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Over at Techdirt, Glyn Moody writes briefly about how to stop the large academic publishing houses from completing their attempts at gaining control over the entire publishing process from end-to-end.
Techdirt's coverage of open access -- the idea that the fruits of publicly-funded scholarship should be freely available to all -- shows that the results so far have been mixed. On the one hand, many journals have moved to an open access model. On the other, the overall subscription costs for academic institutions have not gone down, and neither have the excessive profit margins of academic publishers. Despite that success in fending off this attempt to re-invent the way academic work is disseminated, publishers want more. In particular, they want more money and more power. In an important new paper, a group of researchers warn that companies now aim to own the entire academic publishing stack: [...]
As it stands, universities stand for the salaries of the faculty members who research, write, and edit the journal articles at no cost to the publishers which then charge exorbitant prices for access to the results.
Journal Reference:
Björn Brembs, Philippe Huneman, Felix Schönbrodt, et al. Replacing academic journals, (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5526635)
Previously:
(2020) Open Access Journals Get A Boost From Librarians—Much To Elsevier's Dismay
(2019) University of California Boycotts Publishing Giant Elsevier Over Journal Costs and Open Access
(2019) German Institutions Reach Open Access Deal with Scientific Publisher Wiley
(2018) Elsevier's Demands are Unacceptable to Germany's Academic Community
(2017) List of "Predatory Publishers" Disappears
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @01:49AM
Well, don't give it to them! Really, WTF?!
(Score: 5, Informative) by Kell on Monday October 04 2021, @01:49AM (5 children)
Academic and senior editor of an IEEE journal here: yes, they are parasites - they charge money and contribute
nothingvery little. Some, like IEEE are ok and mostly work for the benefit of members. Others are riding high on the reduction of costs that's come from moving entirely to digital dissemniation, without correspondingly lowering prices to customers or academics. That's right - they charge us money to publish with them (typically in the form of extra page fees or open access charges). If you want your manuscript available to all without limit then you need to pay upwards of $1500 per paper, which gives you a reasonable estimate of what their expected profit per publication works out to be. Given the thousands of publications that go to "print" every year, that's a ton of money for doing very little more than running a server.So why do smart academics put up with them? Because we are beholden to "prestige" publications with good names that act like a brand-name for our papers. Being published in a top journal means your paper must be good, whereas lesser papers may not - and everyone wants their science to be held to high esteem. It's a type of popularity club. Note, that the choice of journal doesn't actually change the substance of the paper at all, short of useful comments and suggestions of the reviewers (who work for free).
If we all banded together and said "Fuck this, we'll run our own servers hosted by the university" then there'd be a bunfight over whose journal was best and who should be editor and so on. This is all driven both by ego and by the resource scarcity in the university sector, where metrics have become sharp edged instruments by which one's career thrives or falls. As the saying goes: publish or perish.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @01:58AM
Boils down to a corrupt economic system. Can't be any other way until we alter our entire system of exchange, and mentality in general
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday October 04 2021, @08:10AM (3 children)
"Hosted by the university" doesn't do a damned thing for those like me, who have little to no access to these universities. It's weird how motels and restaurants offer free WiFi to all, but university WiFi is password protected so only students and faculty can access it.
If I want to access some journal article, I can't, not online through a university. Have to travel to their library, beg them to let me use their facilities, which takes a bit of tedious explanation that, no, I'm not a student or faculty. Even being an alum isn't good enough. They usually do have some sort of guest usage protocol. Then I can access whatever journals they have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @01:16PM (1 child)
schihub exists
(Score: 3, Informative) by http on Monday October 04 2021, @05:04PM
Scihub is a potential workaround, not a bugfix.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @06:35PM
You are wondering why everyone is dropping out of schools. Because these institutions and the ones they work with, which were supposed to be about promoting academic advancement, have turned into a for profit business.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @02:00AM (1 child)
Obviously, this model of publish/perish/peer-review is proven to be a clown show. Academic research is not like back in the 19th C where uppercrust dilletantes can devote their energy into study without worrying about making a living.
What are your ideas to turn things better? I know most of yous are douchebags/working stiffs, as I am, not some hoity-toity ivy-league/oxbridge dons, but give it up - suggest some ideas.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Monday October 04 2021, @11:57AM
Like the US political system, I don't think it's fixable because everyone involved in it has too much at stake to want to switch. As others have pointed out, academics are locked into publish-or-perish, and the academic publishers are locked into taking advantage of that. You would need to convince all the major universities in the world to act together to switch to something else, which would be akin to negotiating a lasting peace in the Middle East or the Balkans or possibly both at once, in order to get any change.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @02:05AM (7 children)
In a nutshell, the problem seems to be that a few publishers have an unhealthy hold on many major research publications.
Academia is a conservative institution (at least in terms of how it functions), and the primary reason scholars haven't moved toward alternatives is that tenure, promotions, and prestige are generally awarded based in part on the prestige of the specific named journals that research appears in (or, in the case of books in some fields, by the publishing house name). While some universities have moved to encourage open access publication, tenure committees and reviewers are going to keep relying on the standards of yesteryear.
So how does this get shaken up? The grown-ups with the real power need to make the change: the institutions and organizations who offer grants for research. In most cases, these groups want research to be public and shared to show how groundbreaking it is. And if "prestigious" journals are getting the way because they are in bed with publishers who want to shave huge profits off the top for doing very little, these grant-providing organizations need to step in and say, "You can't use our grant to publish any results in anything that isn't open-access. PERIOD."
Academia is too stuck in politics and tradition to make the change by themselves. But the people who actually give the money for research could make the change, and it would be beneficial to them in terms of making results more public (thus more likely to be read, cited, etc. which leads to more prestige for research).
It's a win-win for grant providers, and some are doing it. But more need to add that stipulation. Once enough grant-providing groups make that clear, the academic publishing market will have no choice but to shift. Now it's stuck in this stupid netherworld where everyone (including most academics) agrees it sucks and academics are already sharing publications through "unofficial" means to get the research out, even if publishers are erecting expensive paywalls.
We just need to make it clear that no money flows out for research unless results are public. It's really that simple. And then the (now mostly unnecessary) publishers can die a quick death, as they should have a couple decades ago.
P.S. For those who don't know this, actual publishers tend to do very little. The vast majority of selection of research for publication, peer review, suggestions for editing, high-level management of journals, etc. is generally done by VOLUNTEER academics. About the only thing the publishers actually tend to do is some copyediting and formatting, as well as maintaining some business office contact or editorial assistants who handle basic everyday secretarial duties of the publication. Books are a little different story where subject matter editors are often employed by presses, and they may have a pretty important role in selecting and guiding publication -- however, to be frank, the fields where monographs and books are still considered "cutting edge research" (like much of the humanities)... well, really nobody's going to die if they can't read some obscure new monograph. Unlike in medical science if doctors don't have access to new articles. Or in engineering if some important finding on, say, some material that impacts public infrastructure is stuck behind a paywall. We should ultimately move toward open publication in all disciplines, but we can start with those that tend to be run by grant money, where journals are the biggest problem.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday October 04 2021, @03:59AM (4 children)
I don't think that's really it.
I see what's going on in academic publishing as a side effect of something much more important going on in academia, namely that the odds of any young academic getting tenure has dropped dramatically over the last few decades, as part of a concerted push by administrations to eliminate tenured faculty in favor of ridiculously underpaid adjuncts. The young academics, in turn, are more desperate to pad their resumes as much as humanly possible to increase their shot at getting one of the handful of tenure-track positions still out there. The academic publishing industry has moved rapidly to exploit that desperation to offer options like pay-to-publish which seem to help with the resume-padding process. The tenure committees, in turn, have to try to filter out legitimate important research articles versus stuff appearing in schlock pay-to-publish journals that will literally publish anything [predatory-publishing.com], while being swamped with applicants that appear to be and may very well be qualified for the job.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Monday October 04 2021, @07:44AM (2 children)
Yes, the pressure is high, but publishing in a predatory journal is a red flag. Never do this, if you value your career. There are quite a few "properly" reviewed journals serving as a catch-all like Plos One or PeerJ which will accept your research if it has at least some merit. The properly is in quotes, as the review process is under severe pressure for almost all journals for similar reasons. Most people I have talked to (and including myself) spend at most a few hours on reviewing a paper. While this is enough for judging an experimental study (most of the time), it is not enough for checking mathematical proofs or the validity of algorithms. Most papers are therefore under-reviewed and likely to contain undetected flaws.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday October 04 2021, @03:33PM
I agree you shouldn't, but I have to imagine that if you get to the point where simple publication counts are being used to even get to the point where a human would even be looking at your application, the temptation goes up dramatically. And when we're talking about the difference between a future where you make something like $100-200K a year for holding a tenured position at a respected institution, versus a future where you make $15K a year slaving away as an adjunct for the rest of your life, I'm not going to be all that surprised that enough people fall for the predatory publishing scam to keep it going.
This will be solved when academic institutions, at all levels, value quality teaching and research more than the brand new Alfred E Neuman Administration Building and the Quincy Adams Flagstaff Athletic Center, and not before.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday October 04 2021, @09:21PM
Which is why there's a trend to have the results in mathematics papers formally verified by computer systems.
Systems like Coq, Agda, and Lean get used for this. (And I'm leaving one out that I can't think of just now).
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 05 2021, @11:36AM
That in turn is driven by a ridiculous oversupply of said academics. For example, at the time I was going to school for a PhD in pure math (as opposed to applied math), there were roughly twice as many PhDs created as there were academic and non profit positions to absorb those degrees. While there was some consumption of pure math PhDs in the business world, it's not a lot either. So year after year, there are a bunch of math PhDs that end up dropping out of the field (for those interested, I was one such and had planned to do so from near the beginning of my efforts).
Ridiculously underpaid adjuncts makes sense in such a messed up labor market. After all, most colleges are there to teach undergrads and such, not to pay a few elites a bunch of money. It's more cost effective to take advantage of the overproduction by paying cheap, than to pay someone a lot of money to do less.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @05:31PM
You know that open access is currently like "pay to win"? Or: Pay to get published without review made for free by beginners or for free by more experienced scientists who had some spoken obligation or a deal to do so.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Tuesday October 05 2021, @12:34AM
Something similar I wrote twenty years ago
Short version: "An Open Letter to All Grantmakers and Donors On Copyright And Patent Policy In a Post-Scarcity "
https://pdfernhout.net/open-letter-to-grantmakers-and-donors-on-copyright-policy.html [pdfernhout.net]
Long version: "On Funding Digital Public Works "
https://pdfernhout.net/on-funding-digital-public-works.html [pdfernhout.net]
From the first: "Executive summary: Foundations, other grantmaking agencies handling public tax-exempt dollars, and charitable donors need to consider the implications for their grantmaking or donation policies if they use a now obsolete charitable model of subsidizing proprietary publishing and proprietary research. In order to improve the effectiveness and collaborativeness of the non-profit sector overall, it is suggested these grantmaking organizations and donors move to requiring grantees to make any resulting copyrighted digital materials freely available on the internet, including free licenses granting the right for others to make and redistribute new derivative works without further permission. It is also suggested patents resulting from charitably subsidized research research also be made freely available for general use. The alternative of allowing charitable dollars to result in proprietary copyrights and proprietary patents is corrupting the non-profit sector as it results in a conflict of interest between a non-profit's primary mission of helping humanity through freely sharing knowledge (made possible at little cost by the internet) and a desire to maximize short term revenues through charging licensing fees for access to patents and copyrights. In essence, with the change of publishing and communication economics made possible by the wide spread use of the internet, tax-exempt non-profits have become, perhaps unwittingly, caught up in a new form of "self-dealing", and it is up to donors and grantmakers (and eventually lawmakers) to prevent this by requiring free licensing of results as a condition of their grants and donations. "
The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Monday October 04 2021, @06:45AM (9 children)
Old news, but still the problem: "publish or perish". My teaching college recently went through years of pain, in order to receive an accreditation. The main result? A requirement for the faculty to publish.
Publish what, exactly? Most of us do not do research. At best, we supervise a few commercial projects, but companies are generally not thrilled with their internal projects being made public. Personally, I'm lucky, because I have always written the odd article for the general public (stuff like "what is blockchain?"), but many of my colleagues have no choice but to resort to parasitical "write only" journals.
I could rant more, but tl;dr: Publishing detracts from doing our actual jobs, and is a net negative for the quality of the school.
Even in research-oriented universities, "publish or perish" is dumb. It would be better to see a really ground-breaking paper every couple of years, instead of wasting time searching for MPIs (minimum publishable increments), to maximize the number of separate papers.
We need a better measure of faculty productivity. The fact that this would kill the parasitical "academic journal" industry would just be a bonus.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by driverless on Monday October 04 2021, @12:01PM (1 child)
Yup. The universities push academics to (a) teach, teach, teach, teach (maximise revenue from student fees), (b) carry out research in conjunction with industry (maximise revenue from consulting fees), and (c) design commercially-viable products and patentable things (maximise revenue from licensing). That's it in most cases.
You may have noticed a common theme among all those...
(Score: 5, Insightful) by SpockLogic on Monday October 04 2021, @12:50PM
Look at who are being appointed to governing boards of colleges and universities. The infection is being imposed from the top as society is unwilling to invest in higher education. This MBA/profit above all else mindset will kill higher education but perhaps that is their long term goal, more proles less thinkers.
Overreacting is one thing, sticking your head up your ass hoping the problem goes away is another - edIII
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @12:44PM (4 children)
1956: "Dysfunctional Consequences of Performance Measurements" ( https://www.jstor.org/stable/2390989?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents [jstor.org] ) - I've come to think that even though objective measurements are critical in all other scientific research, in anything involving human performance the focus on the measurements poisons the process. There are countless examples. As a favorite of mine, all of the additional standardized testing mandated by the No Child Left Behind education law in the US has had a negative impact on American education quality. George Bush and Ted Kennedy were trying to improve American education using measurements, and they made it worse. The countries that do far better than the US on standardized tests have far less standardized testing.
So I'm not sure how faculty should be measured. There may be no useful way to do it.
(Score: 2) by SpockLogic on Monday October 04 2021, @12:52PM (1 child)
You don't fatten a pig by weighing it more often.
Overreacting is one thing, sticking your head up your ass hoping the problem goes away is another - edIII
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @06:53PM
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Monday October 04 2021, @03:54PM
The only useful measures I can think of are (1) the judgment of their students and peers when evaluating their teaching, and (2) the judgment of either their peers or their more experienced colleagues when evaluating their research work. Both of which are impossible to reduce to a metric or number like the MBA-infected deans want.
These measures aren't without risks: Students might approve of professors who grade them well versus grade them badly. Colleagues judging each other might lead to groupthink or backroom deals to all give each other good reviews. But I don't see a good way to otherwise get at things like "This professor's lectures were decent but not great at teaching the subject matter that was on the syllabus, but were unsurpassed in teaching the processes and methods and thinking that leads to that subject matter, and have inspired me to take up this field as my focus of study" or "This researcher can do useful lab work, but what they're really great at is shooting down ideas that seem promising at first glance but are fundamentally flawed, saving their colleagues from spending lots of lab time and funding pursuing red herrings". It's hard to devise allegedly-objective metrics that would reward either of those, even though they're undoubtedly valuable.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 05 2021, @11:47AM
I'd start with the assumption that the measurements are objective. And a related second, a consideration of what is really being measured. For example, the metric of papers published ignores both that some researchers would be better connected and more able to publish than others. And of course, that also goes for the quality of the paper. If I'm connected to a paper mill that publishes my crap regularly, I'll look better by this metric than someone who publishes good stuff rarely (or even, just dumps the article on arxiv.org and doesn't bother to publish at all).
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Monday October 04 2021, @09:25PM (1 child)
The minimum-publishable-increment papers are hell to read.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday October 05 2021, @11:50AM