

~~~
thirdstation
The new journals will lack the prestige and career-boosting qualities of the
established, old-guard journals.

It will take longer than just providing another avenue to publication.

The incentives for publishing need to be addressed adequately. It's relatively
easy nowadays to figure out how to produce articles for publication cheaply.

~~~
grecy
> The new journals will lack the prestige and career-boosting qualities of the
> established, old-guard journals.

True, just like Wikipedia lacks prestige and "credibility" now.

I'm willing to wait +/- 20 years until all those old folks die off or become
irrelevant and today's late teens can't remember a world without Wikipedia and
have never seen a printed encyclopedia.

~~~
rst
But the academics can't "wait +/- 20 years" --- they have careers to build
now. Grad students, post-docs, and junior faculty have to build a portfolio of
work that will be impressive across many institutions where they might get
tenure, or just their next gig. (Most would love to get promoted at MIT, but
the odds are against that.)

If most of those institutions are looking at the same set of prestigious,
closed journals, avoiding those journals is not an option for an ambitious
academic --- and if MIT starts insisting they must, good talent will go
elsewhere.

That's why this is hard.

------
czr80
"are giving their work away to journals for free"

You know, the funny thing is that this pretty much describes the business
model for all websites with user-generated content.

~~~
hect0r
It is also a fallacy that they are giving it away. They must be deriving some
non-monetary value from doing it else they would not do it since they are free
to decide not to publish or select a particular outlet. The fact is that
authors are paid with the prestige that comes from being published in a
journal.

~~~
betterunix
In theory, researchers publish their work in order to make their knowledge
available to others. In theory, the more people who read a published paper,
the better, regardless of whether or not the researcher who wrote it is even
alive. In theory, the only reason researchers put their name, affiliation, and
contact information on published papers is so that they can answer questions
other people might have after reading the paper. It's a great theory...

In practice, researchers publish their work because their jobs and livelihoods
depend on it. In practice, researchers publish the same paper with minor
tweaks in multiple journals because they need to pad their CV. In practice,
most of humanity cannot read journal articles anyway so researchers are only
really communicating with each other when they publish -- and they already
know how to contact each other.

So that is the value researchers derive from publishing their work: failure to
publish means failure to advance one's career. It makes no difference _what_ a
researcher publishes, and so researchers tend to gravitate towards problems
that do not seem very hard (but they make it sound very exciting in the titles
and abstracts of their papers, because the people with hiring/firing power
usually can't get through the introduction).

~~~
pseut
Whose theory are you describing in the first paragraph? Yours? In practice,
the needs of society -- new freely available knowledge -- match up imperfectly
with the needs of the people who can or should do the research: money,
recognition by their peers, time to spend on fun problems, and general
satisfaction (which can and almost always does come from a large degree from
_learning something new that other people will want to learn too_ ).

------
drharris
They can further honor him by putting some reins on their legal team.

~~~
sp332
Well he did sneak into a closet and cause JSTOR to threaten to cut MIT's
access. After things settled down, MIT dropped all charges. I think that was
pretty reasonable.

~~~
waterlesscloud
Where have you seen that they dropped charges? Everything I've read has
indicated exactly the opposite.

~~~
sp332
MIT dropped trespassing charges. (JSTOR also dropped their charges after Aaron
deleted the files and promised not to do it again or something.) The feds got
involved with the "hacking" because it crossed state lines, and the district
attorney in Boston continued the criminal case after both JSTOR and MIT had
settled with Aaron out of court.

~~~
btilly
And according to what the Aaron's lawyers have said, the prosecutors pursued
the case because MIT behind the scenes wanted them to.

MIT is not necessarily blameless here. I for one will be reading that report.

------
clicks
Well, some people are already on it, whether or not MIT chooses to do anything
about it: <http://aaronsw.archiveteam.org/>

------
hakaaaaak
Not to be insensitive to Aaron, but even if this could be pulled off, which it
wouldn't, this might encourage copycat suicides to produce change. Suicide
should not be encouraged. Often change can happen without any harm to self or
others. Sacrificing oneself because there is no other option is one thing; but
suicide to make journals available was probably not Aaron's intent.

------
slacka
I strongly believe that publicly funded research should freely available to
the general public. I use the <http://aaronsw.archiveteam.org/> daily to help
continue Aaron's fight.

Could someone please explain what is stopping arXiv from filling the role
discussed in this article?

------
SagelyGuru
MIT is far more likely to come up with an exonerating report rather than an
excoriating one.

