Yes, definitely. Is this even a discussion? Scientific journal companies extract enormous rents and add literally zero value. I'm not using 'literally' in the not-actually-literally sense that people sometimes use it. I mean literally zero value. They either don't pay, or barely pay, the peer researchers who review the material (the only valuable part). Aside from that, they do what, exactly? Publish it? The thing that costs effectively zero dollars to do on the internet now? It's disgusting that this business still exists.
I'm excited about the increasing frequency in which articles on this topic are showing up on HN. I believe that many of the problems in academic publishing can be remedied by giving the scholarly community affordable tools to manage and publish journals. After all, they are already writing and peer-reviewing the material themselves. Full disclosure: I'm a founder of a company called Scholastica (https://www.scholasticahq.com), a peer-review and publishing platform used by hundreds of journals across a variety of disciplines ranging from law to mathematics. Sir Timothy Gowers, the Fields Medal winner and Cambridge Mathematics prof, launched a high-quality ArXiv overlay journal on the platform about a year ago (http://discreteanalysisjournal.com/) which I think lends credence to the idea that the scholarly community can write, review, and publish work without relying on the current corporate publisher status quo.
We haven't even addressed the distortion that negative results, such as the results of failed experiments, are never published, yet are extremely valuable. Perhaps scientists wish to condemn their peers to fighting battles already lost.
Yes, next question.
More seriously, it's hard to see what value publishers possibly be adding to the publishing process. Beyond tier one journals, full time editors don't really seem to do very much.
But I'd love to see some data supporting the argument that they're of value.
My feeling is that the misery is inhomogeneously distributed when it comes to scientific disciplines.
In physics the situation does not seem too terrible. The American Physical Society is a nonprofit which runs a family of go-to subscription-type journals. Preprints on arxiv are the standard.
Publishing innovations are popping up from time to time. A prominent example is scipost.org, which is funded by national funding agencies and is free to both publish and read. Also, their peer-review is public.
Full disclosure: I have published in various APS journals.
There should not be an industry for scientific publishing in the first place.
I think about this problem a lot because the whole biomedical publishing industry is so backwards.
One of the reasons why scientists are currently dependent on the journal industry is because the journals control peer review. Unfortunately, instead of merely reviewing manuscripts for correctness, the journals link peer review to "impact," which is a prospective measure of importance (i.e. whether they are likely to get many citations). Every journal you submit your manuscript to will put it through a new round of peer review looking for both correctness and impact. Massive amounts of time are wasted by working scientists and journal editors attempting to prospectively "grade" manuscripts on how important they will be (along with checking the correctness of the manuscript). Upon rejection for either correctness or impact, authors resubmit their manuscript to a lower tier journal (+/- revision) and wait for the next round of reviews. Rinse/repeat. Eventually, assuming the paper is not awful, it will be published.
How could we do it differently?
One idea is to disentangle impact from correctness and eliminate the journals from peer review. Scientists already review each others manuscripts pro-bono, so here's a proposal: Scientists submit manuscripts to bioRxiv as "pre-prints" for a nominal fee (say $1000) and request peer review. An editor selects 3-4 potential reviewers and reviewers are paid a nominal fee (~$150) to perform the review. The money paid by authors covers the reviewer fees and editors salaries. After peer review, authors can decide whether they want to submit their articles for additional peer review and fancy publication in a journal.
Impact is thereafter judged only by how many citations a paper gets, not which glossy magazine it gets published in.
Betteridge's law be damned, the business of scientific publishing is bad for science. Scientific publishing is a complete mess. We have a large scale business built around an industry funded by public money.
This creates barriers to scientists getting access to research papers. As research papers are the lifeblood of discourse in the sciences, we are artificially limiting the effectiveness of our scientists.
In case you were not paying attention, science and engineering is ultimately responsible for all economic growth, so the public has a vested interest in enabling successful outcomes in this space.
Anything with an emotional component of drive that exceeds rationality with respect to holding out for money will of course be exploited.
That's a really high minded way of saying "For every Artist, Musician, Scientist, or Teacher trying to make $1, there's a Shitty C-Student there making $5 before letting go of the rest downstream."
It might sound harsh but it's a fundamental human truth in the US business model of Art-as-Commercial.
Jason Hoyt (of PeerJ) wrote an interesting commentary on this article: https://twitter.com/jasonHoyt/status/879624241817296896
Ultimately it's a bit more complex than "all publishers are evil". There are a while slew of low-cost, open-access journals out there, but the wider academic community still places far too much weight on individual journals' impact factors.
Is it the responsibility of publishers to try to effect a wider change in attitudes? It seems doomed to failure to try and make them, and it seems like pressure from within might be the only way to deal with the problem.
Why haven't PLoS and Science One eaten Elsivier's cake? Their model makes perfect sense in a web-based world. Why are scientists still playing Elsivier's game?
If I'm not mistaken, many publicly funded studies end up behind paywalls. Terrible model. Especially in the age of wiki based media. Combine this problem with low quality science necessitated by the publish or perish doctrine, failure to incentivize publishing of negative results, p-value misuse, and the reproducibility crisis of soft sciences, and it is almost a wonder that we make any progress at all! Also ironic that an institution dedicated to order and objectivity suffers from problems with both.
Loosley related commentary: perhaps it is illustrative of the difficulty in bridging the steep impedance mismatch between idea and practice.
I think, its a artificial status symbol for universitys- if you cant afford it - you are not really a scientistic institution.
Like all statussymbols, it could easily be replaced with something more pragmatic - and will never be, because ironically - in something as meritocratic as the sciences, the caste longs for the aristocratic.
Wasn't the point of the web to be a replacement for this? Nobody's done the meta level work of making reviews of URLs easy to access in a relevant way, I think.
But that would be the best replacement, right?
Corrupt institutions are trying to claim ownership of science? What a surprise...
Savvy headline writers flip the bit on Betteridge.
We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14658308 and marked it off topic.
In the old days there were the journals from the scientific societies and the Elsevier-Pergamon duopoly. Society journals were respectable, generally speaking, and subscriptions were affordable. Elsevier/Pergamon was expensive, pretty bad, and something you could do without if you had to. If the library wouldn't subscribe you'd ask for a reprint. Things weren't great 30 years ago but manageable.
Several things have happened since. The society journals have mostly been sold to commercial publishers, and prices have gone up steeply, Elsevier is as sketchy as always but even more expensive, and the various open-access journals have popped up, with a quality even worse than Elsevier. Finally, even academics at teaching institutions are forced to publish thanks to clueless administrators and a general shortage of funds.
Scientific publishing is fully out of control. Librarians thought they had it bad in 2001, but look at it now!