
The Meddling Middlemen of Academia - Topolomancer
https://bastian.rieck.me/blog/posts/2020/middlemen/
======
impendia
I once had to explain, to a copyeditor at one of the leading mathematics
journals, that the meaning of a fraction changes if you move stuff between the
top and the bottom.

The annual subscription cost for this journal is $3,250.

I am bewildered that we continue to tolerate this state of affairs.

~~~
tdumitrescu
Over the years that I published (in a humanities field), I was astonished by
the rapid decline in copy editing quality at even top publishers like Oxford
University Press. They stopped budgeting for specialists, and started
contracting out copy editing to people who couldn't even tell apart common
non-English languages. I started getting back "final" proofs with diagrams in
the wrong order or with the wrong captions, and was so dearly tempted to just
sign off "looks great!" like they were expecting me to. If only it wasn't my
own reputation on the line if I let these things through.

~~~
Topolomancer
OUP is also my main 'adversary' these days for certain publications. They do
almost everything I described in the article...

~~~
ppod
I like your blog format, is the code available? It looks like one of the
RMarkdown themes a bit?

~~~
Topolomancer
Thanks! Did not see it earlier; you can find the code on GitHub:
[https://github.com/Pseudomanifold/hugo-
purus](https://github.com/Pseudomanifold/hugo-purus)

Feel free to reach out with any questions you might have!

------
humanistbot
This seems to be missing any discussion of non-profit academic society
publishers, which in many fields are the dominant publishers and so much
better than the for-profit companies that seem more dominant in the life
sciences especially. I'm most familiar with the Association for Computing
Machinery (ACM) in computer science. Sure, they have their own bureaucracies
and added costs, but they run all kinds of other programs and events based on
the profits from journals and conferences, including the kind of student
scholarships to conferences they suggest. The overall costs are way lower,
they're governed by the leading professors who are elected from the
membership, they've been far more willing to negotiate with universities in
the big transition to open access, and I've found very little meddling of the
sort this piece describes.

In ACM / CS, the publishing pipeline is now fully based in LaTeX, so authors
effectively do their own typesetting for their own articles. There is now a
standardized template for submissions, so the version of the draft you send to
peer review is typeset in the same way it will be published in the final
version. In my experience, almost always the version that gets published is
identical to the final "camera ready" version I submit after peer review.

Finally, peer reviewing is indeed not paid, but the way my fields treat peer
review is that you are supposed to review proportionally to however much
reviewing you obligate on others by the papers you / your students / your lab
submit to peer review. If your paper goes out to three reviewers, you sign up
for three reviews. Then for the reviewer coordinator / meta-reviewer burden,
if your group/lab is submitting 6-8 papers a year, then you have an obligation
to be on the editorial board / program committee, which comes with the
reviewer coordinator burden of what a decent sized group/lab obligates on
others. Of course, some people are still free riders, and many people submit
publications who are not qualified to peer review, but it does change how you
think about the "peer reviewing is free labor" issue.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
> In my experience, almost always the version that gets published is identical
> to the final "camera ready" version I submit after peer review.

This is actually a bad thing, and a sign of standards slipping. Even if one
uses a LaTeX template there are all kinds of quality-typesetting nuances that
many authors are not aware of: where non-breaking spaces are necessary, proper
hyphenation of foreign-language names, en dashes instead of hyphens in ranges,
etc. I have seen so many publications in maths and sciences where the author
was expected to provide camera-ready copy and the final result was sloppy.

I agree that learned societies can do a great job of publishing journals and
Festschriften, and it is the norm in my own field where our learned societies
never handed over their journals to a for-profit publisher. But I am happy
that in my own field one's submissions still get hands-on work by trained
copyeditors and typesetters so that the final result is perfect regardless of
the author's own typesetting competence.

~~~
Topolomancer
Author here; that very much sounds like the utopia I am dreaming about :-)
What kind of field are you in?

------
TheOtherHobbes
Journals aren't charging for the publication - either for the editing, or the
reviews.

They're charging huge tolls for their work as peer-review gatekeepers, and for
the career benefits - and potential improved access to funding for departments
and universities - that can result from having work published in a prestigious
journal.

Essentially it's like a more complicated form of buying likes (i.e. prestige
and marketable crediblity) on social media, for an older and much richer
market - with a monopolistic twist.

Opening access to content and paying editors more won't necessarily help. This
market won't go away until the tacit benefits become equivalent. This means
breaking their ability to operate together as a cartel.

Besides - in reality they only the highest profile journals provide any
benefits at all. Most journals are low-profile throw-aways with limited
influence and prestige. But the publishers have contrived a situation where
universities have to buy an all-or-nothing access package.

If citation prestige is opened up, the cartel will collapse almost overnight.

~~~
impendia
I mostly agree with what you say, but I disagree with this:

> Besides - in reality they only the highest profile journals provide any
> benefits at all.

In my discipline (mathematics) there is a large middle tier of "respectable"
journals, that regularly publish good work, including work by well known
people. A typical tenure dossier at a middling research department might list
say, 15 papers, most of which were in this middle tier, and a couple of which
were published somewhere really good.

I agree that the system is a cartel and would love to see it collapse. In my
opinion, whatever replaced it would need to duplicate the signaling mechanism
to succeed.

------
AndrewGYork
Every since I got my own lab, I've been skipping "traditional" publication,
for these reasons and more. I've had great success and satisfaction sharing my
research via "DIY" publishing:

[https://andrewgyork.github.io](https://andrewgyork.github.io)

Advancing my field is my life's mission, and disseminating my research is too
important to outsource.

Believe it or not, Twitter has been crucial to the process. It's not great for
nuanced discussion, but it's AMAZING for advertising the existence of
technical information. For example:

[https://twitter.com/AndrewGYork/status/1138963271594020864](https://twitter.com/AndrewGYork/status/1138963271594020864)

[https://twitter.com/AndrewGYork/status/1222319044755197952](https://twitter.com/AndrewGYork/status/1222319044755197952)

[https://twitter.com/AndrewGYork/status/1227747499454021632](https://twitter.com/AndrewGYork/status/1227747499454021632)

~~~
throwawaygh
I hate publishers as much as the next guy, but playing the twitter high-school
popularity game is the _last_ thing I want to do with my time, and IMO it's
leading to the click-baitification of research in AI. This year there was even
an instance of literal ASTs being hailed by deep learning hoards as some
amazing new idea.

If science gets attention according to its level of twitter amplification,
then scientific publishing is going to start looking a lot like journalism.
That's already happening. Ask journalists how their search for truth is going.

~~~
AndrewGYork
As opposed to the traditional publishing high-school popularity game? I'm
partially joking, but traditional publishing is very much a popularity
contest. You're free to ignore this, but I don't recommend it.

My personal experience (twelve years of traditional publishing followed by
five years of DIY publishing) is that I spend substantially _less_ of my time
on publishing/dissemination, have higher impact, and produce higher quality
work. You should give it a try!

------
llamaa2
> To me, it is super weird that research that is often funded by the taxpayer
> cannot be accessed by the taxpayer.

This is so completely true, and is something everyone should be fighting for.
As for the U.S., it doesn't look like our FASTR bill has gone much anywhere at
all.

~~~
jpeloquin
In the US, the NSF and NIH both have public access policies requiring that
published papers resulting from taxpayer-funded research be made available
free of charge no more than 12 months after publication.

It should be available immediately, of course, particularly since the official
"publication date" can be delayed many months after the article is actually
available. But taxpayers do get what they paid for in a somewhat reasonable
time frame. The part where academic institutions provide publishers with
content for free, then buy the same content back, is the insane part.

[https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2016/nsf16009/nsf16009.jsp#q1](https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2016/nsf16009/nsf16009.jsp#q1)
[https://publicaccess.nih.gov/faq.htm#753](https://publicaccess.nih.gov/faq.htm#753)

------
qmmmur
For a gold standard of publishing see
[http://distill.pub/](http://distill.pub/)

Open access and not stuck in the dark ages with dissemination.

------
brzozowski
Related article by Russell O’Connor about copyright assignment I recently
stumbled onto:
[http://r6.ca/blog/20110930T012533Z.html](http://r6.ca/blog/20110930T012533Z.html)

~~~
tomcam
That whole episode was disgusting, assuming that blog post was accurate.
Thanks (I think!) for pointing it out.

------
0d9eooo
Peer review is a cornerstone of academics, and there continues to be a
prestige associated with it as well as with certain journals. This is
especially true in certain circles.

As far as I can tell though, functionally this is breaking down. People can
find preprints and archived papers, and do, if they're searching by topic.

So journals at this point are providing a peer review portal, and formatting.
I happen to think the formatting does provide value. My sense is that at a
good journal, there's a kind of stochastic improvement in errors and
formatting, so that the numbers of errors go down on average, and the
formatting improved, on average, over iterations back and forth with the
copyeditor.

As for peer review, I'm not so sure anymore. My sense is that it does provide
some kind of stamp of approval from experts in the area, so if you don't know
much about an area, it provides some sense that at least some small group of
people in the area believe it meets some kind of basic standards. But that
says very little, and the amount of noise in the review process is large.

I think the core of the academic communication system is slowly being hollowed
out, and being replaced by blogs, things like twitter and mastodon, and
archives. At this point the peer review journal process provides some value,
but it's being propped up by tradition. Already, with COVID, we're
increasingly seeing the focus on preprints. Journalists and others are careful
to note something hasn't been peer-reviewed yet, but everyone knows it matters
little because they can turn to experts to find out what they think of it.

If there aren't formal attempts to create an alternative, I think we'll just
be left with people posting and passing around preprints and discussing them
on twitter, mastodon, blogs, and message groups. If people want the nice
formatting, and some stamp of approval, I think something else will have to be
worked out. But the journals are starting to feel like they're getting in the
way, in general, and represents some kind of power or status structure more
than quality control system.

Paying reviewers I think creates bad incentives as the author of the post
points out. So do author-pays systems. What is maybe missing from the piece is
some recognition that in the past, reviewers reviewed and editors edited in
part as part of their job. That is, you were paid as a faculty member at a
university, and that was what people understood you did. Pre-internet, this
was all valuable service. Now that universities and others are more focused on
faculty bringing in profits rather than paying for their services -- and
questions are being raised about the value of journals in general -- we are
seeing these questions about what reviewers get paid.

I think in the future there will be value in article hosting and searching,
and providing website frameworks for discussion and peer review, but I'm not
sure they will look like journals per se. You'll see things like arxiv.org,
but with commentary, rating, discussion, and approval infrastructure over
them. That's what large libraries and research centers will be donating money
to or paying for. I think journals per se will eventually start to seem kind
of stodgy and old fashioned.

~~~
microcolonel
> _Peer review is a cornerstone of academics_

It isn't, it was a mistake trying to bring it everywhere. Peer review is a way
for your jealous colleagues to stop your novel, disruptive, or counter-
intuitive research from being published; and while it may serve some purpose
in some limited fields, for most fields it does little else but suppress good
science.

If your peers understood where your field was going, they'd be doing the
research, not reviewing it.

Now, that doesn't mean we shouldn't have journals with _editors,_ but peer
review is not necessary to good science, and in most fields it is a parasite.

------
netcan
" _One of the strangest phenomena in academia is_ " is a good opening line.
Deep well.

------
SubiculumCode
My biggest pet peeve is the downsampling of my high dpi figures to get the
image size down for the publisher.

Also, open access journals will eventually dominate, but I think the idea is
hurt by all the scam open access journals that plague our inboxes.

