zlacker

The core issue is that journals offer standard. People don't like to bother with checking every paper's reputability with a magnifying glass, and the reputation of the journal gives a shortcut around that. It's editorial work which gives the competitive edge.

Now, of course scientists could run a reputable journal for free or on donations. However, once you have achieved a reputable status with your journal, it becomes something that can be milked for money. And generally people fail to resist that temptation.

Even if they resisted, they still have the entire academic publishing industry very scared, and as we can see, these are people who aren't afraid to use the dirtiest tactics to protect their position.

Even though the status quo is strong, it can be dismantled.

>>mach1n+(OP)
The existence of many high quality open access journals would seem to contradict your theory.

>>OskarS+A
I think it proves my point. Would you rather see your paper featured in Nature or on any open access journal of your choice? Would you trust more on a random article from Nature or an article from any open access journal?

>>mach1n+(OP)
> generally people fail to resist ... temptation

And this is why society defines regulations. Society, which has an interest in open access to knowledge.

>>OskarS+A
These are in an extreme minority, although this may vary from discipline to discipline. In my area you can count fully open access journals on one hand and they play no notable role yet. All top journals are closed access with expensive "open access" publication fees (ca. 3,000 USD per article). Most of them are Springer and Oxford Journals, others are Elsevier.

>>mach1n+(OP)
I think this does more harm than good. If there's anything we should have learned from the replication crisis of 2014, a decent amount of "generated" or "satirical" papers scandals, and an essentially constant stream of retractions, merely being published in a prestigious journal is not a great heuristic for whether a result holds up or the methodology was sound. People who want to seriously assess a paper need to read it, no matter what. Reputation by institution may once have been valuable, but as institutions are corrupted by their incentives and names can be bought and sold as part of the shell game of business, this gets worse and worse as a way of actually assessing information. The benefit you tout is on thin ice if it exists at all, and the harm is enormous, to the point where these institutions have lost the support of the overwhelming majority of people who do the research published in them. In practical terms, most researchers already get most of their papers through sources like Sci-Hub or arXiv, or find out about them through search engines or word of mouth, only dealing with the publisher at the point where they already know what they're looking for. This argument simply has no merit

>>jonath+x2
Can I guess, your area is experimental science/engineering? I notice that in the more theoretical fields (theoretical physics,math,CS,stats) the open access channels are on par with the paywalled ones. Curious as to why. Perhaps its more expensive to replicate results, perhaps the fees are nothing compared to what you pay for the labour and equipment..

>>balsam+B3
No, it's philosophy. I believe theoretical physics and math are special, as you recognize, because they need a lot of additional vetting. My work is mostly in formal philosophy, which does involve a bit of math, and I'm constantly worried the reviewers might not spot a mistake and send it to colleagues for additional checking. This must be a hundred times more pressing in math and physics, so they developed open archives. As for CS, the reason for more open access archives may be a bit different. My personal impression from reading many CS papers is that 90% of publications are garbage whose only purpose is to satisfy some publication requirements. There is also a lot of repetition by authors. That's in my view understandable since many funding authorities also expect fancy prototype systems and concrete implementations, and computer scientists have only 7 days a week to achieve all this. So in CS hurdles for publication are kept low by having a lot of proceedings and open access journals and archives.

>>advael+m3
It's a terrible heuristic, but it's one that is used for a LOT of funding decisions. "You want money? Show me how many papers in Nature you have."

>>hoseja+K4
And that's the rub, isn't it? Once a player like Nature or Elsevier can entrench itself in the process by which the other institutions function (Like being gatekeepers on the government's merit metrics for funding), they can route around the fact that nearly every working academic doesn't actually want to support their business model by effective fiat

Personally, I think it's always a mistake to build a business into government policy. It uses the government to protect the business from the free market, and the business to protect the government from public influence or public transparency

>>mach1n+(OP)
> Now, of course scientists could run a reputable journal for free or on donations. However, once you have achieved a reputable status with your journal, it becomes something that can be milked for money. And generally people fail to resist that temptation.

That is true across all fields, not just for publishing scientific papers. That's why we need a true cooperative economy, that is an economy of cooperatives which do not compete with one another but promote active cooperation to reduce the overall competition/privatization in society.

>>mach1n+(OP)
I believe your argument misses a critical point: The practicing researchers have no difficulty judging the value of articles appearing in a given venue. The whole "fake journal"-thing only really took of after new public management moved the decision power on hiring and grants from scientists to MBA's who could not judge publications on merit.

>>mach1n+21
I would like to have a paper featured in Nature but published in a volunteer-run non-profit open access journal. The papers published in prestigious journals are often not very useful, because they must be written for a rather general audience. When I'm building upon someone else's work, the information I'm interested in tends to be buried in the supplements, because it's too obscure for the audience of the journal.

>>southe+w5
Yes and:

The metaphor of "producers and consumers" is inadequate for today's reality.

> ...promote active cooperation to reduce the overall competition/privatization in society.

David Graeber's ideas (memes) have truly infected me.

"The purpose of universities is to produce scholarship."

Facepalm slap. Like "duh", right?

Exposes the folly of higher ed's current focus on credentialing, for profit.

--

Another meme:

Graeber also points out that in our "service economy", much of the actual work being done, needing to be done, is "caring work" (vs "service work").

A distinct type of labor ignored by our current economic accounting rules.

Much of FOSS is something like "caring work", right?

Sure some people profit from the products and services. Which I have no problem with.

But there's a lot of really important work that just needs to be done. Just one recent example was OpenSSL.

Our Freedom Markets™, those magical invisible hands of the marketplace, haven't figured out how to incentivize and reward and sustain the efforts of maintaining the commons.

>>mach1n+(OP)
Journals don't actually sell editorialization though. They sell exclusive access to content. They claim the content is valuable because they curate/editorialize it. But the core offering isn't the curation. It's the exclusive access.

They could offer the curation without the exclusive access and I'm sure many scientists would pay for that curation.

>>southe+w5
but unfortunately, publisher only want money mean they do not concern who can publish article, they do concern their reputation(bring money). I just want to direct that build a new system control people corporate from different science organizations will not resolve problem easily.

>>jonath+D4
Ah yes! Would you say that in the field of philosophy, practices around publication and exposition are in general more aligned with the humanities than the sciences? Hadn’t even thought in that direction yet, thank you for the heads up!

>>jonath+D4
Physics PhD here, I would extend your comment that 90% of CS papers are garbage to include engineering and physics as well. The vast majority of those are what people refer to as "status updates" where long term projects provide minor updates that don't really contribute anything to the general knowledge but exist solely to advertise their work and provide a bullet point in their quarterly report to the funding agency. This is also added to the fact that most PhD programs require a candidate to publish at least 3 articles in peer-reviewed journals, where some programs even discriminate based on the impact factor, further entrenching the paid-for journals as open access are not ranked as highly. I personally really like the IEEE journals as they are cheap ("free" with IEEE membership to a given society) and reasonable high quality (exceptions as always of course). Years ago I looked at trying to get my department a subscription to the major Elsevier journal in our industry and was quoted almost $6,000/yr, mostly for historic papers published back in the 50's, 60's and 70's where authors were long since dead and the utility mostly on filling in gaps in modern theory. While neither bandwidth nor website design infrastructure are free, high access costs are unnecessary and just equate to greed IMHO.

>>advael+m3
To be clear, I'm not arguing that this is a good system. I'm simply stating that it is the way it is right now. And while these counterforces are indeed gaining traction, they are still far away from toppling the status quo.

>>zaphar+tf
I would pay to hear prominent scientists discuss each other's work. Or have a journal where the content is the meta analysis of the paper which I find the educating part as a non-domain expert in many of the papers I read.

Like the stilted writing in patents, academic writing often has a loud thundering message in the content that is never actually expressed in the writing. If you have the right context it hits you like a red brick, to the lay person is has to be explained.

Some work is like, omg this is going to change the world and another is, showing another construction of an uninteresting thing we already knew. Both are presented in the same manner. Much of this meta analysis happens on twitter and reddit, but is easy to miss. It would be nice if it was contained within the journal structure itself.

>>mach1n+(OP)
> The core issue is that journals offer standard. People don't like to bother with checking every paper's reputability with a magnifying glass, and the reputation of the journal gives a shortcut around that.

I'm not sure why people still believe this. High-impact journals like Nature have the highest rates of retraction. The incentives around scientific publishing are too perverse to make naive claims like that journals enforce some kind of quality standard.

>>mach1n+(OP)
> of course scientists could run a reputable journal for free or on donations

We can't even get critical infrastructure open source projects funded by donations. What makes you think people will start donating to free research journals?