
How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?  - sasvari
http://www.monbiot.com/2011/08/29/the-lairds-of-learning/
======
retube
Yes this is a problem. Occasionally I have to to resort to emailing authors
directly and asking for a copy of the paper - in most cases they have been
obliging.

As far as I am concerned publicly funded research papers should (must) be
freely available. If the public are funding it then the public has a right to
the fruits of this investment. And newspapers must be able to link to or
reference a source when they quote or review academic literature (in fact I
think it should be law that they have to).

A very simple solution would be for authors or institutions to make copies
freely available on their websites. I can only assume that they are not
allowed to, due to copyright imposed by the journals.

It's ironic that the invention of the www was driven by the need for an easy
way to freely distribute and share academic literature.

P.S. There's also a strong case for privately funded research to be made
public too. Companies who make product claims based on privately funded
research for example absolutely must make this research ("research") available
for the public to review. It is notoriously hard to get pharma firms to cough
up the papers which support their claims for the latest wonder drug.

~~~
impendia
_I can only assume that they are not allowed to, due to copyright imposed by
the journals._

This is probably true. Whenever I have published articles (I am a
mathematician), I have been asked to sign some long agreement which I only
skimmed. We have some rights to publish and distribute our work... but not
unlimited... something complicated...

In practice, I just put copies of all of my papers on my website where anyone
can download them. I have many colleagues who do the same, and many colleagues
who are more scrupulous about following the journals' rules. In any case, I
don't know of any scholars who have gotten into trouble for distributing their
own work.

~~~
jessriedel
What's the advantage over just using the arxiv? A bit better typesetting?

~~~
lliiffee
Credibility. Reading a mathematical paper takes a huge amount of effort, and
people won't go through that unless there is a high chance to believe the
paper is good/correct. Usually this is determined by 1) The author is famous
2) The journal is respected.

~~~
jessriedel
The ArXiv includes a link to the actual (usually gated) journal article. And
the text of that link is the journal name and citation.

My question isn't "why do people submit to journals?" it's "why post the
actual PDF from the journal on your webpage (thereby taking a slight risk of
getting in trouble) rather than just linking to the ArXiv version?".

~~~
lliiffee
Ah, sorry I misunderstood your question.

To answer your actual question, I personally do it because I almost _wish_ the
journals would do something nasty to me. Then, I would tell everyone I meet at
every conference about that for the next few years and would hasten the
decline of the current status-quo.

------
impendia
I heard an interesting argument from my advisor (a very famous mathematician).
I strongly disagree with it, but it is the only argument I have heard for
keeping this system in place.

His argument was the following: In many fields such as laboratory science,
research is expensive; one has to apply for grants and then spend the money,
and these departments have large budgets, and this all looks good to deans. If
a department is going through a lot of money, then it must be prestigious,
important, and doing good work.

I heard a joke once that mathematicians are the second-cheapest academics to
hire because all we require is a pencil, paper, and a wastebasket. But, in
fact, we require online access to all these journals, for which we have to
spend a ton of money. Spending all this money makes us look good to our deans,
and lends prestige and the look of importance to our department, and allows us
to compete with other departments for resources.

I think it's a bunch of BS, frankly, but it's the one time I heard the
existing system defended, so perhaps it's worth bringing up.

~~~
electrichead
I'm not sure about that. If you pump out a tonne of great research, but use
relatively less money, wouldn't that make you look better? Or is the academic
world that far removed from the rest of the economy?

~~~
mateo42
It's really sad that this is the case, but in the lab I worked for at a UC
many of our costs were complete BS made up so that we could use up the full
amount of our grant. The system encourages this behavior. The logic is
completely flawed: If you don't use the money, then you obviously don't need
it. Next time you won't receive the full amount from your grant. When your
grant is millions of dollars over a few years, you end up having a lot of very
nice dinners paid for with money that was meant to be used for research and
education.

~~~
ramchip
_If you don't use the money, then you obviously don't need it. Next time you
won't receive the full amount from your grant._

That's exactly, word-for-word, what professors have told me here. Sad indeed.

------
jgrahamc
Reminds me of the time I wanted to read Chadwick's 1932 paper "Possible
Existence of a Neutron" in which he mentioned the discovery of the neutron.

<http://blog.jgc.org/2008/09/dear-nature.html>

~~~
dcminter
Academic publishing seems to be messed up but I'm not sure this is a good
demonstration of that.

Of the three links that you cite to online copies two no longer link to the
article. So while your $32 doesn't buy you anything you can't already get
elsewhere the availability (at a price) from Nature does at least supply a
degree of permanence to the article. That may be more important with less
prominent items.

~~~
jordanb
The illegality (or quazi-illegality in the case of the links from the edu
sites) of the mirrors is what's keeping them from being hosted permanently on
a free site.

If the copyrights were clear, there would be repositories like arxiv.org that
would ensure high-availability free access. The paper isn't on arxiv.org
currently because Nature uses its copyright to ensure that it's not.

------
blahedo
It doesn't have to be this way, and individual fields can break away (to a
greater or lesser extent). For instance:

In Natural Language Processing / Computational Linguistics, the professional
society (Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL) was its own
publisher, with no profit motive, and so authors for its conferences and
journal never signed over copyright (merely granted permission to ACL to
publish the work). For years, it was quite standard for nearly all of the
authors to post PS or PDF versions of their papers on their own websites. Then
ACL started accepting PDF instead of camera-ready, and just posted the PDFs
themselves; and then they started scanning the back-catalogue.

The result of this is that the vast majority of all NLP/CL papers ever written
(excluding only those published elsewhere, e.g. in AAAI, and a very few
missing proceedings from fifty years ago) are available online, for free, in
PDF, at <http://aclweb.org/anthology-new/> .

This is how science should be.

------
dctoedt
One possible disrupter is the open-access model used by the Social Science
Research Network, <http://www.ssrn.com>, which was founded in 1994 and seems
to be extensively used in the legal academic community.

SSRN makes posted PDFs available for free download. The Wikipedia entry says
that "In economics, and to some degree in law (especially in the field of law
and economics), almost all papers are now first published as preprints on SSRN
and/or on other paper distribution networks such as RePEc before being
submitted to an academic journal."

Quality and prestige metrics: SSRN ranks posted papers by number of downloads,
and it also compiles citation lists---if I successfully find Paper X at SSRN,
I can look up which other SSRN-available papers have cited Paper X. (Sounds
like a job for Google's PageRank algorithm, no?)

According to SSRN's FAQ, it's produced by an independent privately held
corporation. I assume that means they're a for-profit company. I don't know
how they make their money, other than that they will sell you a printed hard
copy of a paper, presumably print-on-demand.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
From that same SSRN FAQ page,
<http://www.ssrn.com/update/general/ssrn_faq.html>:

" _We have entered into a variety of relationships with the publishers to
provide access to their fee-based research through the SSRN eLibrary. These
papers are identified by this icon: Incl. Fee Electronic Paper (a red dog-
eared page with a "$"). If you are purchasing a fee-based paper, you will
click the 'Add to Cart' link and be linked to your Shopping Cart._ "

So they run as affiliates for paid-for papers.

They also run a job listings service.

You noted already the ability to get a printed and bound copy of a paper on
demand.

Edit: without looking in detail it seems those running the service are
probably supported by academic institutions [for other work that they do?].

------
impendia
But surely, one might think, that some of the price goes to offset the
expensive costs of peer review?

The author neglected to mention that peer reviewers work for free, and that
the editorial boards are also made up of scholars who work for next to
nothing. (edit: see reply below, this was in the article and I missed it)

It used to be that it fell to the publishers to typeset the articles, but with
the advent of TeX they don't have to do that either. (in my field anyway)

Speaking as an academic, these companies do nothing for us. The sooner we
agree on an alternative model which doesn't go through them, the better.

~~~
rmc
_Speaking as an academic, these companies do nothing for us_

Start the revolution at home. Put PDFs on your university website. Ask your
collegues to do likewise, ask the rest of university to do likewise. Start the
ball rolling.

~~~
starwed
That doesn't really fulfill the "quality signal" aspect of journals, though --
the replacement would be some sort of open journal that still had peer review.

There was an Elsevier math journal where the entire editorial staff got fed
up, quit, and then simply founded a new journal on the same subject. _That's_
the sort of thing most likely to bring the big journals down, not self
publication by individuals. (Well, that or direct government intervention.)

~~~
rmc
You're probably right that there's a good value add to come from journals.
However the internet works well, and that's a pile of individual pages/web
sites, so I think it'll all work out.

------
tylerneylon
The obvious negative this has on folks outside of research-level academia is a
significant contribution to tuition prices, which seem to be rising at about
5% per year.

But a less obvious - and personally very painful - consequence of greedy
publishers is the inability to do serious academic research outside of
academia/industry. I have the ability (math PhD) and the will (have published
a few papers post grad school, though it's hard to find time), but I have all
but given up due to lacking access to books and articles behind these
paywalls. Yes, you can find a decent chunk of articles online -- but very
often there are one or two (or more!) key papers you _need_ to read to be at
the front of a field, and one of those will be behind a paywall. The worst
part is that I never know how truly useful an article will be before reading
it, so in the few cases where I've payed I find that only a small percentage
of the time was it worthwhile.

In short, this system essentially kills research outside of academia /
industry.

~~~
shasta
I guess you don't live near a decently sized university?

~~~
tylerneylon
I do, and they require $500/year for library use by non-students/staff.

Even if some people are lucky enough to have university library access, the
problems caused by a broken publishing system still pose a barrier to many
independent people.

------
jpallen
> The reason is that the big publishers have rounded up the journals with the
> highest academic impact factors, in which publication is essential for
> researchers trying to secure grants and advance their careers(16). You can
> start reading open-access journals, but you can’t stop reading the closed
> ones.

This is the only problem standing in the way of open access publishing. While
the arXiv doesn't offer peer review and so doesn't negate the need for
journals, the ecosystem would quickly adapt to open peer review. Unfortunately
the implied reputation of being published in certain journals is still
something that's too ingrained in academia. It's getting better slowly but
it's going to take at least a generation to go away at the current rate.

~~~
cstross
_Unfortunately the implied reputation of being published in certain journals
is still something that's too ingrained in academia._

It's worse than that: this isn't just a matter of old fogies (who will
eventually retire) clinging to out-moded ways.

The problem is, academic career progression is dependent on publication. And
these days, it's also contingent on citations. Your work is more likely to be
cited if it's in a prominent journal. So by gaining a lock on the high
academic impact publications, the big publishers have got a stranglehold on
the career ladder.

------
rmc
University libraries are still mostly money grabbers aswell, but are slowly
changing.

In the 1830s Ireland was mapped to a great detail (for tax purposes) of
1:6500ish. These maps would still be very helpful for OpenStreetMap, and are
obviously outside copyright. A few Irish universities have them (e.g. Trinity
Map Library, a copyright deposit library for Ireland & the UK), however they
charge €50,000ish for a copy of the digitial scans of the full set. Other
libraries are similar.

Universities really are not pro-sharing

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Presumably somewhere like the British Library has the scans for the maps on
disk. They're a government institution aren't they so would a Freedom of
Information Act demand supposedly liberate that data ... just a thought.

When I'm Prime Minister I'll instigate a government run academic library as
the repository for all data originating from tax paid research with free
access for individuals and paid access for profit yielding institutions;
something along those lines anyway.

~~~
rmc
These maps are usually on microfiche.

Freedom of Information is a good idea, however the orignals are out of
copyright (being 150+ years old). Just scanning a page of a book isn't a
creative work, and hence you technically can't claim copyright on it again.
Some mapping agencies like the Ordnance Survey of Ireland who have copies,
scan and then join images up together, and rectify them so they work on google
maps. This 'stitching & rectifiying' is a creative act, and hence they can
(and do!) claim copyright on the new item. So this map from 1833 is Copyright
2008 OSi. :(

However a lot of libraries claim copyright on just a straight scan, even
though they can't really. A FoI would get you the map, but probably something
with a copyright symbol on the corner. If you want to use them (for
OpenStreetMap tracing) the onus is now on you to prove you can. In short, they
don't want to share them out to everyone. :(

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _This 'stitching & rectifiying' is a creative act, and hence they can (and
> do!) claim copyright on the new item._ //

I was trying to find the caselaw on a related point the other day. I remember
there being something to do with, I think the British Museum or similar,
taking high res scans of old paintings and claiming a renewed copyright term
on that then ferreting away the original. Do you have caselaw to cite? AFAIR
the act is supposed to be transformative to create a new work, stitching
doesn't appear to be tranformative to me. However I also seem to recall the
the "sweat of the brow" argument was made to support a new copyright in high
res scans, that a large amount of work had been done and that this somehow
earned them a new right.

It seems this sort of manoeuvring is within the letter of the law but not at
all within the spirit of it. Very underhand for those who are supposed to be
managing works owned by the country for the country itself using public money.

If one can get a copy of the original then it could be leaked to wikileaks ...
the onus is not on the copier to prove they have a right but on those suing to
show that tortuous infringement has occurred. The demands of OpenStreetMap may
be different however.

~~~
dctoedt
> _Do you have caselaw to cite?_

Try _Bridgeman Art Library v. Corel Corp._ , 36 F. Supp. 2d 191 (S.D.N.Y.
1999), summarized in the Wikipedia article [1].

The court's opinion [2] surveys the relevant case law beginning at paragraph
19.

The court states its conclusion and summarizes its reasoning in paragraph 25:
" _In this case, plaintiff by its own admission has labored to create 'slavish
copies' of public domain works of art. While it may be assumed that this
required both skill and effort, there was no spark of originality -- indeed,
the point of the exercise was to reproduce the underlying works with absolute
fidelity. Copyright is not available in these circumstances._ "

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp).

[2]
[http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/36_FSupp2d_191.ht...](http://www.law.cornell.edu/copyright/cases/36_FSupp2d_191.htm).

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Thanks for that, the Wikipedia page has some useful links and info on the
relevance to UK copyright law. The case I was remembering is almost certainly
this one -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_copyr...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Portrait_Gallery_copyright_conflicts)
concerning use of photos of images in the National Portrait Gallery on
Wikimedia pages, the case dating from 2009.

------
jtwb
We forget the value of curation.

Why can a boutique shop sell a $50 dress for $200? Taste. One could simply
walk into that boutique, confident that 20 minutes later a cute, fashionable
and well-fitting dress would be acquired.

Why can top universities charge so much for tuition? Every year, %s University
generates a curated list of individuals, and many hiring processes (not to
mention ad-hoc interpersonal filtering processes) emphasize individuals in
that list. Like boutique shopping, this is an expensive strategy that often
excludes superior talent, but is fast.

Is it worth $200,000 to have one's name on that list? Apparently.

Is it worth application fees and an iron publishing agreement to have one's
paper published in Nature. Apparently.

------
RyanMcGreal
A professor emeritus recently sent me an article to publish on my web
magazine. The turnaround time was around 18 hours and he replied to express
his surprise at how quickly his piece was published. In contrast, he has had
an article pending at an academic journal for three years now.

~~~
jessriedel
Usually this kind of long turn-around time is because it is held up by the
referees, not the actual publishing process. That process is too slow
(sometimes as much as a few months, but usually more like a few weeks), but
it's not 3-years slow.

------
DanielBMarkham
I'm buying into his thesis, but heck, I really expected to see some causality
explained. The title began, after all, with "how did...."

It would be great if somebody could provided an insider's account of why the
academic publishing industry maintained those margins from 2000 to 2010. Did
nobody propose legislation to stop them? Were there no criminal
investigations? Who are these people connected with politically? What sorts of
causes to they contribute to? Just how is the status quo maintained? The guy
made a point I was already predisposed to agree with, then kind of went on a
rant about how bad it all was. Hey, I'm with you. I'm just not sure my useful
knowledge of the issue has increased any.

------
mathattack
I agree with All the points about hiw government sponsored research (including
all public school research) Should be free or near free.

The unanswered question is "Why is the market failing?"

A couple unmentioned ideas:

\- Until recently, tuition hikes went unchallenged.

\- Faculty have a vested interest in maintaining the system. (If my publishing
in Journal X marks my competence, what happens if it goes away?)

\- An alternate system for rating a very hard to measure topic would be
needed. Counting scarce publishing, and references in scarce journals is
imperfect but nothing else has beaten it.

I don't have an answer but perhaps a couple bright entrepreneurs could figure
out a better equilibrium, and find a way to cross the chasm to get there.
Geoffrey Moore would say pick one vertical or academic discipline.

~~~
blahedo
> _"Why is the market failing?"_

There's an easier answer to this question: because it's not a "market". There
is no part of this whose pieces are fungible. Not the researchers, not the
ideas, not the papers, not the journals. For "the market" to do its thing (to
the extent that we can even say that), it requires the goods for sale or the
people providing the services to be substitutable and commodified. That isn't
(and pretty much _can't_ ) be true of academic publishing.

~~~
mathattack
Thank you for the comments. I appreciate your insights as an academic living
through this. Even still, I have to respectfully disagree.

I'll grant that the economics in most textbooks starts with the assumption of
homogenous buyers and sellers. Economists have found ways of breaking down
this assumption without giving up the concept of a market. Granted you lose
"Perfect competition" but that's ok.

Let's look at an analogy...

Rather than academics, let's talk about programmers. There is as much variety
in programmer performance as senior faculty performance. The firms that hire
these programmers have not been able to create a monopoly. Yes - Google,
Microsoft and Facebook have some high margins, but all of them are looking
over their shoulders for the next competitor. The technology firm graveyard is
filled with former near monopolists. (Excite? Altavista? Compuserve?)

I'm sure that there are reasons for the market failing, but I think it's more
than a lack of homogenous products and vendors.

------
merraksh
Interesting article. In 2011 there is no practical hurdle to web-based
publishing portals. Given that papers are already peer reviewed on a volunteer
basis, the middle man and its administrative staff has a high cost and a low
benefit.

The system could keep volunteer-based peer review, and establish a (perhaps
private) forum-like interaction for the authors to improve their article.

Google Scholar has solved many of my article search problems and often gives
me directly a link to the PDF of (sometimes just a preprint of) the article.
However the problem remains for the libraries, which might well be the largest
contributors to publishers, and which may find it hard to cut a subscription
and suggest its users to use Google scholar.

------
PaulHoule
A lot of it is that academics are the most atomized and individualistic group
of people that you'll find. If there's any part of society where "Aproi Moi Le
Deluge" is the slogan, it's academia.

Cornell has about 18 libraries and is slowly implementing a "Fahrenheit 451"
plan to eliminate them. First they eliminated the Physical Sciences Library,
next the Engineering Library, and they'll eliminate most of the others, one at
a time, until there's nothing left but a remote storage unit, lots of
computers, and a few pretty library buildings for show. Since it's happening
slowly and only affecting one community at a time, they'll avoid a general
uproar.

If I blame anything, I blame the institution of tenure, which can be seen more
clearly as a cause of moral decay than ever.

Workers and capitalists alike will fight to the death to protect the interests
of groups they are a part of because shifts in the rules can cause their
personal destruction. A man with tenure knows he can't be ruined, so he's got
no reason to ever take a stand.

------
Estragon
This is simply a consequence of the fiscalization of academic values, and
doesn't just apply to libraries. Professors need "high-impact" papers to
justify their grants so they can get more grants. The fiscal imperative to
acquire grants is very strong, because grant overhead is a major revenue
stream for the host institution (probably THE major stream.) It's much easier
to have a high-impact paper if you publish in a famous journal, so everyone
shoots for _Science_ , then _Nature_ , and on down the hierarchy as their
field sees it. And they will eat just about any kind of shit to get published
there, including having their papers locked behind a paywall. Because they are
plugged into a system where getting grant money takes priority over advancing
knowledge. Don't get me started on how this skews research priorities and
experimental designs...

------
rflrob
Given that PLoS is only 8 years old, I think it's too soon to draw any
meaningful conclusions from the fact that the open access movement "has failed
to displace the monopolists". I think more important is that the trends are
moving in the right direction: some high profile journals (like PNAS) have an
open access publishing option, and it's unusual for new journals (at least in
biology) not to be open access [1][2]. We aren't where we could be 20 years
into the World Wide Web, but we're getting there.

[1] <http://www.hhmi.org/news/20110627.html> [2]
[http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-06/gsoa-
gln06211...](http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-06/gsoa-
gln062111.php)

------
Cyranix
Articles like this make me sympathize with Aaron Swartz a little more.
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2813870>

------
forkandwait
Academic journals are gatekeepers of academic promotion, the prestigious old
journals are the only ones that count today, and they are owned by Wiley and
friends.

To make matters worse, academics are among the most tradition bound creatures
in the universe, especially when there is no clear criteria for truth (which
is like all of the social sciences and humanities). The only thing they have
to calibrate against is consensus, and consensus favors institutions already
in place.

------
roadnottaken
This is not quite right. The NIH does, in fact, maintain a Public Access
Policy:

<http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm>

which states that all NIH-funded research must be placed in this database
("PubMed Central") within 12 months of publication. I do not know how widely
it is obeyed, but I know that the several labs I've been in regularly
deposited their papers there.

~~~
decode
Since the article mentions this, in what way is it not quite right?

"The National Institutes of Health in the US oblige anyone taking their grants
to put their papers in an open-access archive(17)."

~~~
roadnottaken
You're right, I mis-read this line. Still, it deserves more than a sentence.
The NIH _does_ require all NIH-funded research to be made publicly available.
What more should/could they do?

------
merraksh
See also discussion in <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2373030>

------
rizumu
This is in line with the True Cost Economics Manifesto:
<http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/truecosteconomics/sign>

~~~
rmc
I cannot see how a critique of mainstream economics is relevant to the fact
that most scientific journals is very expensive.

------
omouse
The military-industrial complex! Done, next question?

Why would a government want to remove the middle-man when the middle-man is
making enough money to lobby the government to protect them? -_-'

