Publishing in Academia is a scam. Nowadays everyone puts their papers also on arxiv.org so at least we can read each other's papers for free. While of course still paying the fees to these publishers who are doing nothing but messing up the PDF (I have to fight them to fix the mistakes they add every time a paper is published), while claiming to do a value-add, which happens to add value to nobody but their own pockets. It's a scam through and through.
Of course one has to examine why this system is still in place. And it's mostly to do with policies in universities, where certain journals/conferences are valued more, and changing that is hard, because e.g. Springer happens to own the name. So we all pay millions to Springer, for the use of this name (that we, together, made great, not Springer), and in return, they charge us the privilege of reading the papers that we reviewed, edited, and wrote. It's insane, but it can't be changed as long as universities refuse to change.
So the hard truth is, it's not Springer/IEEE/Nature/etc, it's ultimately, us.
Relatively soon after starting work on my PhD, one of my more-experienced colleagues explained the affect of "impact factor" on academic publishing. Back then I was young and naive, and assumed that at least impact factor itself would be some kind of open system based on freely-available data.
Many years later, I read up on this and discovered Web of Science/Clarivate :(
How is it possible that scientists and academics are gated from the most important metrics based on their own output and by which they measure themselves and are measured by those who fund them?
No it is not. There's nothing in the capitalist model that mandates academic community to maintain a zero-valued-add gatekeepers. It's just an extremely lazy dunk, which happens each time somebody discusses any rent-seeker setup - somebody comes out of the woodwork and proclaims "oh, it's because of capitalism!". In a very very very dumb sense it is - like the reason of crime is that people are breathing. If they didn't they'd be dead, and there were no possibility of them to be criminal. It is this level of lazy and useless logic. Yes, capitalism allows rent-seekers to exist. But it in no way mandates their existence - a model without rent-seekers is as compatible - I would say even more compatible - with capitalism as one with them. Just don't make this kind of lazy dunks anymore, it really adds nothing to the problem.
To avoid the rent seeking you need a state that will enforce laws that prohibit the rent seeking process and revert it when it has formed. This is not compatible with free market capitalism in abstract (being against the freedom of capitalist agents), and in practice it cannot be done because the capitalists will use political power to stop it.
It is one pissible solution - just as one possible solution for theft is abolishing private property. If there's no property, nobody could steal anything. But it's not the only solution. There are many other ways - such as not employing the services of rent seekers, for example - that do not require government involvement. In some markets, this solution is blocked - usually by, guess what, goverment regulations - but as far as I can see, no goverment forces academia to elevate Elseveir to its pedestal.
In this case, it seems close to a prisoner's dilemma.
That would make the researchers the prisoners and Springer the jailer in this analogy.
All researchers are incentivized to defect to the jailer(s)/private publishers until they know that there is a critical mass of prisoners willing to make a prison break/switch to open access journals.
Honestly, you have an idealized view on capitalism.
It's still the most productive system humanity has ever used at scale, but capitalism favors monopolies, cartels and every other anti-competitive behavior you can think of.
That's why we have regulations against such behavior.
Even if - as it turns out- these regulations can still be weaponized by bad acteurs to ultimately strengthen their hold on markets
Yes, and my point was that the capitalistic ideal does not mean fair competition.
Because capitalism inherently favours anti-competitive behavior. If it didn't, we wouldn't have had to pass legislation to outlaw it.
Quoting "not real capitalism" as am argument is at the same level as saying "we just didn't try real socialism yet". That's technically true, too. And we likely never will.
If you truly believe that capitalism is the best way to "live in free and democratic countries", then you should welcome what Elsevier and others are doing, because that is a direct consequence of their "freedom" to pursue profits.
No I should not. That's like saying if I support free speech, I must welcome lying and insulting others. Supporting free speech means allowing people to speak without being persecuted, but that does not mean I must value all speech equally. Both myself and the society still can pass value judgement and value different kinds of speech differently. Same with business conduct - the fact that this conduct is not explicitly criminal does not in any way mean everybody should "welcome" it. There is a wide area between criminal conduct and welcome conduct, and the society and the culture has appropriate means to regulate it. If the academic institutions and the scientists would not value publication is Elsevier journals so much, and would not buy their subscriptions, Elsevier would not exist. It is not because Elsevier is doing something criminal, it is because people decided to behave in ways that allow Elsevier to rent-seek. They can change this behavior, and they absolutely do not need to join the Communist party for that or welcome Elsevier. Those aren't the only choices.
> people decided to behave in ways that allow Elsevier to rent-seek
Your liberal ideology results in a confusion about what it means to rent-seek. This is possible only if people have no way to escape the rent. Elsevier and other companies do this by restricting the freedom of readers, since the publisher has a monopoly of access to scientific publications. It is not a matter of user behavior, since scientists cannot choose to ignore published research. The only other option available is breaking the law.
No, scientists in general don't choose the journals they publish on. They publish in the journals that accept the kind of research they do and frequently there is no open access option. Even if there is, your paper may not be accepted there, so you need to apply to the next available option.
Journals are not some natural resource that is only found in certain places but not others. People create journals. With current technology, a barrier for establishing a journal is quite low. Nothing prevents people in academia from creating journals and from making them open access. If they prefer the easier option - using existing structure with gatekeepers and rent seekers - it's certainly not capitalism's fault.
> If they prefer the easier option - using existing structure with gatekeepers and rent seekers - it's certainly not capitalism's fault.
You must be joking. Academics already have huge amounts of work just to stay afloat in their fields. Now you're accusing them of not using their precious time to create new journals, so capitalism can save face. It is just nonsense like all nonsense coming from people who subscribe to capitalist ideology.
I never said it's the best, it's actually pretty bad at it (and if you re-read what I've written, you'd see that I consider Capitalism to be a form of totalitarianism). It's just arguably miles ahead of the alternatives that currently exist…
If you truly considered capitalism a form of totalitarianism, you wouldn't be advocating for it, nor suggesting that people who love democracy would be interested in such a system.
Maybe it seems nonsensical because you didn't make the effort to make sense of it? You are interpreting my comment literally in the opposite way of what I'm saying which kinda baffles me because in reality we are (mostly at least) in agreement on the topic!
As an academic, I agree with almost everything you say -- but I wouldn't blame policies in universities. As much as I hate all the bureaucracy, I can't blame it here.
Academics are periodically called upon to pass judgment on other academics. It's an unsavory part of our job, but given that there are fewer jobs, less grant funding, etc. than the number of strong applications, it's a necessary evil.
To the best we can, we try to evaluate their research record directly. But it is maddeningly difficult to evaluate work even slightly out of your field, and so journals serve as a signaling mechanism.
And here I agree again with what you say: we are paying millions to Springer, Elsevier, etc. for the use of their names. ("Ooh, this person published in Inventiones Mathematicae!") Which we we made great.
As much as I despise this system, if you believe that universities can change this, at the level of policy, I am very curious to hear what you propose.
> As much as I despise this system, if you believe that universities can change this, at the level of policy, I am very curious to hear what you propose.
MIT did not renew their contract with Elsevier in 2020, a major reason being their inequitable profit model, and refusal to honor open access agreements. They have a postmortem saying the loss had little impact to their researchers.
How about that for a policy change?
> we are paying millions to Springer, Elsevier, etc. for the use of their names.
As an academic researcher, you are (or your institution is) paying them millions in publication and subscription fees so you can keep your job. Publish or perish.
>MIT did not renew their contract with Elsevier in 2020, a major reason being their inequitable profit model, and refusal to honor open access agreements. They have a postmortem saying the loss had little impact to their researchers.
This "fact" about MIT cancelling the Elsevier subscription is often cited but in isolation, it's misleading because it makes seem like MIT students and faculty don't even need Elsevier articles. That's not true.
MIT in providing some other access methods to the same Elsevier articles for their researchers -- at the cost of some extra inconvenient steps -- is actually proving the opposite of the anti-publisher stance: The Elsevier publisher's articles are still valuable to us.
It's the subscription they cancelled and not the articles.
> It's the subscription they cancelled and not the articles.
Correct. Before the UC system also cancelled their subscription with Elsevier they reported paying $11 million annually.
> The Elsevier publisher's articles are still valuable to us.
Yes, but not $11 million/year with a 3 year lock-in. UC reported (at the time of ending the contract) that they have a perpetual license to ~95% of relevant work on Elsevier, so that $11 million/year went to access 5% of Elsevier's library.
What we do see is publishers shifting to open access (OA), which appears to result in lower Uni costs, but shifts the expense burden to researchers. Researchers in the UC system are now asked to use grant funding to help pay OA APC fees.
> As an academic researcher, you are (or your institution is) paying them millions in publication and subscription fees so you can keep your job. Publish or perish.
This ultimately sounds contradictory to your comment about MIT. It seems that by not renewing the Elsevier contract a university would have more funding for jobs?
Could you explain the contradiction you are seeing further?
Cost cutting and increased personnel funding are not related. Just because MIT library is saving millions by cutting a publisher agreement doesn't mean those savings will be directed towards increased staff.
In what way? I meant freely accessible journals, of course
(making journals, or "journals", of their own, would probably cost much less than the subscriptions they're currently paying)
Sounds like a coordination problem? Couldn't university departments sign pledges that they'll stop using those journals if N peer institutions in their country do too?
> which happens to add value to nobody but their own pockets.
While publishers as they exist now are not necessary for this, the publishing process does typically incorporate peer review which has significant value. I agree that things need to change, but I don't think it's true that zero value is added by publishers.
> does typically incorporate peer review which has significant value.
Significant value which is given gratis by said peers, which journals use to boost their reputability and, by association, their profits. Publishers are profiting off of free labor from subject matter experts. Even more disappointing is this free labor is viewed as a right of passage. Don't forget that the author spent hundreds to thousands of dollars to access these unpaid peers.
Publishers are increasingly well-known as scammy. It's why MIT ended their Elsevier contract, and why many other R1s are following suit.
Also don't get me started on the dubious quality of peer review in todays "Publish or Perish" climate.
I agree that the value is primarily given by the peers. However, someone needs to coordinate the process. That said, while I can understand viewing it as free labor, it is often (indirectly) part of the job description of faculty members.
In many fields, particularly those that rely on conferences over journals, peer review is organized by others, not the publisher. So here they are truly doing nothing but hosting the papers behind their pay wall.
Peer review and editing is done free by academics. Publishers "facilitate" this by having horrible unusable sofware platforms from the 90's for this. These are actually worse than nothing, as review would be a lot easier to organize and conduct via e-mail.
Publishers don't add value, they subtract it.
People probably have hard time undersanding this because the system is so absurd and so obvious racket they don't think such can exist.
I am an academic who spends a nontrivial amount of time reviewing papers. My experience has been that the platforms used for submitting reviews are perfectly fine. Often outdated, sure, but I've never really found this to be a significant barrier. I would personally find it more challenging to manage reviews via email.
For reviewers they are usually least bad, but still bad. For example Manuscript Central still requires pop-ups and can be more or less impossible to use with mobile devices. It also has separate login for all journals and password rules that makes it very common for people (including me) to have to reset the password every time they need to log in.
For editors they tend to be a lot worse. E.g. with Editorial Manager adding reviewers is really painful and the search is totally useless. The process to add and be added as a reviewer takes multiple messages in a quite confusing process. Decision letters are sent with bizarre template hacks that are really easy to mess up.
Some submission systems still require formatting of images etc to some arcane formats like tiff and eps. Or to have figures and captions as separate pages. These cause significant work for submitters and are a disaster to review.
Compared to typical enterprise systems they could be even worse, but I'd say still worse than average in that class too.
Don't know if these are a significant barrier. For me they have been and I've resigned as an editor due to the unusability. But I find that they easily cause enough loss in time and nerves of authors, reviewers and editors to be of negative value.
I will admit that MC is pretty annoying. Particularly the issue of having separate login/passwords for all journals. I haven't been in the position of Editor at this point, so I can't speak from that perspective.
I haven't yet run into submissions systems as arcane as those you mention in terms of format requirements, but that does indeed sound very messy and I hope I never see it.
It could enable to have a decentralised web of trust of reviewers. In the same vein it is used to verify identities, you can use it to assess the reliability of a reviewer. A reviewer could sign another reviewer's key with the confidence it has about their reviewing.
The publisher does often assist with coordinating the peer review process which is a nontrivial task. I'm not saying this in itself necessitates everything else surrounding the publishing ecosystem, but I don't think it's accurate to say the publisher does not contribute.
In my editor experience the assistance is minimal at best. Editors (almost all upaid) assess suitability of manuscripts, find the reviewers and handle all communication.
Meta: the linked post is undated, but available on the Wayback Machine as early as November 2005, so a (2005) in the title is warranted and, in any case, this isn't new advice...
To be fair, the Last-Modified header is very sketchy. I use it as one of the heuristics for determining the age of a website in my search engine. It's not great.
It's frequently found incorrect, both older and younger than the actual age of the document. It's a bit of a relic from back in ye olden days when websites were static .htm files in a folder, which is so rarely the case today.
It doesn't help it's also got overloaded uses via If-Modified-Since -style conditional requests.
Plenty of websites also play with the user-visible dates on websites to game search engines - most dates shown in Google results seem to be complete garbage. I don't think Modified-Since is really worse, and it at least gives you a chance to maybe get a date for static pages.
But you are right that If-Modified-Since forces it to be a date for the complete document rather than the content, which might not be as useful to normal users for dynamic pages.
Yeah, my takeaway after having attempted to do so is that properly dating websites is a very hard problem. You can get Google-level-accuracy decent guesstimates relatively easily, but going beyond that is hard.
Not generally useful to show this by default, because nowadays most pages are dynamically generated and although it's technically easy to implement, the last modified header is typically not set to $now.
Well, if Browsers would show it more prominently, there were more motivation to think about it for developers.
But Browsers are bad HTTP clients. Think about bad user experience with file uploads (no built in progress report!?), HTTP auth (not showing status, no logout etc.)
In Chrome you can F12 and go to "Network" tab and then refresh the page. Choose the first file in the list (that's the HTML itself) and you will find "Response Headers" in the "Headers" panel, which includes Last-Modified. It's a bit deep, which makes sense as it's rarely useful.
Last-Modified can have unwanted negative influence on caching behavior. If you want to expose metadata, there's OpenGraph et al. to do the job properly.
Thankfully there are a few amazing Diamond/Platinum open access journals popping up (that are often ‘arXiv overlay’, meaning they simply provide peer review services to arXiv-hosted papers). These journals are free to publish and free to read but still provide the useful categorisation/review/cataloguing services of traditional publications. Notably this includes a post-review DOI.
Relevant for the HN crowd is the Journal of Open Source Software: joss.theoj.org.
that works for a person who actually holds copyrights and can trasfer them - so that IEEE gets its papers, and eventually the author regains the right to also publish, modify, distribute etc. their paper.
For public domain it could be a bit trickier, and would require looking at the text of the current IEEE forms. I would guess that an appropriate loophole can be found to achieve a similar result.
I don't get it. Why use a preprint server associated with publishers, when publishers have the history they have? What's the difference with putting them on e.g. arxiv?
Arxiv has a narrow focus (only physics) and it's rather difficult to even get permission to publish there in the first place. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory runs BioRxiv and MedRxiv for biology and medicine, respectively, but again there's the issue of focus. Those are the big three. Then IEEE started TechRxiv as a preprint server for tech/engineering, which, given the landscape at the time, was a good move.
It's very easy to get access to arxiv.org, if you're at a university or a company doing research you'll surely have a colleague to vouch for you. Even if you're a lone wolf, just ask someone on a subject-focussed site or email a local professor.
1. No. "TechRxiv offers several Creative Commons licenses, all of which permit you to retain copyright of your work. You do not need to transfer your copyright to TechRxiv."
2. Preprint servers aren't really for the publication of articles that were already published elsewhere. But you can have an article published on TechRxiv peer-reviewed and subsequently published in an IEEE journal -- or a non-IEEE journal, for that matter.
*Disclosure: I run a preprint server that "competes" with TechRxiv at https://engrxiv.org.
I'm a little salty about TechRxiv/IEEE as IEEE has a copyright transfer policy that permits posting preprints at approved servers. I applied to have engrXiv recognized as an approved server but received no response. Shortly after that TechRxiv was launched. Currently the only approved servers are still ArXiv and TechRxiv.
As someone who published multiple papers during his academic days under auspices of ACM, USENIX and IEEE, I never saw a case where they demanded that authors not host a copy of the paper for themselves for their "own" audience on their own website.
Furthermore, the concept of a "public domain" paper in academia just seems weird to me. the concept of "public domain" means that the contents can be reused in whole or in part without attribution of any sorts to the original author(s). that goes against the ethos of academia (i.e. plagiarism) in regards to authoring papers, so unsure what public domain for the actual paper gives users vs. the document being what I'd refer to as "freely available" (i.e. no one else can charge for access to the document, only the 'copyright' holder can).
If the author has a right to freely distribute the document (and anyone who gets the document from the author maintains the same right), I don't see what public domain "assignment" gains anyone. i.e. copyright assignment (to the publisher) with the ability to freely distribute the paper accomplishes all these goals. The only thing (I can imagine) that it doesn't accomplish is giving others the ability to collect a bunch of papers together and sell it for "profit". But that doesn't seem to be a something DJB views as needed (and in fact, rails against the publishers who are requesting the copyright assignment for that very purpose).
1. make science self-publishing using decentralised protocols the default
2. redefine traditional journals and publishers as curators or labellers on top of the network, instead of owners
Before you do either of those you need to convince academia that publishing in traditional journals/"prestige" legacy journals does not matter as much to the job. The entire system has Goodhart's Law-ed themselves into a trap connecting tenure to a very specific kind of publishing. Until that changes everything else will just get ignored.
The academia is not the real problem. Once you pass the initial filters, you will be judged by other academics, who are usually pretty reasonable. (For every reviewer 2, there is also a reviewer 1 and a reviewer 3.) They may not always notice that things work in different ways in different fields, and they may not have enough time to evaluate you properly. But they will usually at least try to see behind the metrics.
Governments are another matter, because they lack the expertise to judge your work. Immigration officials in particular are something academics often have to deal with. For some type-2 fun, try applying for a visa that requires something beyond a PhD from a reputable university and a job offer.
I tend to think of science as a distributed consensus process, and that peer review is analogous to a proof of work, and publishers are gatekeeping the distribution of proof of work. I think this is a useful analogy because one can subtract (in theory) the gatekeeping entirely: distributing proof of work is required for the distributed consensus to update.
However, and, crucially, journals differ in their effect on the consensus, e.g. IEEE or PNAS have much higher impact factors, and the competition both among researchers and institutions creates a market opportunity for gatekeeping, that naturally sorts those same researchers and institutions for the next ground of grants.
Again, I think it's hard to understand what a fix would look like, if we don't first recognize how distributed consensus should work for science. Algos like Paxos require a leader, and editorial boards for journals are effectively leaders.
in german law it's even impossible to transfer copyright (Urheberrecht). There is but one way: inheriting. What can be transferred though is usage right - licensing.
Many Germans incorrectly believe that copyrights cannot be abandoned. The actual situation in German law is as follows:
"Nutzungsrechte" (literally "usage rights") include the rights of copying, modification, distribution, etc. These rights can be waived, as in other countries.
"Urheberrechte" (literally "originator rights") include reputation rights and generally cannot be waived. This protection against fraud, libel, etc. has nothing to do with whether something is in the public domain.
Because you want people to read what you've written. You can publish on your personal site too, but Arxiv aggregates things nicely and is easy and free.
But publishing a public domain paper with a commercial publisher still makes little sense, unless the paper is also _open access_, for without the latter, the public domain document could still be put behind a pay wall. Just because it is owned by no-body does not create a duty for the publisher to open their paywall (unlike, for instance, the viral clauses of software licenses like FSF's GPL, which include language that actually forces sharing).
Unfortunately this is exactly what came to mind seeing the level of non response to the level of question. Someone on the other end was ill equipped to fill their role well.
Either through lack of time, skill, training or ability. I'll be optimistic and think the former but suspect one of the latter.
Of course one has to examine why this system is still in place. And it's mostly to do with policies in universities, where certain journals/conferences are valued more, and changing that is hard, because e.g. Springer happens to own the name. So we all pay millions to Springer, for the use of this name (that we, together, made great, not Springer), and in return, they charge us the privilege of reading the papers that we reviewed, edited, and wrote. It's insane, but it can't be changed as long as universities refuse to change.
So the hard truth is, it's not Springer/IEEE/Nature/etc, it's ultimately, us.