The Meddling Middlemen of Academia

Topolomancer | 89 points

I once had to explain, to a copyeditor at one of the leading mathematics journals, that the meaning of a fraction changes if you move stuff between the top and the bottom.

The annual subscription cost for this journal is $3,250.

I am bewildered that we continue to tolerate this state of affairs.

impendia | 4 years ago

This seems to be missing any discussion of non-profit academic society publishers, which in many fields are the dominant publishers and so much better than the for-profit companies that seem more dominant in the life sciences especially. I'm most familiar with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in computer science. Sure, they have their own bureaucracies and added costs, but they run all kinds of other programs and events based on the profits from journals and conferences, including the kind of student scholarships to conferences they suggest. The overall costs are way lower, they're governed by the leading professors who are elected from the membership, they've been far more willing to negotiate with universities in the big transition to open access, and I've found very little meddling of the sort this piece describes.

In ACM / CS, the publishing pipeline is now fully based in LaTeX, so authors effectively do their own typesetting for their own articles. There is now a standardized template for submissions, so the version of the draft you send to peer review is typeset in the same way it will be published in the final version. In my experience, almost always the version that gets published is identical to the final "camera ready" version I submit after peer review.

Finally, peer reviewing is indeed not paid, but the way my fields treat peer review is that you are supposed to review proportionally to however much reviewing you obligate on others by the papers you / your students / your lab submit to peer review. If your paper goes out to three reviewers, you sign up for three reviews. Then for the reviewer coordinator / meta-reviewer burden, if your group/lab is submitting 6-8 papers a year, then you have an obligation to be on the editorial board / program committee, which comes with the reviewer coordinator burden of what a decent sized group/lab obligates on others. Of course, some people are still free riders, and many people submit publications who are not qualified to peer review, but it does change how you think about the "peer reviewing is free labor" issue.

humanistbot | 4 years ago

Journals aren't charging for the publication - either for the editing, or the reviews.

They're charging huge tolls for their work as peer-review gatekeepers, and for the career benefits - and potential improved access to funding for departments and universities - that can result from having work published in a prestigious journal.

Essentially it's like a more complicated form of buying likes (i.e. prestige and marketable crediblity) on social media, for an older and much richer market - with a monopolistic twist.

Opening access to content and paying editors more won't necessarily help. This market won't go away until the tacit benefits become equivalent. This means breaking their ability to operate together as a cartel.

Besides - in reality they only the highest profile journals provide any benefits at all. Most journals are low-profile throw-aways with limited influence and prestige. But the publishers have contrived a situation where universities have to buy an all-or-nothing access package.

If citation prestige is opened up, the cartel will collapse almost overnight.

TheOtherHobbes | 4 years ago

Every since I got my own lab, I've been skipping "traditional" publication, for these reasons and more. I've had great success and satisfaction sharing my research via "DIY" publishing:

https://andrewgyork.github.io

Advancing my field is my life's mission, and disseminating my research is too important to outsource.

Believe it or not, Twitter has been crucial to the process. It's not great for nuanced discussion, but it's AMAZING for advertising the existence of technical information. For example:

https://twitter.com/AndrewGYork/status/1138963271594020864

https://twitter.com/AndrewGYork/status/1222319044755197952

https://twitter.com/AndrewGYork/status/1227747499454021632

AndrewGYork | 4 years ago

> To me, it is super weird that research that is often funded by the taxpayer cannot be accessed by the taxpayer.

This is so completely true, and is something everyone should be fighting for. As for the U.S., it doesn't look like our FASTR bill has gone much anywhere at all.

llamaa2 | 4 years ago

For a gold standard of publishing see http://distill.pub/

Open access and not stuck in the dark ages with dissemination.

qmmmur | 4 years ago

Related article by Russell O’Connor about copyright assignment I recently stumbled onto: http://r6.ca/blog/20110930T012533Z.html

brzozowski | 4 years ago

Peer review is a cornerstone of academics, and there continues to be a prestige associated with it as well as with certain journals. This is especially true in certain circles.

As far as I can tell though, functionally this is breaking down. People can find preprints and archived papers, and do, if they're searching by topic.

So journals at this point are providing a peer review portal, and formatting. I happen to think the formatting does provide value. My sense is that at a good journal, there's a kind of stochastic improvement in errors and formatting, so that the numbers of errors go down on average, and the formatting improved, on average, over iterations back and forth with the copyeditor.

As for peer review, I'm not so sure anymore. My sense is that it does provide some kind of stamp of approval from experts in the area, so if you don't know much about an area, it provides some sense that at least some small group of people in the area believe it meets some kind of basic standards. But that says very little, and the amount of noise in the review process is large.

I think the core of the academic communication system is slowly being hollowed out, and being replaced by blogs, things like twitter and mastodon, and archives. At this point the peer review journal process provides some value, but it's being propped up by tradition. Already, with COVID, we're increasingly seeing the focus on preprints. Journalists and others are careful to note something hasn't been peer-reviewed yet, but everyone knows it matters little because they can turn to experts to find out what they think of it.

If there aren't formal attempts to create an alternative, I think we'll just be left with people posting and passing around preprints and discussing them on twitter, mastodon, blogs, and message groups. If people want the nice formatting, and some stamp of approval, I think something else will have to be worked out. But the journals are starting to feel like they're getting in the way, in general, and represents some kind of power or status structure more than quality control system.

Paying reviewers I think creates bad incentives as the author of the post points out. So do author-pays systems. What is maybe missing from the piece is some recognition that in the past, reviewers reviewed and editors edited in part as part of their job. That is, you were paid as a faculty member at a university, and that was what people understood you did. Pre-internet, this was all valuable service. Now that universities and others are more focused on faculty bringing in profits rather than paying for their services -- and questions are being raised about the value of journals in general -- we are seeing these questions about what reviewers get paid.

I think in the future there will be value in article hosting and searching, and providing website frameworks for discussion and peer review, but I'm not sure they will look like journals per se. You'll see things like arxiv.org, but with commentary, rating, discussion, and approval infrastructure over them. That's what large libraries and research centers will be donating money to or paying for. I think journals per se will eventually start to seem kind of stodgy and old fashioned.

0d9eooo | 4 years ago

"One of the strangest phenomena in academia is" is a good opening line. Deep well.

netcan | 4 years ago

My biggest pet peeve is the downsampling of my high dpi figures to get the image size down for the publisher.

Also, open access journals will eventually dominate, but I think the idea is hurt by all the scam open access journals that plague our inboxes.

SubiculumCode | 4 years ago