
Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research - joeyespo
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg24032052-900-time-to-break-academic-publishings-stranglehold-on-research/
======
dougmccune
Academic publishing is a favorite recurring topic on HN, and it's one I've
occasionally dipped into discussing, although these discussions are typically
99% one-sided and void of nuance or reasoned arguments. It's like discussing
politics online.

I'm a shareholder and board member of a large privately-held, family-owned
academic publishing company. If anyone is interested in trying to understand
what makes the industry work, why it's so hard to disrupt it, etc. I'd love to
engage or put you in touch with people within the industry smarter than me -
my email is in my profile.

I know the industry is particularly frustrating to the HN crowd. We want to
think it's a technology problem - that distributing PDFs is a solved problem
(which it obviously is). But the root of the problems (of which there are
many) are all cultural and much harder to change. If you're going to jump in
and try to "fix" the industry or put publishers out of business, I highly
encourage you to engage with folks in the industry with an open mind and
really try to understand why things work the way they work. You're not going
to have any success unless you truly understand the incentive structure of
academia and the social and cultural aspects of inertia that are at play. If
you go in thinking you can build a better "publishing" mousetrap you will
fail. You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business. And when
you start peeling back the onion of how academics are assessed, given jobs,
given tenure, etc you start seeing how hard changing behavior can be.

~~~
em-bee
_You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business. And when you
start peeling back the onion of how academics are assessed, given jobs, given
tenure, etc you start seeing how hard changing behavior can be._

there is no doubt about that. but maybe it's time to question how science is
done in general.

in the end the goal is to advance our knowledge and bring humanity forward.

but instead of everyone cooperating to do just that, they are competing with
each other, and try to outdo each other. a lot of energy is wasted in
preventing others from stealing your research ideas and being the first to
publish on a particular topic. instead of looking at the benefits of the
research published in a paper, and whether the results can be reproduced,
instead what matters more is how many citations the paper can get.

reputation has become more important than producing actual results. academics
and academic institutions are measured not in the quality of their research,
but in the amount of papers and citations they can produce, to the point that
researchers who can't dedicate their life to their work, because they have
family, or worse, are a single parent, can't get a job, let alone tenure,
because they can't put in the time required even though they may well put in
more effort than others into the time they do have.

so yes, i acknowledge that changing this is going to be extremely hard. but it
looks to me like changing the way papers are published will be the easiest
step, because the components that actually matter are distribution, which is
technology, and reviewers, which are academics.

the only thing that i see publishers doing is to edit the journals and decide
what to publish. but shouldn't exactly that, also be done by academics?

how about a model like stackoverflow? papers are published like questions, and
reviews are the answers. readers upvote good papers and good reviews, so that
the most upvoted and most reviewed papers float to the top. the citation count
can be included in the score too.

greetings, eMBee.

~~~
im3w1l
> which is technology, and reviewers, which are academics.

There is another factor to consider - the outsiders. They need to know which
research is good and which isn't and independent journals giving a stamp of
approval to create "branded" science helps.

~~~
em-bee
the same can be done by independent reviewers.

i would not trust a commercial entity whose goal is profit, to be able to
decide for me what research is good, the same way that i don't trust movie
distributors. i'll look for outside reviewers who earned my trust because they
understand the subject matter.

~~~
im3w1l
There are two types of outsiders, individuals and institutions. For an
individual, choosing a reviewer to trust can potentially work but it does get
harder if you have to pick multiple different reviewers to get good coverage.

For institutions, especially those in charge of grants, something more
stringent and organized is needed than "I like that science guy". And those
organizations will need to be payed somehow, preferably in such a way that it
doesn't create too perverse incentives.

~~~
em-bee
how about the institutions themselves? it's their money after all.

we pay you to do research, you send us your results, and we publish them.

or someone higher up, if the institutions get their money from the government,
then that same government could fund a separate institution to review the
results (so as to see whether the money is well spent)

there is still a room for commercial publishers, but instead of controlling
access to the papers they publish, they get to republish what their audience
thinks is interesting. so they are no longer gate-keepers, but add value
instead.

and whoever thinks that added value is worth it, will pay for it.
universities, and especially individual researchers need not pay for it,
because they can go directly to the source.

magazines like nature or national geographic for example. but it could also be
a company like microsoft that funds reviews of papers that are interesting for
their business. or some independent thinktank. or the government of a
different country.

everyone gets free access to the original research. that's what open access is
all about. and anyone can fund reviews to suit their needs.

------
justinpombrio
For anyone who still doesn't know this: publishers do not pay paper authors,
in any field. I am also not aware of a publisher paying peer reviewers.

(Lowly soon-to-be-postdoc here; a professor would be able to say more.)

~~~
rsa4046
In academia (at least the hard sciences), no faculty are ever paid for
publishing in mainstream, peer-reviewed journals. No reviewers are ever paid
either, although recently Elsevier has started to publish the names of its
"star reviewers", presumably as a token for the large investment in time and
expertise required to evaluate papers for publication and improve the field.
Even book deals (or editorships) yield no real income, beyond some nominal
amount (between $0 and $50). What's more, the lay public is hilariously
misinformed about this, believing that faculty, researchers, etc., are paid
royalties for journal papers. Where they got this idea, I don't know ...

~~~
impendia
> No reviewers are ever paid either

That's almost true. Elsevier once surprised me with a $100 Amazon gift card,
which they said was in recognition for a particularly good job of peer review
that year.

I'd laugh at the prospect of Elsevier rewarding me with "recognition" \--
certainly something I would not put on my CV -- although I did take their
money.

Another time, the American Mathematical Society (which is non-profit, and
perfectly ethical) asked me to do a book review, and then gave me $150 in
bookstore credit afterwards -- again by surprise.

My understanding is that book authors can make a reasonable amount in
royalties (a few thousand, anyway). For journal papers, as you say I've never
heard of any author getting a royalty.

~~~
laichzeit0
What's your hourly rate? How many hours did you spend reviewing? Divide that
$100 by the hours and see if it was worth it.

~~~
impendia
> What's your hourly rate?

This is not how I think about my job. Rather, the university pays me a salary,
and expects me to engage in "scholarship" and "professional service" \-- and I
get to decide where I think I can make the biggest contributions.

This luxury is not available to everyone. Universities are hiring more and
more non-tenure-track instructors, at lower rates of pay, with less job
security, with higher teaching loads, and (usually) without any research
expectations. In the future, we might be obliged to think about our jobs in
more transactional terms.

But for now, I have the luxury of not having to think very much about
questions like yours.

------
avs733
Add in that the quality of the system is massively massively broken...peer
review is about as accurate as the flip of a coin. It does not promote gorund
breaking or novel research, it barely (arguably doesn't) even contribute to
quality research. I had a colleague recently be told by a journal editor 'we
don't publish critiques from junior scholars.' So much for the nature of peer
review being entirely driven by the quality of the work.

As one of those academics...I keep getting requests to peer review, I
respectfully make clear I don't review for non open source journals anymore.
Same with publishing. I'm not tenure-track so am not primarily evaluated based
on output.

Publishing is broken, but it is really just part of the broader and even more
broken nature of academic research.

~~~
Angostura
What would be a good alternative to peer-review though? Genuinely interested.

~~~
lumost
It strikes me that the challenge of peer review is that it is non-transparent,
and gate-keeping. It is impossible for one to read the peer review feedback
related to a published paper, and it's similarly difficult to publish
controversial pieces that break established norms.

Contrast this to the peer review culture of popular open source projects -
major pull requests have extensive and transparent dialogue, and disagreements
known. Meanwhile there is no barrier to releasing anything new.

~~~
specialp
There's a difference with scientific publishing for most disciplines. I work
for a non-profit scientific publisher. Much of the research today that is
coming out is extremely specialized. Thus there aren't many people in the
world that have the expertise to referee a paper. So the review is anonymous
in order to get a more frank and honest review (we hope).

I am also a developer. There are far more people that can give feedback on
most code, and also it doesn't take a lot of apparatus or money to get good at
coding. Also CS/OSS is relatively young when compared to other disciplines.
We've almost always done things with honest and sometimes brutal feedback.
Even academic research is usually announced/shared at conferences. Look at
what happened when Nature tried to make an AI journal.... [1] I think there is
still value in someone getting paid to manage research and referees and ensure
a high quality product. Open peer review is just going to be a lot harder for
some of these disciplines with limited experts.

[1] [https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/why-are-ai-
researche...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/05/why-are-ai-researchers-
boycotting-new-nature-journal-and-shunning-others)

~~~
sitkack
It sounds like machine checked proofs or other mechanical formalisms need to
be employed to ensure scientific validity.

~~~
geoalchimista
Machine checked proofs only work for deductive, non-experimental disciplines.
You can't use machine checked proofs to tell if a drug is effective or not.
Human referees have to be involved no matter how advanced the AI is.

~~~
Ericson2314
You can precisely "quarantine" the "human referree part within the framework
of a formal proof. That's still a huge step forward from the status quo of
reasoning and opinion being smeared together and nothing formal.

~~~
geoalchimista
> You can precisely "quarantine" the "human referree part within the framework
> of a formal proof.

I think it is unlikely you can separate the two precisely. If it be so,
mathematicians can replace doctors who make diagnoses. I don't think all
empirical facts can fit nicely into a formal proof system.

But still, any effort to reduce the burden on the human referees would be
welcome. This said proof system for peer review would be most useful to math
and theoretical CS (though not so much to biomedical sciences).

~~~
Ericson2314
I take it as trivially true that they can be separated shallowly. Then the
question is how big the informal "leaps of faith" are. If they are big, the
next thing is to look for "strands" of reasoning (lemmas that may not be
connected) inside them, as a sort of formal proof reverse-marginalia.

------
gandalfian
This remarkable article explains how it all came to be this way;
[https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...](https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-
business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science)

(The good stuff starts where Robert Maxwell appears)

------
RMarcus
It's worth noting that the computer science community (at least in systems and
machine learning) have already made some strides in this direction. Systems
conferences like VLDB and CIDR post the proceedings online for free (and most
ICDE and SIGMOD articles are available through the author's website). In
machine learning, almost every conference paper is also available via arXiv.

When a paper is seemingly not available online, I've always gotten a free copy
via an email to the author... And then there's sci-hub. It's not the way it
should be (i.e. you shouldn't have to hunt around for publicly-funded
research), but at least it's something.

------
sytelus
_HERE is a trivia question for you: what is the most profitable business in
the world? You might think oil, or maybe banking. You would be wrong. The
answer is academic publishing. Its profit margins are vast, reportedly in the
region of 40 per cent._

40% are very normal and consider healthy margins for many businesses. The
business with largest possible profit margins I know of is political
donations. For mere $100K, one can own vast public land for mining and selling
resources worth billions for many generations. That's 1000000% margin for you.

~~~
Vinnl
Consistent 40% margins, year over year, for decades, are rarely seen in other
industries. For example, Apple's brand is very strong, so it can ask a very
steep markup on their products. Nevertheless, its profit margins are lower
than those of the big five publishers, usually.

------
rasengan
From the article:

> the business of publishing tax-funded research and then selling it to tax-
> funded institutions has produced the most profitable industry in the world

How is this not illegal?

~~~
Jhsto
I don't see why would it. You can submit papers without an affiliation, so the
idea of publishing only tax-funded research is a generalization. That is,
these organizations do work by being selective and then selling the
collections of that selection process back.

~~~
killjoywashere
Granted the publishers do work. Even PLoS does work. It's the lack of access
that is the problem. $42.50 for an article one of my colleagues at my own US
Government institution wrote (random example from this weekend's work,
American Journal of Bioethics) is ridiculous.

~~~
ams6110
I thought in most cases the author is free to provide copies of his/her own
articles directly? Is it not true that you could just ask your colleague for a
copy of what he submitted for publication?

------
jacknews
According to the opposition open letter, Plan S includes "A prohibition on
publishing in either subscription or “hybrid” (i.e. partially open access)
journals,"

I don't see why that should be a requirement. So long as papers are made
available for free, why should it matter if they are also available in a paid
journal?

------
elvinyung
Here's a Twitter thread with a director at Elsevier (@mrgunn) making extremely
snarky comments about why they think academia shouldn't be free and widely
available:
[https://twitter.com/dgmacarthur/status/1028489457803161600](https://twitter.com/dgmacarthur/status/1028489457803161600)

~~~
blazespin
The real problem is that these publishers actually provide real value that
gives them leverage over the industry. If they didn't, it'd be pretty easy to
destroy their grip over academia. The idea that after 23 years of internet
they've maintained their position via smart deals is ludicrous. They've
maintained it because of useful curation.

If there was a way to open source curation and not lose quality, I can't
imagine anyone would disagree with that - even the people who work at these
organisations.

Unfortunately, what you end up with is arxiv, while very useful for sure, has
no curation.

Everyone just keeps bleeting - we want free! But they don't bother to think
about how to do actually do it. How to ensure quality curation remains which
is absolutely so critical to the advancement of science.

I've been fantasizing about free everything since forever. Who hasn't? But at
some point we have to stop trying to fantasize our way to results.

This is like underpants gnomes logic - steal underpants .. .. .. .. quality
curation!

Also, MrGunn is a moron commenting on that thread. Why not just hand out free
subscriptions to rare disease patients? What a trivially cost less PR move.

~~~
api
I have to reluctantly agree. If there is one thing I've learned after 20 years
on the open commercialized Internet its that any uncurated medium falls to
spam, trolling, con artists, cranks, propaganda, and hoaxes. The bad stuff is
easy to make and generally has better "viral" characteristics, so it drives
out the good. The money is also very much on the side of quacks since absent
regulation quackery is more profitable than real medicine. Hoaxes and tabloids
are also more profitable than real news.

Science without curation will fall to corporate shills and propagandists with
political axes to grind. It's already bad enough but with no gatekeepers at
all it would be a total free for all. Tobacco would become good for you again,
homeopathy would work, etc.

Curation can be democratic, but if so there must be a well thought out
procedure for electing curators and a constitution or set of bylaws that is
hard to amend. Science has a lot of power, so any scientific curation system
is going to come under constant attack. We are living in the age of
information warfare.

------
panic
The most direct way to do this would be to legalize sites like Sci-Hub. It's
hard to argue you're performing a valuable service when you have to use legal
power to prevent others from doing that service for free.

------
neilwilson
Surely the system should be like ... Hacker News.

We publish here, and the stuff that is good rises to the top with upvotes from
our peers, and it is all subject to review in the comments where many an
interesting discussion is had.

We all gain by sharing ideas as widely as possible. We just need a way for
that to happen.

~~~
chaosite
Or, maybe not.

An academic article is not a blog post. Also, only the most popular posts get
discussed here -- tons of stuff is lost if it's not initially popular. Timing
your submission allows for gaming the system.

All scholarly articles need to go through peer review and receive honest,
constructive feedback -- especially the bad ones, and Hacker News (and Reddit
and Slashdot and any system like that which doesn't assign reviewers to
articles) isn't very good at that.

~~~
vanderZwan
> _All scholarly articles need to go through peer review and receive honest,
> constructive feedback_

Which is also a system that can be gamed, by the way. For example, by the
reviewers:

\- _" Oh dammit, we got scooped... better use the insights from here to help
us past our hurdles, while stating this work is not original enough to be
published so we can quickly submit our own and get published earlier after
all!"_

\- _" I see that this paper belongs to Camp A with regards to these two
competing hypotheses explaining unexplained phenomenon X, I am in Camp B.
Therefore, I will consider this paper rubbish by definition."_

\- _" I am an old researcher who does not believe in some of the newer
findings that contradict longstanding assumptions that I "grew up with", and
therefore will never allow this paper to pass."_

\- _" I am a very insulated researcher who cannot make sense of this
multidisciplinary work, therefore reject the parts that lie outside of my
field as rubbish."_

\- _" This paper is a by a researcher competing for the same
position/grant/etc. as me. Better make sure they don't get too much credit."_

\- _" I'm not sexist/racist/etc but... totally clearly biased in my judgement
of this paper because..."_

Now, I'm obviously describing worst-case scenarios here. But my point is: it's
human politics all the way down.

~~~
chaosite
Of course it's human politics. Science is a human endeavor, and you can't
remove human behavior from it.

My argument is that a blog aggregator style system is a bad fit which doesn't
meet the requirements we desire from a replacement of the current commercial
publishing scheme.

------
shrimpx
The trouble here is that the entire academic structure is extremely difficult
to question and change. Disrupting academia is kind of like disrupting the
Catholic Church. It's so entrenched in its assumptions and rituals that trying
to bring revolutionary change to it is pretty hopeless. Professors gained
their status in this archaic structure and will resist challenging it. I mean,
your PhD advisor will make sure you never challenge the research status quo
with your thesis topic, let alone partaking in the academic publishing
structure being fundamentally restructured.

~~~
Fomite
> I mean, your PhD advisor will make sure you never challenge the research
> status quo with your thesis topic

This will come as a surprise to both my PhD advisor and my current advisee

~~~
ms013
Same for my PhD advisor and current/past students. Unfortunately, this HN post
seems to be full of the usual cohort of passionately opinionated HN readers
who don’t have a deep understanding about that which they’re passionately
opinionated about.

~~~
shrimpx
You should elaborate with some detail instead of ad hominem.

------
BurnGpuBurn
I've always wondered why scientists, arguably the smartest people around,
would fall for this blatantly obvious racket. And why they keep going back to
the racketeer for years on end too, wasting millions in tax money while
keeping the valuables behind lock and key for most of us.

It's so obvious you're being ripped off. What the heck scientists?

No wonder people believe in conspiracy theories, with a bunch of scientists
denying them the knowledge while a bunch of business suits hoard the cash.

~~~
dalore
Because of the prestige of being in a journal.

------
eigenman
There are many perverse incentives in this system, but one that tends to be
overlooked is the incentive for faculty to publish in predatory journals. It's
not that most want to publish there, but when even 3rd tier schools require
their faculty to publish a certain number of articles a year under pain of not
making tenure or an increased teaching load, submitting work to an
undiscriminating journal is the easiest way to check that box.

------
QML
Why don't people just publish through Arxiv? Is there not a discussion forum
where people can post, discover, and comment on new papers?

If you know of one for CS, do comment.

~~~
avs733
because while that might make sense at the field level, it relies on scholars
getting credit for that work, which few do.

~~~
QML
Could you elaborate on what you mean by scholars getting credit for their
work?

~~~
Fomite
Very few tenure committees, funding agencies, etc. give equal weight to an
arXiv pre-print and a published paper.

------
peter303
Note several major research universities require faculty to place an online
copy of their papers in an open university server within a year of
publication. The problem may be subject-themed fashion like in a journal. Now
and them an energetic individual might create a mirror TOC page of a joirnal.
For example someone does this for SIIGRAPH's flahship journal Computer
Graphics.

------
sitkack
While we are at it, lets change the format from .pdf to .zip to include
source, data and other information that a hypothesis and test and resulting
analysis can encompass.

First step is to put the pdf into the zip and have existing tools be able to
navigate the hierarchy. Could include notebooks, bibtex, tex, data, images,
etc.

And semantic scholar is in _exactly_ the right place to institute this
evolution.

~~~
icelancer
The OA community - particularly PeerJ - has solved this problem by forcing you
to upload supplementary data either to their website (if it's small enough) or
to Figshare, which does not allow you to delete data once it is uploaded and
paired to a research study. It works rather well.

------
Latteland
This would be great, many people support this idea. You'll need generational
change to get there.

~~~
FlyMoreRockets
"Truth never triumphs—its opponents just die out." \- Max Planck

------
aj7
If you think about the insurance business, it’s only economic value added is
fraud detection and minimization. Someone needs to have an incentive to
prevent fraudulent claims. The economic value of publishing is orderly and
dispassionate administration of intellectual property ownership. Successfully
publishing a paper entitles the author to permanent ownership of the work. The
author name never changes. A paper that leads to tenure at a major research
university has a discounted value of more than 7 figures (USD or Euros.) This
is why the academic beneficiaries of this system, who further control
research, are not eager for alternative methods, or they could bring it down
rapidly.

------
eecc
Academics, I have a proposal/question and was curious if such a system would
work for you. Here it goes:

Take a P2P program similar to Kazaa or BitTorrent to share paper pdfs and
datasets.

Next to these files also share indexes, derived data for searching.

Next to that, also share user generated review comments and endorsements to
implement peer review and quality filtering.

Finally, digitally sign all these data to guarantee provenance and credibility
of the data found on the network.

Let me know what you think of it. I’ve been loosely working on a prototype
application that does all that for a while.

~~~
ms013
The problem isn’t technical. The current flaws in the publishing system are
not due to lack of indexing, data distribution, provenance, or filtering. And
please, please, please, don’t turn reviews into some user driven drivel like
amazon product reviews or other systems that are easily gamed or prone to the
whims of the masses. We already have problems with gaming and personal agendas
making reviews less than impartial: don’t make something that makes it 10x
worse. (CS academic publishing and refereeing for 20+ years here).

~~~
eecc
I understand, please see clarifications in
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18537122](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18537122)

------
8bitsrule
If publishing can't come up with a solution to limit cost and open up access,
there are already online models for open publishing.

An online taxpayer-funded archive could be created/designated by statute. It
would require that such articles be published there (before and after
reviews). Publishers would pay to have access; their prices would reflect that
cost and a cost-plus profit. Privately-funded org's could decide which game
they prefer.

Make a fine memorial for Aaron Swartz.

------
gigatexal
How about this: after 1 year peer reviewed publications get released under a
BSD license? Because this research needs to be available to all and this would
give publishing shops enough time to sell to universities and people who want
it now.

~~~
chrisseaton
BSD is a licence for software. Papers are literature. How’s that going to
work?

~~~
gigatexal
A community open free to the world license then. The exact license isn’t the
point but that the research is not locked away behind a paywall but free to
benefit society and not let a few pocket and profit from the research often
done by public institutions like universities and such.

------
ekianjo
> The answer is academic publishing. Its profit margins are vast, reportedly
> in the region of 40 per cent.

That's an extraordinary claim to make. I would seriously doubt the "best"
profit margin cross-industries is capped at 40%.

------
known
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_to_know](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Need_to_know)
though I do not endorse it for academic research

------
unixhero
Welp. It already has been broken up. Scihub is going strong and so is the push
and emphasis on open journals such as Arxiv and others

------
thoughtexplorer
> HERE is a trivia question for you: what is the most profitable business in
> the world? You might think oil, or maybe banking. You would be wrong. The
> answer is academic publishing. Its profit margins are vast, reportedly in
> the region of 40 per cent.

Interesting. Does anyone know what the volume is like?

------
dustycat
People have been trying to set up web-based academic publishing for at least
twenty years, and they've failed. The obvious explanation is that it does
actually cost money to publish academic research.

------
Aelius
This comment is more directed at hn commenters than the article itself. I'm
led to believe that free journals aren't successful precisely because they
don't have standards. They don't have standards because they can't fund people
to do basic vetting (this is not the same as peer review), or otherwise are
eager to accept whatever comes their way- which are usually papers that have
been rejected by the reputable journals.

Assuming there is no money driven agenda, even the reputable journals have the
issue where much of the content doesn't get peer reviewed. The findings are
far from concrete.

But money driven agendas definitely exist too, and without basic vetting a
journal finds itself hosting bs lobbyist material with sloppy "science"
finding favorable results for anti-GMO, alternative medicines, organic
farming, anti-vaccine, etc. The problem also exists that these entities are
effectively funding their own journals to buy "legitimacy"\- and they
certainly would pose a threat to any journal that doesn't have high vetting
standards.

As of yet, free access journals aren't reputable or actually desirable because
they don't have adequate quality control. Free access to information is a
worthy and noble goal, but we can't render the information useless in the
process.

~~~
mrhappyunhappy
What’s wrong with organic farming? It’s the only kind of produce I want to
eat.

~~~
NateEag
Organic farming does not mean farming without weedkillers or pesticides. It
means farming with weedkillers and pesticides that are largely unstudied,
compared with known quantities like Monsanto's products (whose positive and
negative effects are well documented and widely understood).

The 'organic' products may be better on balance, but we don't actually know
that, because the body of knowledge isn't nearly as developed yet.

That's my layperson's understanding, anyway. I could be wrong.

