The alternative business model that the world is moving to is Open Access. The difference being that instead of paying to access the journal or paper, the researcher or institution that wishes to publish pays up front to have the paper published.
Open Access has its own problems, such as predatory journals, where researchers who don't know better or who are desperate to publish are more or less lied to as to the reach and validity of a journal. It has become an area ripe for a new kind of scammers. This has prompted efforts such as Think, Check, Submit[1].
There's also the problem with raising the funds to publish something as Open Access. It's not always the case that the researcher actually has the means to pay for Open Access.
Nevertheless, Open Access is clearly the way where the research community is headed, and we're going to see a steady growth in percentage of research published as such over the next decade or so. But it does come with its own set of problems to solve.
It is not true that all open-access venues require authors to pay article processing charges (APCs) to publish with them. For instance, in my field, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_Methods_in_Computer_Sc... is a reputable journal which is free to read and free to publish; it is hosted by the Épisciences platform which is managed by a French public agency (CCSD). People usually use the name "diamond open access" to refer to such journals, which I believe are the best direction for scholarly publishing. By contrast, we talk of "gold open access" to refer to the situation where traditional publishers charge APCs: as you point out, this approach has several problems, in particular the fact that the APCs are often extortionate (e.g., $2000 for a 12-page PDF provided by the authors in a completely typeset and publishable form). However it's not correct to say that open access is expensive -- that's only the case if one stays with traditional publishers.
It's also important to keep in mind that "Think, Check, Submit" is an initiative backed by traditional publishers (of the "gold open access" kind), and I think they are making this a bigger problem than it actually is. In my area, everyone knows which conferences/journals are reputable, and everyone knows that all others are essentially scams (especially if they have APCs). I have never seen anyone make the mistake of publishing valuable material with a scam publisher.
I'm going to be honest. IMHO publishing a paper should be like doing a PR on github and there is no reason it shouldn't be.
You do your research, read the "PR" i.e. submission guidelines and submit it, - sure let the committer and reviewers be anonymized until the PR has been accepted - then just pull it into a "Repo" aka journal and be done.
I am curious who/what administration is impressed by publications in predatory journals when listed on a researcher's CV.
P.S. Jeffrey Beall kept a list of predatory publishers but was shut down.
> In January 2017, Beall shut down his blog and removed all its content, citing pressure from his employer.[] Beall's supervisor wrote a response stating that he did not pressure Beall to discontinue his work, or threaten his employment; and had tried hard to support Beall's academic freedom.[]
> The alternative business model that the world is moving to is Open Access. The difference being that instead of paying to access the journal or paper, the researcher or institution that wishes to publish pays up front to have the paper published.
Open Access is not a business model. It is about the Access, as the name says. The author pays is a business model, not the best one, and is the one with many problems.
> Open Access has its own problems, such as predatory journals, where researchers who don't know better or who are desperate to publish are more or less lied to as to the reach and validity of a journal.
This is not specific to Open Access, there are low quality subscription journals as well. No serious scientist would send articles to unknown journals without checking their credentials, whether the journals are open access or not.
> The alternative business model that the world is moving to is Open Access.
That's one of the possible alternative, not the only alternative. Another alternative would be to have peer review as done today where authors pay for PDF hosting, server maintenance costs etc. and not the cost of "publishing" as in the traditional sense.
What has always underpinned this flawed and collapsing business is that successfully published works in “prestigious journals” are a form of private property to the authors. A series of such publications can result in tenure or lifetime job security and prestige for the author. The PRESENT VALUE of cash flows associated with such publications is a number of million dollars in advanced societies, and no cash investment was required on the part of the beneficiary. And the publishing fees are paid by someone else. So the researchers went along with the system which only began to crack due to two factors: (1) Developing economies needed the information but couldn’t afford it at absurd prices (2) Commercial application began to eclipse government and defense as a research driver.
Your post lacks crucial detail. I worked in a scientific journal and am familiar with the pipeline of article creation. Can you elaborate on who "someone else" is that is paying the publishing fees? These are often derived from grants authors have received. Furthermore, where is your evidence that commercial applications have eclipsed government/defense as research drivers? The vast majority of the studies I reviewed in the scientific journal were not directly related to commercial applications, but were most often funded by government organizations of one kind or another (CDC, NIH, defense, tech innovation funds, etc. from various countries). Your comment just doesn't square with my experience in the industry.
Look at the UK's regulations. If UK govt money goes into a research project, it must be open access. They are, to my knowledge, the only country which uses this policy.
In related news, the academic publishing problem is still unsolved. There is no standard model to fund the resource intensive process of peer review in the open access journals and their role as a gatekeeper for scientific relevance, advancement and funding.
> There is no standard model to fund the resource intensive process of peer review in the open access journals
This process doesn't necessarily need to be funded. In my own field, most journals are published by learned societies. They were founded with endowments large enough to cover the costs of publication (i.e. printing) in perpetuity, but the work of editors and peer review is unpaid. This doesn't strike most of us as a problem.
Even the big publishers do not compensate peer reviewers or sometimes even editors. They don't even provide typesetting or copyediting anymore -- authors are expected to provide camera-ready output. So, a lot of the money being gained by the big publishers does not actually go to fund the whole process of creating those journals.
> There is no standard model to fund the resource intensive process of peer review in the open access journals
I have been a peer reviewer over the last 5 years or so for multiple journals and conferences in Computer Science like Elsevier, IEEE etc. Not once have I receive any remuneration for my comments in the article. Most of us do this as voluntary community service.
Peer reviewers are unpaid. Editors are usually unpaid though some large / prestigious journals can manage a few paid staff to edit/layout, the publishing decisions are usually taken by committees of unpaid volunteers (renumeration is basically reputational.)
The solution is technically easy - reciprocal peer review so you pay other people to review your papers by agreeing to review others’ papers, and then publishing on arXiv. Computer science basically does this but replaces arXiv with an industry body the ACM. I don’t see why it needs to be any more complex than that.
Purely open-sourced publication and review; you have to publish your data along with your paper. A wikipedia style review process (or maybe more of a stackoverflow/ wikipedia hybrid).
The biggest and most critical miss of the whole process is not having the data a paper is based on published along with the paper. If something is irreproducible, is it really scientific? If I don't have your data, can I really reproduce your results?
> resource intensive process of peer review in the open access journals
I think you may be unfamiliar with how the reviewing process works. I get an e-mail asking me to review an article for a journal. If I say yes, I donate between two and ten unpaid hours of my time producing a review. After I am done with my review, I send it to the AE. The associate editor donates additional hours of his/her time reading my review, plus one or two others, along with potentially the entire manuscript, in order make a decision on the paper. This recommendation gets forwarded to the editor, who makes the final call on publication. With few exceptions (the only ones I'm aware of being the biggies like Nature, Science and Cell) every single person involved in this process is uncompensated. In some cases the editor may receive a small honorarium, but it's trifling compared to amount of time it takes to run a large, prestigious journal.
You're absolutely correct that reviewing is a resource intensive process. But you're wrong if you believe that the publishers are shouldering a significant part of the resource burden. This is exactly why people are so pissed off when these same publishers turn around and charge our own campus libraries a five-figure sum to access the same journals that we work basically for free to produce.
A token-curated registry (TCR) is an emerging model of information curation developed by Mike Goldin & Simon de la Rouviere from Consensys. It's an incentive system which decentralises the work of creating and maintaining high-quality repositories of valuable information.
Academic publishing seems like an ideal use-case for this model. There's a frenzy of activity going on in this space at the moment, and hundreds of details to work out - rather than get wrapped up in theorising, we want to release a v1.0 quickly and learn from there.
Please reach out to me via LinkedIn if you want to contribute to the pilot, or can help us raise awareness among the academic community. We're a small but dedicated group, open to partnering with universities, journals, crypto-developers, and other interested parties (especially academics).
Note: we have no plans or desire to make money out of this project. We're a group of well-connected enthusiasts who want to make headway on solving this problem.
I’m not an academic so forgive me for a noob question.
Is there a good introductory essay/book on how the academic publishing industry is setup, the workflow and the incentive structure for each party involved?
As an employee at an open access publisher, I can't agree that funding the peer review process is the biggest problem. Our surveys of our own reviewers have shown that only a small (<20%) minority of reviewers wish to be paid a fee for their reviews. The majority of referees prefer the current model of crediting volunteer reviewers in a regularly published "acknowledgements" article. I assume the incentive may be that reviewers show these to their tenure committee.
In fact the most common complaint from peer reviewers is about the length of the review period. Because open-access journals have authors as our customers, the market pressure is to provide excellent customer service, and authors prefer publishers who will process their papers quickly. This pressure is passed on to reviewers who must complete reviews much faster than the old norms under Springer.
Funding, or a startup enterprise, is certainly needed to administer the peer review process. I'm willing to bet it would be less than $10 per paper in universal use. No money is needed to pay reviewers. In fact the savings would be so great, their could be a courtesy payment. The ruinous censorship and false ownership of the publishers should be broken.
Meanwhile, German universities are teaming up for joint negotiations with journal publishers. Their first target is Elsevier. My university came close to losing access to Elsevier journals as a part of this move.
I work at a small non-profit anthropological database. Our primary target is academia. We can only employ a small team of developers (2) and 12-13 total staff. About a decade ago Germany negotiated with us our only perpetual access license for all of their universities.
Consortia memberships in the US and Canada are not uncommon either. However, Germany possess our only perpetual license.
A lot of us desire open access, however, we are not sure how we would fund ourselves. Our subscription rates are generally very low. Especially compared to these large journals.
That's also what the French are doing ; first paragraph of the article:
> [...] an impasse in fee negotiations between [Springer Journals] and Couperin.org, a national consortium representing more than 250 academic institutions in France.
I’ve been reading these comments because I’m always seeking ideas for how to distribute peer review and provide signals about paper quality. How could we leverage the Internet and a large group of authors and papers to show readers which papers thrown online are of citable quality? Surely there’s something we can do beyond counting page views.
The system as it is requires experts to review - peer review isn't "let any random person review" so I'm not sure leveraging the Internet in the traditional sense is the way to go. There are scientist social networks, but they don't have a lot of traction, and there's something to be said for the refereed process that exists.
Both knowledge extraction and signaling paper quality are fascinating, hard problems in modern science. I wish I had answers beyond criticism of the current system, but it might be a problem for people far smarter than I.
I have not given this much thought or did any research. It is just an idea that popped into my head reading this thread. Why not just replicate the open source software model? Author opens a git repository on a github like repository. Reviewer can comment on the content repository. Article versions are stored and changes are stored for future reference. Even research data can be stored in same repository. Reviewers can build up a reputation by reviewing articles. Articles can even be forked or referenced. Articles with the most references and reviewed by reviewers with a good reputation can thus rise to the "top". Technically everything is in place. Or I am too much of a technical optimist?
From what I've seen, the average number of citations for papers published in the previous year is something like 0.3. A significant proportion are never cited.
Most people give no shit about most papers. The fact that even the shittest publication will be reviewed by a handful of experts, even though most people will never read the paper, is as good as you're gonna get imo.
My hope is that the ethos of FAIR* data sharing principles spreads and researchers finally replace the current commercial aspect of publications with an endowment funded system.
[+] [-] fnordsensei|8 years ago|reply
Open Access has its own problems, such as predatory journals, where researchers who don't know better or who are desperate to publish are more or less lied to as to the reach and validity of a journal. It has become an area ripe for a new kind of scammers. This has prompted efforts such as Think, Check, Submit[1].
There's also the problem with raising the funds to publish something as Open Access. It's not always the case that the researcher actually has the means to pay for Open Access.
Nevertheless, Open Access is clearly the way where the research community is headed, and we're going to see a steady growth in percentage of research published as such over the next decade or so. But it does come with its own set of problems to solve.
1: https://thinkchecksubmit.org/
[+] [-] a3_nm|8 years ago|reply
It's also important to keep in mind that "Think, Check, Submit" is an initiative backed by traditional publishers (of the "gold open access" kind), and I think they are making this a bigger problem than it actually is. In my area, everyone knows which conferences/journals are reputable, and everyone knows that all others are essentially scams (especially if they have APCs). I have never seen anyone make the mistake of publishing valuable material with a scam publisher.
[+] [-] jfaucett|8 years ago|reply
You do your research, read the "PR" i.e. submission guidelines and submit it, - sure let the committer and reviewers be anonymized until the PR has been accepted - then just pull it into a "Repo" aka journal and be done.
How can this process cost tons of money?
[+] [-] hatmatrix|8 years ago|reply
P.S. Jeffrey Beall kept a list of predatory publishers but was shut down.
> In January 2017, Beall shut down his blog and removed all its content, citing pressure from his employer.[] Beall's supervisor wrote a response stating that he did not pressure Beall to discontinue his work, or threaten his employment; and had tried hard to support Beall's academic freedom.[]
[+] [-] dmitriz|8 years ago|reply
Open Access is not a business model. It is about the Access, as the name says. The author pays is a business model, not the best one, and is the one with many problems.
See the Fair Open Access Principles https://www.fairopenaccess.org/ and the Publishing Reform Discussion Forum https://gitlab.com/publishing-reform/discussion/issues
> Open Access has its own problems, such as predatory journals, where researchers who don't know better or who are desperate to publish are more or less lied to as to the reach and validity of a journal.
This is not specific to Open Access, there are low quality subscription journals as well. No serious scientist would send articles to unknown journals without checking their credentials, whether the journals are open access or not.
[+] [-] denzil_correa|8 years ago|reply
That's one of the possible alternative, not the only alternative. Another alternative would be to have peer review as done today where authors pay for PDF hosting, server maintenance costs etc. and not the cost of "publishing" as in the traditional sense.
[+] [-] dramaking|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lotophage|8 years ago|reply
Isn't this the case with the subscription-based model as well?
[+] [-] aaron695|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] aj7|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WhompingWindows|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fermigier|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WhompingWindows|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ljegou|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ekianjo|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cornholio|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Mediterraneo10|8 years ago|reply
This process doesn't necessarily need to be funded. In my own field, most journals are published by learned societies. They were founded with endowments large enough to cover the costs of publication (i.e. printing) in perpetuity, but the work of editors and peer review is unpaid. This doesn't strike most of us as a problem.
Even the big publishers do not compensate peer reviewers or sometimes even editors. They don't even provide typesetting or copyediting anymore -- authors are expected to provide camera-ready output. So, a lot of the money being gained by the big publishers does not actually go to fund the whole process of creating those journals.
[+] [-] denzil_correa|8 years ago|reply
I have been a peer reviewer over the last 5 years or so for multiple journals and conferences in Computer Science like Elsevier, IEEE etc. Not once have I receive any remuneration for my comments in the article. Most of us do this as voluntary community service.
[+] [-] GahMatar|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisseaton|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] RosanaAnaDana|8 years ago|reply
The biggest and most critical miss of the whole process is not having the data a paper is based on published along with the paper. If something is irreproducible, is it really scientific? If I don't have your data, can I really reproduce your results?
[+] [-] hyperbovine|8 years ago|reply
I think you may be unfamiliar with how the reviewing process works. I get an e-mail asking me to review an article for a journal. If I say yes, I donate between two and ten unpaid hours of my time producing a review. After I am done with my review, I send it to the AE. The associate editor donates additional hours of his/her time reading my review, plus one or two others, along with potentially the entire manuscript, in order make a decision on the paper. This recommendation gets forwarded to the editor, who makes the final call on publication. With few exceptions (the only ones I'm aware of being the biggies like Nature, Science and Cell) every single person involved in this process is uncompensated. In some cases the editor may receive a small honorarium, but it's trifling compared to amount of time it takes to run a large, prestigious journal.
You're absolutely correct that reviewing is a resource intensive process. But you're wrong if you believe that the publishers are shouldering a significant part of the resource burden. This is exactly why people are so pissed off when these same publishers turn around and charge our own campus libraries a five-figure sum to access the same journals that we work basically for free to produce.
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] followrosemary|8 years ago|reply
A token-curated registry (TCR) is an emerging model of information curation developed by Mike Goldin & Simon de la Rouviere from Consensys. It's an incentive system which decentralises the work of creating and maintaining high-quality repositories of valuable information.
Academic publishing seems like an ideal use-case for this model. There's a frenzy of activity going on in this space at the moment, and hundreds of details to work out - rather than get wrapped up in theorising, we want to release a v1.0 quickly and learn from there.
Please reach out to me via LinkedIn if you want to contribute to the pilot, or can help us raise awareness among the academic community. We're a small but dedicated group, open to partnering with universities, journals, crypto-developers, and other interested parties (especially academics).
Note: we have no plans or desire to make money out of this project. We're a group of well-connected enthusiasts who want to make headway on solving this problem.
Here's Mike Goldin's intro to TCRs, for context: https://medium.com/@ilovebagels/token-curated-registries-1-0...
[+] [-] ablaba|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nell|8 years ago|reply
Is there a good introductory essay/book on how the academic publishing industry is setup, the workflow and the incentive structure for each party involved?
[+] [-] scythe|8 years ago|reply
In fact the most common complaint from peer reviewers is about the length of the review period. Because open-access journals have authors as our customers, the market pressure is to provide excellent customer service, and authors prefer publishers who will process their papers quickly. This pressure is passed on to reviewers who must complete reviews much faster than the old norms under Springer.
[+] [-] agjacobson|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|8 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] cm2187|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jzl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gmueckl|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mgr86|8 years ago|reply
Consortia memberships in the US and Canada are not uncommon either. However, Germany possess our only perpetual license.
A lot of us desire open access, however, we are not sure how we would fund ourselves. Our subscription rates are generally very low. Especially compared to these large journals.
[+] [-] egourlao|8 years ago|reply
> [...] an impasse in fee negotiations between [Springer Journals] and Couperin.org, a national consortium representing more than 250 academic institutions in France.
[+] [-] notyourday|8 years ago|reply
HN: Just do it yourself! It is easy! You already do the hard part! Yay!
-- -- -*- At the same time.
Poster: this is how you run your small db
HN: Oursource your databases! Outsource your apps! Oursource your auth! Outsource your mail! It is difficult!
[+] [-] erikpukinskis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cnees|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] achileas|8 years ago|reply
Both knowledge extraction and signaling paper quality are fascinating, hard problems in modern science. I wish I had answers beyond criticism of the current system, but it might be a problem for people far smarter than I.
[+] [-] berryg|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anjc|8 years ago|reply
Most people give no shit about most papers. The fact that even the shittest publication will be reviewed by a handful of experts, even though most people will never read the paper, is as good as you're gonna get imo.
[+] [-] lolc|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dmitriz|8 years ago|reply
Please help us by expressing your opinion and public support on the forum. There is still a lot of work needed to convince the journals' editors.
[+] [-] harunurhan|8 years ago|reply
[1] https://scoap3.org/
Disclosure: I work at the same section as scoap3 team, at CERN.
[+] [-] ddavis|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ginko|8 years ago|reply
[+] [-] haZard_OS|8 years ago|reply
* https://www.monash.edu/ands/working-with-data/fairdata