
Australian academics seek to challenge 'web of avarice' in scientific publishing - dredmorbius
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/aug/14/australian-academics-seek-to-challenge-web-of-avarice-in-scientific-publishing
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loginusername
"... the labour of academics, freely give, paid for by the government and
student tuition."

Even more, it is student tuition that underwrites for the exorbitant annual
license fees the university libraries are forced to pay.

I always pondered how much of my tuition was going toward these subscriptions.

I was probably one of the library's top users of expensive journals by volume;
I knew how much it cost the library to provide access and I knew I was paying
for it. At one point one of the scientific journal search engines gave me a
prize. Students: use the library's journal subscriptions. You are paying for
it. Download PDF's like there is no tomorrow.

There are exceptions, but for most students, after you graduate, you will
never again have such access to so much peer-reviewed research.

~~~
wodenokoto
How do you decide what to download?

~~~
loginusername
This is a good question.

Obviously it becomes easier the more you understand the subject area. As
student you might have little understanding. That's why you are studying!

In my case, initial downloads were readings for my courses or papers
referenced in handouts. I just let my curiousity guide me from there. But I'll
admit I also had some background knowledge to begin with, gleaned from work
experience.

In some (most) scientific discplines, every paper begins by citing background
material. You should gather and save those papers. No matter how old.

When you read the more general papers, and the other background material, in
chronological order, you are in a better position to understand more specific,
recent work.

Basically you are building a foundation for understanding the current state of
research in a subject area. At least you will always be able to get up to
speed more easily by having the proper foundation.

Of course, when you're at university you may be busy with other pursuits and
you may not have the time nor inclination to read all those older papers. This
is what you download and save. Sometimes there are scientific "encyclopedias"
or other compilations. These can be good in their own right and also a further
source for references pointing to more worthy downloads.

When in doubt a general rule is to download papers that are highly cited.

There is a vast amount of general knowledge that will never be offered on
Wikipedia.[1] It is the best kind: peer-reviewed. Wikipedia and clones (Knol,
etc.) wanted or tried to become "peer-reviewed" sources but this idea has
never really succceeded on the open web. That is why this issue with academic
publishing will continue to simmer.

1\. At least, not until academic publishing undergos some changes.

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anonymousDan
One idea I've been toying with is to not cite papers submitted to rip-off
journals such as this in order to encourage people to submit to more
reasonable venues. The downsides I see are that (i) you might get rejected for
ignoring previous work, and (ii) it's a bit unfair on researchers who
submitted to those venues before many other options were available.

As a potential solution, you could only cite papers submitted to those
journals before some cut-off date. The cut-off date could be in the near
future, and could be advertised in advance as part of a campaign to get other
researchers to do the same thing.

~~~
hugh4
It's not okay to not cite something, if it's relevant, regardless of where
it's published. But people who feel strongly about open access are free to
publish there themselves.

Most academics don't care that much, because they tend to assume anyone
_worthy_ of reading their paper is someone with an affiliation to a university
that has a subscription.

~~~
dredmorbius
While there are merits to that, there are two roles to a citation.

One is to reference clearly foundational work. Here, you've got a limited set
of choices, but also, directly consequent, the total number of works is small.
The key here is to ensure that they're made publicly available -- SciLib,
LibGen, etc.

I've found myself frustrated by researchers who _don 't_ cite key foundational
works -- case in point is Fischer-Tropsch based fuel synthesis from
electricity. I'd run across several studies from the US Naval Research Lab
none of which cited research prior to the mid 1990s. Turns out the field is
actually over 50 years old, with early work at Brookhaven National Labs -- not
some sketchy fly-by-night. The lack of citations here was egregious.

The other purpose, and far more common, is simply _to show documentation of
established claims or facts in a field._ Here, virtually _any_ credible source
will do, and it's for this type of citation that open-access pubs can and
should be strongly favoured.

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harry8
Most academics looking for promotion are subject to publishing KPIs where
publishing in various journals is weighted according to the prestige of the
journal.

So you mandate a 30% discount on the KPI for any journal that isn't open
access. Suddenly prestigious open access journals spring up and attract the
best papers thereby getting more prestige points and so on.

It's really that easy. Most academics I've noticed are more interested in
their careers for which they're more than willing to exploit graduate
students, holding them back a lot more than 3 years and so on to care which is
why the problem continues to exist. Academics need to look firmly in the
mirror when they ask why the journal publishing racket exists.

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Thriptic
The real solution is to create more positions and increase the grant budgets.
The reason the publishers have such a strangle hold over academic science is
because there are so few academic positions available to scientists that it
becomes imperative to be published in an existing high impact factor / well
known journal. If there wasn't such a hyper competitive atmosphere, people
could explore open access journals more openly without fear of negative career
implications.

~~~
hugh4
People don't avoid open-access journals because they're low impact factor;
many are quite high. People avoid them because there's a whopping big
publication charge.

What we really need to think about is decreasing the number of journals. But
nope, spammy new for-profit journals are launched every week.

Overall science funding is a separate issue, and so is the flawed metrics we
use to determine who gets it.

~~~
micwawa
Most of the spammy for-profit journals are ignored by serious academics. You
wouldn't be caught with one of these on your CV. The big Elsevier ones are a
problem, because they are revered as the good journals. For example, Advances
in Math is very highly regarded, in particular in my department. I had
promised to be done with Elsevier several years ago, but now my collaborator
has spoken with an editor at Advances who suggested we submit there. It's the
optimal journal for a number of different reasons. If this paper gets
accepted, it strengthens my grant and tenure situation. I can't really justify
putting myself at this disadvantage.

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mirimir
Sci-Hub has always worked well for me. But now they're being sued in New York.
What we need is a reboot that's takedown proof, with strong anonymization for
site operators, contributors and users. Maybe a Tor onion service, with
tor2web links. I'm rather surprised that it's not already operational. It'd be
a fantastic tribute to Aaron Swartz.

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AC__
This is amazing! Take science back from the profiteers. Open source science
will benefit mankind greatly, increased proliferation of information
accelerates innovation in a profound manner.

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javajosh
Can someone please explain to me the social/economic/historical basis of
academic publishing, maybe in the way Jaron Lanier might?

~~~
dredmorbius
That's an interesting suggestion. A few bits that I'm aware of.

There's a Randall Munroe comic ( _not_ published on xkcd) which shows the
growth in academic publishing. As with many of his infographic strips, this
one is stunningly effective at conveying quantity:

[http://m.sciencemag.org/site/special/scicomm/infographic.jpg](http://m.sciencemag.org/site/special/scicomm/infographic.jpg)

Much of the growth in publishing followed the explicit formulation that
science and technology were the path to an endless frontier, explicitly stated
in Vannevar Bush's 1945 report, "Science, the Endless Frontier", and
accelerating through the Sputnik crisis, space race, and expanded academic
funding of the 1960s-1980s. By the end of that period, academic research was
increasingly privately funded and seen as a profit center for large research
institutions.

[https://archive.org/details/scienceendlessfr00unit](https://archive.org/details/scienceendlessfr00unit)

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dredmorbius
NB: Title edited for length and to include date. Original:

"Australian academics seek to challenge 'web of avarice' in scientific
publishing"

~~~
dang
The convention is to only include the date when it's from a previous year.

~~~
dredmorbius
Thanks. Wanted to indicate it wasn't entirely current. I've seen multiple
gripes registered on previous posts ;-)

