Ask HN: Why does academia still publish in for-profit journals?

[AlphaWeaver]

As a teenager who has just graduated high school, and is evaluating entering the university research scene, this is a question that has stuck in my mind for a while. I have seen countless articles here, and elsewhere, explaining why for-profit journals for scientific papers is a bad idea... Why is the problem still so prolific?

Is it a result of the interests of the researchers not aligning with the decision-makers, an issue with lobbying, or something else?

[detaro]

Academics generally are rated by the prestige and number of their publications when it comes to who gets their contract extended or who gets tenure. Prestigious publications happen in prestigious journals (or often conferences in CS, but same principle), the prestigious journals almost all are for-profit (and of course that causes the ugly feedback loop that the best papers only are submitted to those journals, further establishing them as good journals).

In most fields, submitting to a "lower-quality" venue when you could get into a better one means unnecessarily risking damage to your career (or, in case of established, tenured professors, who don't have to care so much about their own ranking, damage to their co-authors'). Also, most universities have access to all important journals, so they don't feel the pain of closed access so much.

While they might like the idea of alternative venues, the universities incentivize them to optimize for "impact factor".

[evolve2k]

There is something going on with academics being told to maximize their impact factor.

Impact Factor is a score derived from how often the average article in the journal is cited over the last 5 years.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor

Deriving then from this an academic is then encouraged to maximize their own score and new academics have only a few years to get their score up if they want to compete for tenure.

I'm not sure but there seems to be something in the way your score is calculated to make academics want to publish in certain journals to increase their score.

http://researchguides.uic.edu/if

It sounds like a glorified page rank system, with people wanting to keep getting their own page rank up by getting links from the historically highest page rank sites.

I wonder is there a way to hack the system to shift the scoring in favor of open access?

[impendia]

Signalling effects.

Imagine that you are one of five hundred postdocs applying for your dream professorship. Your papers are so highly technical that the hiring committee won't be able to judge them directly (certainly not before you make the short list).

The most important component of your job application is your recommendation letters. But also very important is your CV, and hiring departments will want to see where you have published. Journals like Inventiones Mathematicae, Journal for die reine und angewandte Mathematik, Publications mathématiques de l'IHÉS, and so on have developed a reputation for publishing only outstanding papers, and so your CV will stand out if you have published them. Less so if you have published only in, say, Indagationes Mathematicae.

Same when you are applying for tenure, promotion, grants, etc. Basically any time you need to demonstrate to anyone outside your immediate specialty that you are doing top-notch work.

This could be done in other ways; indeed I would have better use for my brain cells than to keep track of a Byzantine hierarchy of journal quality -- but for now the system is quite entrenched.

[tnecniv]

The flip side of all the prestige incentives that everyone mentioned is that there's little downside. Either your institution will foot the bill for the cost of publication or it's built into grants. On the other end, the institutions researchers are affiliated with pay for access to many of the top journals and, even if you don't have direct access to the journal version of a paper, you can normally find it somewhere else, like the author's website.

[jldugger]

For better or worse, tenure evaluations are a crazy important part of academic life in the US. You have roughly five years to produce enough research of a high enough quality to earn the right to keep doing said research.

The three common metrics for evaluating are:

1. citations -- highly cited papers are evidence of contributing to academic society

2. impact factor -- papers published in highly selective journals that peer reviews submissions are considered better

3. money -- AFAIK nobody says this out loud, but if your department can't bring in revenue to support you and your researchers, your tenure case is on thin ice.

[ferdterguson]

In my field, if you get a TT position and play nice, you usually get tenure. But yeah - it's basically all about money. You can't do good research if you don't have solid funding, you don't get solid funding unless you have good research in high impact journals.

[paulsutter]

AI publishing is virtually all on Arxiv. Conferences replace the role of journals (for example getting a paper accepted at NIPS, ICLR, ICML, etc). And I find out about important papers on Arxiv Sanity or even Twitter.

[nnn1234]

Great point by detaro. Issue is convincing the ivy league or some league of universities to adopt open public standards. Better yet make a taxes being used unfairly argument to make a law that every instituion that takes public money has to open access their work.

[kem]

fwiw, it's important to remember that there's a lot of diversity involved.

In my university, for example, the library pushes hard for movement toward open public standards. I've also seen junior faculty make efforts to publish in open journals. But then those junior faculty get slammed by [some] senior faculty for not publishing in higher profile journals and not having enough of an impact factor.

There's also a lot of legitimate grievances against open journals, due to the financial incentives that are created and the types of review processes that are encouraged by their policies.

So there's a chicken-and-egg factor and a lot of disagreement about what should be happening.

Personally, I think there should be a huge shift in publishing practices in academics, but it's going to take some time.

[JeSnuster]

They don't have the strength to revolt. These are the people who give away their creative output for pennies, suckered by the fake dream of recognition, when they could be capturing so much more of the value they create, if they weren't willing slaves to publishers, governments and nasty corporations that exploit their idealism to suck them dry, and instead acted entrepreneurially. Academia is the exploited worker class of the knowledge economy, and I'm a capitalist.

[Amir6]

Probably one of the biggest scams of all time!

- You do a lot of work and put a lot of effort doing state of art and novel research (by mostly using tax payers money through research grants coming from government)

- You pay for publishing while giving up all your rights (including copyright) and violating tax payers rights by punting the results of their money behind a paid wall!

-Someone will sell that research results to another researcher (maybe the colleague next door!) and make profit

3 wastes of money and 2 absolutely pointless profits made using this ill phased circle.

[joeclark77]

There is a lively debate in the Western world about just how free the free market should be, but very few even on the political left think that "for-profit" == "evil". If the publishing business model works for the researchers, the universities, and the publishers, what's wrong with it? No need to fix what isn't broken.

[ben_jones]

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it"

[kronos29296]

Prestige, Resume and Career. We have system in place for this. You don't get hired without credentials. In academia it is publications and only big publishers like Elsevier, Springer, Wiley etc are acknowledged. Kinda like Microsoft, Google, Apple in software.

[c12]

I seem to remember one of my lecturers having to get their doctoral research published in a journal before they could pass the course.

[deepnotderp]

AI publishes in arXiv. There's still hope ;)

[tnecniv]

Many fields do but everyone, including AI, submits to conferences and journals because arXiv is not peer reviewed.

[codesnik]

what if legally compel to publish public funded research results only in open access journals?

[detaro]

Some funding sources do that, but note that open access does not mean non-commercial: in case of commercial journals it typically means paying a publishing fee.