[HN Gopher] Government grant-funded research should not be publi...
___________________________________________________________________
Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-
profit journals
Author : sito42
Score : 324 points
Date : 2026-03-04 14:53 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.experimental-history.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.experimental-history.com)
| sito42 wrote:
| > Now people barely bring it up at all. It's like a lion has
| escaped the zoo and it's gulping down schoolchildren, but when
| people suggest zoo improvements, all the agenda items are like,
| "We should add another Dippin' Dots kiosk". If you bring up the
| loose tiger, everyone gets annoyed at you, like "Of course, no
| one likes the tiger".
| saghm wrote:
| Is the switch from lion to tiger in that paragraph intentional?
| If only the quote from "everyone" was switched I might think
| it's intended to convey people trying to derisively dismiss the
| issue or something but it does specifically reference the tiger
| rather than the lion being brought up, so I was confused when I
| got to this part of the article.
| bjackman wrote:
| I have had so many "why don't you just" conversations with
| academics about this. I know the "why don't you just" guy is such
| an annoying person to talk to, but I still don't really
| understand why they don't just.
|
| This article pointed to a few cases where people tried to do the
| thing, i.e. the pledge taken by individual researchers, and the
| requirements placed by certain funding channels, and those sound
| like a solid attempt to do the thing. This shows that people care
| and are somewhat willing to organise about it.
|
| But the thing I don't understand is why this can't happen at the
| department level? If you're an influential figure at a top-5
| department in your field, you're friends with your counterparts
| at the other 4. You see them in person every year. You all hate
| $journal. Why don't you club together and say "why don't we all
| have moratorium on publishing in $journal for our departments?"
|
| No temptation for individual research groups to violate the
| pledge. No dependence on individual funding channels to influence
| the policy. Just, suddenly, $journal isn't the top publication in
| that field any more?
|
| I'm sure there are lots of varied reasons why this is difficult
| but fundamentally it seems like the obvious approach?
| glitcher wrote:
| I like the author's idea:
|
| > So the solution here is straightforward: every government
| grant should stipulate that the research it supports can't be
| published in a for-profit journal. That's it! If the public
| paid for it, it shouldn't be paywalled.
|
| The article then acknowledges this isn't a magic solution to
| all the problems discussed, but it's so simple and makes so
| much sense as a first step.
|
| I'm no expert here and there are probably unintended
| consequences or other ways to game that system for profit, but
| even if so wouldn't that still be a better starting point?
| bjackman wrote:
| I think that's also a good proposal, and I don't think it
| conflicts with the "prestigious departments stop publishing
| in $journal" idea at all. Probably we want both.
|
| Only difference is that the author is writing for a wide
| audience and his best angle to change the world is probably
| to influence the thinking of future policymakers. While I am
| just an annoying "why don't you just" guy, my "audience" is
| just the friends I happen to have in prestigious research
| groups.
|
| Adam M also probably has lots of friends in prestigious
| research groups (IIUC although he complains a lot about
| academia he was quite successful within it, at least on its
| own terms). And the fact that he instead chooses to advocate
| government policy changes instead of what I'm proposing, is
| probably a good indication that he knows something I don't
| about the motivatioms of influential academics.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Imagine being a scientist and reading "if you take this
| grant, you cannot publish your results in any of the most
| prominent journals in your field." Sounds good?
| bjackman wrote:
| But IIUC there are entire fields where basically the whole
| US ecosystem is funded by federal grants. So if this policy
| gets enacted those journals are no longer prominent.
|
| (Maybe you'd need an exception for fields where the centre
| of mass for funding is well outside of the US, though).
| abeppu wrote:
| I think the call for top-down policy makes sense b/c otherwise
| this is like every other tragedy of the commons situation. Each
| of those top-level researchers also has to think, "my
| department has junior faculty trying to build their
| publications list for tenure, we have post-docs and grad-
| students trying to get a high-impact publication to help them
| land a faculty job, we have research program X which is kind of
| in a race with a program at that other school lower down in the
| top 20. If we close off opportunities with the top journals, we
| put all of those at a competitive disadvantage."
| bglazer wrote:
| > If you're an influential figure at a top-5 department in your
| field ... you all hate $journal.
|
| That's the problem, they don't hate these journals, they love
| them. Generally speaking they're old people who became
| influential by publishing in these journals. Their reputation
| and influence was built on a pile of Science and Nature papers.
| Their presentations all include prominent text indicating which
| figures came from luxury journals. If Science and Nature lose
| their prestige so do they (or at least that's what they think)
|
| This was very apparent when eLife changed their publishing
| model. Their was a big outpouring of rage from older scientists
| who had published in eLife when it was a more standard "high
| impact" journal. Lots of "you're ruining your reputation and
| therefore mine".
| bjackman wrote:
| Maybe I am underestimating the gap in status between the
| "influential figures" I imagine and the people I actually
| know.
|
| I see: my friend has 10-15 years of experience in their
| field, they have enjoyed success and basically got the
| equivalent of a steady stream of promotions.
|
| I map this onto my big tech/startup experience. I mentally
| model them as: they are "on top of the pile" of people that
| still do technical work. Everyone who still has the ability
| to boss them around, is a manager/institutional politician
| type figure who wouldn't interfere in such decisions as which
| journal to publish in.
|
| But probably this mapping is wrong.
|
| Also, I probably have a poor model of what agency and
| independence looks like in academia. In my big tech world, I
| have a pretty detailed model in my head of what things I can
| and can't influence. I don't have this model for academia
| which is gonna inevitably lead to a lot of "why don't you
| just".
|
| Same thing happens to me when I moan about work to my
| friends. They say "I thought you were the tech lead, can't
| you just decree a change?" and I kinda mumble "er yeah but it
| doesn't really work like that". So here I'm probably doing
| that in reverse.
| currymj wrote:
| it has been known to happen.
|
| For example, spearheaded by Knuth, the community
| effectively abandoned the Journal of Algorithms and
| replaced with with ACM Transactions on Algorithms.
|
| however it's difficult. a big factor is that professors
| feel obligated towards their students, who need to get
| jobs. even if the subfield can shift to everybody
| publishing in a new journal, non-specialists making hiring
| decisions may not update for a few years which hurts
| students in the job market.
| bee_rider wrote:
| For the grad students especially, there'd be a career
| advancement incentive to still publish in the top journals. The
| professors might still want to publish in them just out of
| familiarity (with a little career incentive as well, although
| less pronounced than the grad students).
|
| I think it'd be a big ask from someone whose role doesn't
| typically cover that sort of decision.
| asdff wrote:
| Grant funding reporting requirements. It would be easy to say
| self publish for free via the institutional library. But the
| NIH would not like that use of their money.
| jltsiren wrote:
| There are hundreds of reputable research universities around
| the world. Top-5 departments can't meaningfully change the
| culture of a field on their own. Top-100 perhaps could, but the
| coordination problem is much bigger on that level.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| I explain here (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47250811)
| but tl;dr it's because Universities need this system to _get_
| money and to _give_ money. Nobody has yet proposed a solution
| which solves the money /prestige problem. With no money there's
| no research.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| Part of the problem is we got tricked into thinking "peer
| reviewed" meant "true," or at least something like it.
|
| It doesn't. Not even close.
|
| Peer review doesn't even mean that it's free from errors, free
| from fraud, free from methodological mischief; it doesn't mean
| anything at this point. Yet we continue to act like it does.
|
| Darwin's work wasn't peer reviewed. Nor Einstein's. It's
| something we cooked up in the mid 1900's to deal with the fallout
| from another mistake ("publish or perish") that meant people had
| to try to publish even if they had nothing to say.
| bonsai_spool wrote:
| > Darwin's work wasn't peer reviewed. Nor Einstein's
|
| Except it was...? This is absurdly ahistorical and the fact
| that you cross disciplines in trying to make an incorrect
| argument questions whether you are in science at all.
|
| The structure of peer review in Darwin's time was different,
| where experts wrote monographs and gave lectures at symposia
| that then led to letters among their peers. Which is what
| happens now, if you take a step back.
|
| The volume of new work these days is incompatible with the
| older informal system, and is in some ways our new paradigm is
| superior as there is a formal period in which new works are
| reviewed.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| Sorry. I meant "peer reviewed prior to publication" as the
| phrase is presently used. I thought that was obvious.
|
| What you're calling "peer review" is what I would call
| "discussed" or "debated" which it certainly was.
|
| I dispute your claim that the new paradigm is superior.
| bonsai_spool wrote:
| > Sorry. I meant "peer reviewed prior to publication" as
| the phrase is presently used.
|
| Accepted. But now there is Arxiv and Biorxiv and even
| Medrxiv--so we're back to where things were, it seems.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| > Part of the problem is we got tricked into thinking "peer
| reviewed" meant "true," or at least something like it.
|
| No actual working scientist thinks this.
|
| "Glitchc" has it right elsewhere in this thread: the motivating
| force behind journals is prominence and reputation, not truth.
| D-Machine wrote:
| Ah, but the naive public still broadly believes in peer
| review, and that high profile journals do good review. And
| the prominence and reputation that comes from these journals
| arguably then relies on this (increasingly false) public
| perception.
|
| Would scientists feel the same if the public was more
| educated about how bad journals and peer review are? Not so
| easy to disentangle IMO.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| The naive public does not believe anything in particular
| about peer review. They think new scientific results are
| significant when they read about them in the popular media,
| that's it.
|
| People who do need to work professionally with peer review,
| do understand what it actually does and its limitations.
|
| You seem stuck somewhere in the middle, caring deeply about
| a system you don't seem to fully understand.
| D-Machine wrote:
| > The naive public does not believe anything in
| particular about peer review
|
| You'd need to provide evidence or an argument for this.
| The media reports on things in part based on journal
| prestige, and likely when questioned, people will say
| they can trust such things because good scientists have
| looked at the work and say it is good. This would be an
| implicit belief that peer review is generally working
| well, even if they don't use the term "peer review".
|
| > You seem stuck somewhere in the middle, caring deeply
| about a system you don't seem to fully understand.
|
| Extremely presumptuous, as I work in this system, and
| have provided plenty of evidence for my claims. You've
| provided only sneers.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| You've provided evidence that prominent journals
| experience retractions, fraudulent results, etc. All
| true. But it is not the job of peer reviewers to decide
| what gets published.
|
| You've provided evidence that peer-reviewed science often
| turns out to be incomplete, inaccurate, wrong, fraudulent
| etc. All true. But it is not the job of peer reviewers to
| assure completeness, accuracy, or freedom from fraud.
|
| A peer reviewer reads a paper and make comments on it.
| That's it! They don't check primary data, they don't
| investigate methods, they don't interrogate scientists,
| they don't re-run experiments just to double check. They
| assist a journal's editors in editing--that's it.
|
| The check on published scientific results is the
| scientific process itself, not the publishing process.
| Prominent results attract further investigation, which
| confirms or disproves the reality of the underlying
| phenomena. Again: that's not the job of peer review.
|
| Do some people ascribe too much authority to peer review?
| Yes, for sure. IMO your comments in this thread are
| exacerbating that problem, not addressing it.
| D-Machine wrote:
| > A peer reviewer reads a paper and make comments on it.
| That's it! They don't check primary data, they don't
| investigate methods, they don't interrogate scientists,
| they don't re-run experiments just to double check. They
| assist a journal's editors in editing--that's it.
|
| Um, what? I have done all these things in reviews, and
| know other academics that have done these things as well.
| More confusingly though, if you are saying most reviewers
| _don 't_ do these things (which I agree with), this would
| only strengthen my point?
|
| I'll let readers decide if it is my comments that
| exacerbate the problem, or if, perhaps, it is apologism
| for journalistic peer review that might be causing bigger
| issues in the present day.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Would be interesting if you would be willing to share a
| paper you reviewed and detail your review process of it.
| I don't see how one could check primary data or
| interrogate scientists in a blind review process, for
| example.
| D-Machine wrote:
| This is IMO just bad faith sealioning, you can look at
| the whole replication crisis in psychology and social
| science (esp. the work of people like Nick Brown and the
| GRIM test, or Uri Simonsohn), or sites like Retraction
| Watch, and see clear evidence of everything I am saying.
| There are endless papers in ML research going into issues
| with test datasets and data duplication, etc. In plenty
| of cases all data and code is made open, so it is trivial
| to check data issues and methods.
|
| Also, review is back and forth, and has rounds: you
| almost always interrogate the scientists of the paper you
| are reviewing, this almost like the definition of peer
| review. I don't think you have any idea of what you are
| talking about at all.
|
| EDIT: Heck, just hop on over to https://openreview.net/
| and take a look at the whole review process for some
| random paper (e.g.
| https://openreview.net/forum?id=cp5PvcI6w8_)
| D-Machine wrote:
| Don't know why you are being downvoted, you are largely
| correct. I've provided plenty of evidence in another post in
| this thread showing that journal-based peer review is highly
| farcical.
|
| EDIT: I still want review from a community of scientific peers.
| I just don't want this review to be in the hands of a tiny
| number of gatekeepers entangled with journals that largely just
| slow things down.
| MarkusQ wrote:
| Because a lot of people are deeply invested in the present
| system perhaps? As the article pointed out, there's a lot of
| money involved, and there are a lot of people who've built
| their lives around flourishing in the existing system, cut-
| throat as it may be.
| D-Machine wrote:
| > Because a lot of people are deeply invested in the
| present system perhaps?
|
| I mean, right, yes, of course. Much of the downvotes are
| cognitive dissonance, obviously. I suppose I meant the
| question rhetorically.
| scottndecker wrote:
| Based on title, I was figured it was referring to USA moving to
| the metric system
| snowwrestler wrote:
| U.S. scientists already did, at least at work. They still drive
| home at imperial speeds though.
| psychoslave wrote:
| I thought it was USA custom metrics? Not less ridiculous, I
| guess.
| glitchc wrote:
| We already have open-access publications: Just put it on arXiV.
| Most researchers I work with do this already.
|
| The problem isn't access, it's citations. arXiV is not considered
| a credible citation source since anyone can publish anything.
| TPCs don't use it in their list of citations, neither do grant
| funding agencies or government institutions.
|
| The current academic enterprise relies heavily on third-party
| gatekeeping. We rely on others to do the vetting for us. The
| first thing an academic does is check _where_ a paper is
| published, before even reading it. It 's a crutch.
|
| Any gatekeeper will naturally tend towards charging for access
| over time: It's a captive market, the economics demands it.
| Unless we eliminate that dependency, we cannot change the system.
| contubernio wrote:
| Exactly. The solution already exists. However another problem
| is that the arxiv is creeping towards the old model ...
| bad_haircut72 wrote:
| Unfortunately I think charging money is a necessary signal that
| this particular gatekeeper is doing a good job. We should
| recognise that money is a necessary part of this process, else
| there is no gate to keep. But we shpuld reverse the economics
| by having people pay to get their stuff peer reviewed. Imagine
| if reviewing research papers was something you could get paid
| to do, the incentive then isnt to rubber stamp things, actually
| your rating as a reviewer would come down to quality of reviews
| amluto wrote:
| > I think charging money is a necessary signal that this
| particular gatekeeper is doing a good job.
|
| I've never seen the slightest relationship between the charge
| to read a paper and the quality of review.
| D-Machine wrote:
| Because there isn't such a relation. It's a thing people
| believe when they don't have actual experience with peer
| review. If anything, predatory journals and low-quality
| pubs can charge more, since publication is more guaranteed
| (and researchers reaching for these pay-to-publish journals
| are more desperate).
| fireflash38 wrote:
| It's a reputation economy. Like review sites. They start
| off truthful, and then as time goes on incentives shift
| to bad actors to subvert it. Or they just sell out their
| reputation.
|
| Yelp, TripAdvisor, wire cutter, hell even Google results
| themselves.
|
| Once you start poisoning that well, it's difficult if not
| impossible to claw it back.
| azan_ wrote:
| I tend to agree, but keep in mind that most likely you just
| don't even bother reading the shittiest of the shittiest
| papers just based on title and abstract. And for every good
| article there are like 10 unindexed shitty ones.
| RGamma wrote:
| Yeah review takes time and time is money. This needs to be
| priced in somehow. Bonus side effect: Frauds get discovered
| and filtered out (in theory).
|
| But who watches the watchers? I guess review fraud will need
| to be considered as well.
| fanf2 wrote:
| Scientific publishers do not pay for peer review. Reviews
| are done by researchers as part of their jobs which are
| paid for by their research grants.
| kergonath wrote:
| > But we shpuld reverse the economics by having people pay to
| get their stuff peer reviewed.
|
| Not really. There would be perverse incentives where the
| publisher benefits from accepting more articles. For good
| journals that would be a conflict of interests at best where
| they would optimise the marketing-to-acceptance ratio. I
| can't believe I am writing something good about scientific
| publisher, but at least when the reader pays they are
| incentivise to publish things that have an audience.
| Otherwise, they _are_ going to cut corners, and I mean more
| than they currently do. And it's not hypothetical, there are
| already terrible publishers doing this.
| blharr wrote:
| The problem is that this becomes a race to the bottom of
| actual quality and turns into advertising.
|
| Sponsored reviews of products are basically this. If you are
| paying a reviewer for a stamp of approval and the reviewer
| sets the bar too high, why would you want to pay that
| reviewer? On the other end of the reviewer, it's easy to get
| more money by providing that stamp of approval to _more_
| people--not fewer--so they 're incentivized to make it fairly
| easy to achieve.
| D-Machine wrote:
| > The first thing an academic does is check where a paper is
| published, before even reading it. It's a crutch
|
| IMO, academics that do this are not very competent, because we
| have plenty of research suggesting that higher-profile journals
| are in fact less trustworthy in many ways, or that there is no
| correlation at all between reputation and quality (see my other
| post here in this thread).
|
| Yes, some trash journals publish all trash, but, beyond that,
| competent researchers scan the abstract, look at sample sizes
| and basic stats, and if those check out, you skip to the
| methods and look for red flags there. Also, most early
| publications will be on an arXiv-like place anyway so you can't
| look to reputation yet.
|
| Likewise, serious analytic reviews like meta-analyses don't
| factor in e.g. impact factor or paper citations, since that
| would be nonsense. They focus on methodology and stats.
|
| I really think we ought to shame academics that are filtering
| papers based on journal alone, it is almost always the wrong
| way to make a quick judgement.
| emil-lp wrote:
| > IMO, academics that do this are not very competent, because
| ...
|
| Where's the cry-laugh emoji when I need it.
|
| Of course academics check where stuff is published. Please...
|
| There are still real journals put there, although you might
| not know which is which.
| D-Machine wrote:
| Ah, look, another smug sneer that ignores the evidence I
| presented, and makes another circular argument (i.e. that
| because academics look at rep, this is justified, even
| though I provided evidence disputing this).
|
| I know what journals are better / not. But reputation only
| is helpful in letting you ignore trash journals, once you
| are out of trash land, rep is just not a very meaningful
| factor, and you have to focus on methodology and substance.
| emil-lp wrote:
| Where's the evidence you presented?
|
| What are some higher-profile journals that are in fact
| less trustworthy in many ways?
| D-Machine wrote:
| I literally said it was posted in this thread, and a
| quick Ctrl+F of my username on this page would have found
| you it in a half second:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47249236
| blululu wrote:
| I have seen more than one PI at an R1 universities with
| multiple Nature publications use this heuristic. I would not
| call them incompetent.
| D-Machine wrote:
| Do you not notice the circularity of your reasoning here?
|
| Also I didn't say incompetent, I said "not very". More
| competent researchers make journal rep only a very small
| factor, and it is not via the "high rep = more trustworthy"
| direction (which is the bad heuristic), it is "pay-to-
| publish journals = not trustworthy" (better heuristic).
|
| Once you have ruled out a publication being in a trash
| journal, reputation is only a very minor factor in
| consideration, and methodological and substantive issues
| are what matter.
| tokai wrote:
| Just putting it on arXiv does not automatically make it OA. It
| needs a permissive license.
| D-Machine wrote:
| I think people in this post are using arXiv as sort of
| metonymy / stand-in for OA here, but, yes.
| butILoveLife wrote:
| >The first thing an academic does is check where a paper is
| published, before even reading it. It's a crutch.
|
| This is actually what ruined my respect for Academia.
|
| My Science PhD buddy looked at the journal title and the claim,
| then said: "Its true!"
|
| I look at him with horror. Who cares about the journal, I want
| to know data and methodology.
|
| I've basically never forgiven Academia since this. I see even
| Ivys put out bad research and journals will publish bad
| research (Replication crisis and the ivy fake psychology
| studies)
|
| For outsiders, there is a prestige to being a PhD or working as
| a professor. Now that I'm mid career and lived through the
| previous events I mentioned + seeing who stuck with academia...
| These are your C grade performers. They didnt get hired by
| industry, so they stayed in school. They are so protective of
| their artificial rank because they cannot compete in Industry.
| Its like being the cool person on the tennis team. They are
| locally cool, but not globally cool.
| beambot wrote:
| > This is actually what ruined my respect for Academia.
|
| Spoken like someone who never went through grad school at a
| competitive R1 program
|
| It was already a grueling 60-80 hour grind every week with
| frequent all nighters, high-pressure deadlines, absolute
| minimal pay, thankless duties, and plenty of politics. It's
| about the same for professors too.
|
| We already paid our dues by helping peer review (for free) a
| half dozen papers for each one we submitted. Why should we be
| expected to review random papers on arxiv too...?
| butILoveLife wrote:
| >It was already a grueling 60-80 hour grind every week with
| frequent all nighters, high-pressure deadlines, absolute
| minimal pay, thankless duties, and plenty of politics.
|
| You know what else works really hard? A washing machine.
| Hard work alone doesnt create value. I could give you a
| spoon and tell you to dig a hole, or I can teach you how to
| use a Digger.
| beambot wrote:
| Some things are hard because you overcomplicate them.
| Some things are hard by their very nature.
|
| Unless you are a Claude Shannon type, adding fundamental
| new knowledge to humanity's corpus is generally actually
| hard - at least in science & engineering. If you feel
| differently, I look forward to reading your
| groundbreaking papers!
| butILoveLife wrote:
| Weirdly, I do have my contributions to science. I run a
| pretty popular blog, 250k-1M users per year.
|
| Academia will refer to my stuff. Various levels of the US
| government use my data.
|
| To be honest, I think I got lucky + I was a (hardcore)
| Stoic for a decade + my hobby was scientific.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > You know what else works really hard? A washing
| machine. Hard work alone doesnt create value.
|
| My washing machine creates a lot of value for me. The
| time it saves me is incredibly valuable.
|
| Most machines that work really hard are valuable because
| they free up time.
|
| This wasn't the clever burn you thought it was.
| butILoveLife wrote:
| Its a line from National Lampoon's Xmas Vacation.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Value is what you're willing to pay for something.
|
| Laundromats aren't particularly profitable businesses.
| bdangubic wrote:
| Laundromats are the best business there is and are
| _extremely_ profitable and _seldom to never_ go out of
| business - you should look this up, it is fairly
| fascinating.
| WalterBright wrote:
| The laundromats around here closed down years ago. Not a
| characteristic of extremely profitable businesses.
|
| There are a couple of strip malls nearby that have vacant
| rentables, vacant for years and years. Nobody has thought
| to put an extremely profitable laundromat in any of them.
| BeetleB wrote:
| I went to an R1 university. Most students did not have a
| 60-80 hour grind. If they did, it was because of an
| overbearing advisor. Years later, those students are not
| ahead of those who had a more relaxed advisor.
|
| And chances are: Those overbearing advisors are _very_
| invested in the current system.
| currymj wrote:
| it varies enormously by field.
|
| in CS you will have intense grind weeks around conference
| deadlines and a more manageable but challenging pace of
| life otherwise.
|
| in wet lab science you live by the schedule set by your
| experiments, which often involves intense hours.
| phil21 wrote:
| I don't think folks in academia have come to terms with how
| much the above attitude has completely and nearly entirely
| undermined the credibility of the entire scientific and
| academic community in the eyes of the general public.
|
| You don't need a degree to understand how much utter junk
| science is being published by those who think they are
| superior to you. Just read a few actual papers end to end
| and look at the data vs conclusions and it becomes totally
| obvious very rapidly that you cannot "trust the science"
| since it's rarely actual science being done any longer.
|
| The academic community has utterly failed at understanding
| they needed to cull this behavior early and mercilessly.
| They did not, and it will be generations at best to rebuild
| the trust they once had. If they ever figure out they need
| to.
|
| Things are going to get much worse before they get better.
| You can't take any published paper at face value any longer
| without going direct to primary sources and bouncing it off
| an expert in the space you still trust to give you the
| actual truth.
| D-Machine wrote:
| I fear you are right here, and that the problem is far
| more dire than much of academia realizes. I know enough
| highly intelligent people (some even with family /
| spouses in academia, surprisingly) that are otherwise
| very e.g. left / liberal / progressive and open, that are
| still basically saying academia needs to be gutted /
| burned down.
|
| I've no idea what the actual stats are on faith in
| academia overall today, but I don't think it is looking
| good.
| frmersdog wrote:
| Go read /r/LawyerTalk and enjoy the horror of the dawning
| realization that this is a lot of professionals. I think
| it's an issue that stems from getting too deep into the
| minutiae of the technical and cultural matters of one's
| field; you become a really good scientist, or lawyer, or
| SWE (by the standards of scientists and lawyers and
| SWEs), and end up coming to conclusions that everyone
| outside the bubble looks at and says, "That's absolutely
| asinine." Well, laymen just don't understand the details,
| you know? (Even though the whole point of these
| professions is to provide services to laymen, fix
| problems laymen come to them with, and guide laymen to
| make practical and logical decisions when a $500/hr
| appointment isn't called for.)
|
| These people take themselves too seriously, and other
| people only take them seriously when there are material
| ramifications for not doing so. Otherwise, they're viewed
| as pompous busy-bodies and don't do themselves any favors
| by playing to the role.
| currymj wrote:
| On the whole you should rarely read papers, you want to
| read a whole literature in an area. Academics embedded in
| the field can do this easily. Academics outside of an
| area know to do this, and to bounce things off an expert
| to make sure you have the context and aren't over-
| indexing on a flashy result. Everybody learns the painful
| lesson in grad school to not just read a paper and
| believe everything will work as it says.
|
| Somehow the general public and policymakers got the idea
| that if a paper gets published in any non-fake journal,
| this is an official endorsement that it's 100% correct,
| everything in it can be read in isolation, and it's safe
| to use all claims in the paper to direct policy
| immediately.
|
| I think academia is partially to blame for encouraging
| people to believe this rather than insisting on
| explaining the nuances of how to interpret published
| research. On the other hand, nobody wants to hear a
| message that things are nuanced, and they will have to do
| costly hard work to get at the truth.
|
| I think a world where "you can take any published paper
| at face value...without going direct to primary sources
| and bouncing it off an expert in the space" would be
| great, but it never existed, and it's just fundamentally
| impossible.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| I wouldn't be surprised if the parent's complaint about
| his academic buddy who didn't read the paper's methods
| yet declared their findings as true, had misunderstood
| why his friend did so... which could have well been due
| to their additional knowledge about similar past
| findings/studies.
| graemep wrote:
| The problem is not that he was not willing to review it. It
| was that he was willing to conclude it was true. If he had
| said "that is interesting" or "that is plausible" or
| whatever, that is fine. It is concluding it is true that is
| the problem.
| fluoridation wrote:
| >Why should we be expected to review random papers on arxiv
| too...?
|
| The GP is not saying to review each paper you read or cite.
| They're complaining that a colleague accepted a claim after
| just reading the title and where the paper was published.
| Between that and doing a full review there's surely a world
| of options.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Complete hogwash of a comment, based almost entirely on your
| limited experiences, to denigrate academic scientists.
|
| If you even knew these people, you'd know that most that
| remain in academia never considered industry in the first
| place. These people were not rejected by industry. In fact,
| it is the other way around. *They rejected industry*. They
| did so, despite knowing they'd make more money, but chose to
| remain in academia because they wanted to spend their life
| pursuing research topics that interested them with
| independence. Sometimes they feel the fool when money is
| tight and the hours are relentlessly long, but never have I
| seen it happen because they were rejected by industry.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| Check out the "Collective action problem" described in this
| article. It describes why "Just publish on arXiV" isn't a
| practical solution. It doesn't lead to the problem being fixed,
| because of inertia against any individual breaking out of the
| system.
| Aurornis wrote:
| > The problem isn't access, it's citations. arXiV is not
| considered a credible citation source since anyone can publish
| anything
|
| I do some due diligence work from time to time. Uploading to
| arXiV is becoming a favorite tactic from companies trying to
| look impressive for investors. I've read a lot of "papers"
| submitted by startup founders that are obviously ChatGPT
| written slop uploaded to arXiV. They then go to investor and
| show their record of "published research". Smart investors are
| catching on but there are a lot of investors who associate
| journals with quality and filtering and assume having a paper
| on there means something.
|
| The filtering and curation problem is real. It seems like
| academic pettiness or laziness from the outside, until you see
| the volume of bad "papers" that everyone is trying to publish
| to chase the incentives.
| engineer_22 wrote:
| We have a gatekeeper already in the funding source - they do
| the work of vetting researchers prior to funding the work.
|
| Piggy back this system so that the funding source publishes the
| papers itself, and researchers can only publish their papers
| that are directly funded.
|
| This system requires the cooperation of an organization to
| build the publishing infrastructure, but this could be a lowest
| capable bidder, and less drag on the system overall.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Why isn't a citation just a citation. It's a pointer to a
| source, that's all. If it implies some standards have been
| applied or editorial or scientific review has been done, then
| that's going to have to be paid for by someone. TFA implies
| that doesn't happen: _[and then] we stop doing all that stuff
| and then the cash just pours out._ So a citation to an article
| in _Nature_ isn 't any better than one on arXiV.
| gus_massa wrote:
| > _So a citation to an article in Nature isn 't any better
| than one on arXiV._
|
| The real problem is that nobody can grade and compare article
| in different topics, so there are proxies like number of
| articles in "serious" journals (whatever that means[1]) and
| number of citations in "serious" journals (whatever that
| means[1]).
|
| Do we count also citations in X/Tweeter, FaceBook, WordPress
| [2], StackOverflow, ... ?
|
| If links in HN also count as citations, there are 3
| additional citations for my last paper:
|
| http://www.example.com/gus_massa/very_good_paper_2026.pdf
|
| http://www.example.com/gus_massa/very_good_paper_2026.pdf
|
| http://www.example.com/gus_massa/very_good_paper_2026.pdf
|
| [1] Which journals are serious and which are paper mills? In
| the extremes the difference is clear, but there in the middle
| there is a gray zone.
|
| [2] A citation in Tao's blog in WordPress should be worth at
| least half official citation, or perhaps a whole point.
| armoredkitten wrote:
| I've long wished that "journals" and academic societies would
| transition from a publishing model to a cultivation model. If
| everything is available on arXiv, that's great, but it also
| means the best of the best is mixed in with all the rest.
|
| Journals (in the sense of whoever is on the editorial board)
| don't need to cease to exist; they just need to transition to
| "here's our list this month of what the best new articles are
| on X topic". The paper's already there on arXiv, you could
| already read it before. But having a group of editors that
| cultivate a list of good articles (as well as the peer review
| process that can, in an ideal world, serve to improve a paper)
| can serve to make sifting through arXiv less overwhelming, and
| draw attention to papers in particular subfields, subject
| matter, or whatever other criteria might be relevant.
| convolvatron wrote:
| I don't see any reason why we shouldn't make this transitive.
| working professionals track the literature. if there were a
| standard way to publish a "I think this paper is interesting"
| signal, then we could roll that all up. there are certainly
| practitioners that I really do trust to be in the game for
| the right reasons, if they think a paper represents a
| contribution, then that's a strong signal for me.
| bglazer wrote:
| This is quite similar to how eLife does publishing. You still
| have to submit to them but they basically just add reviewer
| comments and an "eLife Assessment" that serves as the
| quality/curation signal rather than a binary publish/reject
| jcranmer wrote:
| In the publishing world, there is this thing called the slush
| pile: the collection of unsolicited submissions, essentially
| the only way a person without an agent can break into the
| field. And you can find quite a few editors' experiences with
| the slush pile in various blog posts or articles online. And
| the general reaction goes from naive wonder at the idea of
| finding the diamond-in-the-rough to frustration with the
| quality of the submissions and a realization that the actual
| game is to figure out how to reject submissions with as little
| reading as possible (because they don't have the time to do any
| reading!). This is before LLMs came about, which have made the
| slush pile problem much worse because they don't improve the
| quality of the submissions but the increase the amount of
| reading that needs to be done to reject them.
|
| Academia has the same fundamental problem. We don't actually
| have the time to read every possible paper someone has for us,
| because keeping up with literature takes time that we don't
| have. And while relying on the quality of the journal or
| conference as a metric for "is this paper worth reading?" has
| issues, to be honest, it is more effective than other proposed
| solutions. When I have done the literature searches that delved
| into the unknown, low-quality tiers of journals... no, those
| results were not worth the time I spent reading them.
| kleiba wrote:
| There's also a middle ground, i.e., renowned publishers who
| aren't free but still publish everything as OA. One example is
| Dagstuhl Publishing for CS research papers.
| j45 wrote:
| Maybe studies could be dual published in open access
| publications and private.
|
| Then you get the private branded badge social proof and access
| can continue.
|
| Also, til anyone can publish to arxiv.org?
| avadodin wrote:
| I just checked in case it had changed, but Arxiv is nowhere
| near as free-for-all as you imply.
|
| Any crank who learned to use LaTeX is _not_ allowed to post
| articles willy-nilly. You need endorsements in the field.
| D-Machine wrote:
| The other factor preventing a fix is that people with no actual
| serious experience of academic publishing and peer review will
| defend these journals, because they still think that (journal-
| based) peer review acts like some kind of meaningful quality
| filter. But, it really doesn't.
|
| Because someone is surely going to try to defend journals via
| peer review in this thread, I want to provide a counter to the
| arguments that journal peer review does much good. Also, since
| everyone knows that if you just go to a poor enough journal, you
| can be published, I am going to focus on the (IMO mostly false)
| claim that higher-profile journals are still doing a good thing
| here.
|
| There are numerous studies showing that higher-profile journals
| in general have more retractions and research misconduct [1-2],
| lower research quality [3], in fact weaker statistical power and
| reliability [4], and that statistical reliability even in high
| prestige journals is still extremely poor overall [5]. Also,
| making it through peer review is highly random and dependent on
| who you get as a reviewer [6], or is just basically a coin toss
| even when looking at reviewer groups: In 2014,
| 49.5% of the papers accepted by the first committee were rejected
| by the second (with a fairly wide confidence interval as the
| experiment included only 116 papers). This year, this number was
| 50.6%. We can also look at the probability that a randomly
| chosen rejected paper would have been accepted if it were re-
| reviewed. This number was 14.9% this year, compared to 17.5% in
| 2014. [7]
|
| We should just move to arXiv-like approaches and allow the
| scientific community to broadly judge relevance and quality.
| Journals just slow things down and burn funding for very little
| gain or benefit to anyone other than the journal owners.
|
| [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3187237/
|
| [2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1212247109
|
| [3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9382220/
|
| [4]
| https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371%2Fj...
|
| [5] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-
| neuroscience/arti...
|
| [6]
| https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourn...
|
| [7] https://blog.neurips.cc/2021/12/08/the-
| neurips-2021-consiste...
| bonsai_spool wrote:
| I am sympathetic to the argument you wish to make, that peer
| review is no panacea, but the actual evidence you offer has
| nothing to do with this claim.
|
| You are trying to say that high profile journals have more
| retractions, which is well known as you share.
|
| How does that have _anything_ to do with peer review? Are you
| saying that there is more review or less review in some cases
| and that influences retraction rate? In what evidence? In what
| world does the arxiv system moderate this discrepancy?
| D-Machine wrote:
| > How does that have anything to do with peer review?
|
| I already addressed this. People know peer review can be bad,
| but some think "good journals" still do good peer review.
| This is not so clear.
|
| > In what world does the arxiv system moderate this
| discrepancy?
|
| Open systems allow the scientific community to figure out
| ways to properly assess research quality and value more
| cheaply, and without passing through (often arbitrary and
| random) small numbers of gatekeepers that don't even do a
| reliable or good job gatekeeping in the first place.
| bonsai_spool wrote:
| Your argument depends on _worse_ peer review at top
| journals - but fundamentally, you fail to show how doing
| any peer review is strictly worse than doing no peer
| review.
|
| I understand that we want arxiv to exist, and it does, and
| it's growing. That doesn't mean we don't want Nature or
| Science to triage the most compelling stories.
|
| Importantly, we can already begin the search for these
| 'cheaper' review strategies while not losing the helpful
| information filter we get by seeing where things are
| presented/published
| D-Machine wrote:
| > Your argument depends on worse peer review at top
| journals - but fundamentally, you fail to show how doing
| any peer review is strictly worse than doing no peer
| review.
|
| No, it doesn't. The argument is that peer review is
| incompetent gatekeeping in general, and so slows things
| down and makes thing expensive. Also, I am countering the
| argument "we need journals because journals do peer
| review" by arguing "peer review by journals isn't clearly
| actually good", I am not saying "peer review in general
| is unneeded", as I support review by the entire
| scientific community, rather than journal gatekeepers.
|
| > you fail to show how doing any peer review is strictly
| worse than doing no peer review
|
| I wasn't trying to show that. I have provided plenty of
| arguments to show why killing _journal-based_ peer review
| could definitely speed things up and so potentially make
| things better. I want actual organic review by the
| community, not by tiny groups of gatekeepers.
| bonsai_spool wrote:
| > I want actual organic review by the community, not by
| tiny groups of gatekeepers.
|
| But this happens--and good work is cited and talked
| about. I can't tell if you work in science, but this
| latter part is obvious.
| D-Machine wrote:
| I do work in science, I am claiming that pre-publication
| / journalistic peer review is limiting (and biasing) the
| amount of post-publication / non-journalistic peer review
| that can happen, and it is not limiting this in a very
| reliable or even IMO particularly desirable way.
|
| There is definitely a problem with the over-production of
| junk science, and we definitely need a way to filter this
| out somehow. I am just claiming journalistic / pre-
| publication peer review does not do this effectively or
| reliably at all anymore (if it ever did).
| vladms wrote:
| > higher-profile journals in general have more retractions and
| research misconduct [1-2]
|
| Given that reviews are not a mechanism to check for truth but
| soundness, the higher profile the thing I would imagine there
| would be more misconduct. I mean would one risk prison to steal
| 10$ or to steal 1 million $?
|
| > lower research quality [3]
|
| To cite exactly from your link "the evidence is mixed about
| whether they are strongly correlated with indicators of
| research quality.". I find saying "lower" a bit too strong
| given the original quote.
|
| > in fact weaker statistical power and reliability [4]
|
| For a specific field "cognitive neuroscience and psychology
| papers published recently"!
|
| > statistical reliability even in high prestige journals is
| still extremely poor overall [5]
|
| According to https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-
| neuroscience/arti... they kind of targeted
| bio/medical/psychology field for the analysis. Which seems to
| me very focused to be able to draw general conclusions.
|
| > Also, making it through peer review is highly random and
| dependent on who you get as a reviewer [6], or is just
| basically a coin toss even when looking at reviewer groups:
|
| It's a coin toss if paper could get accepted at all, and that's
| less than ideal but what the system should do (at least) is
| reject obvious crap, not ensure that something gets clearly
| accepted. The danger is False Positive (accepted even if it's
| crap) rather than False Negative (rejected even if it might be
| something useful).
|
| Overall note: the review system is not ideal and should be
| improved. But it's a hard, complex and delicate problem.
| D-Machine wrote:
| Oh, I agree this is all super complex and delicate. If I had
| more time, I'd love to write a more nuanced, many-thousands-
| of-words blog post going into which journals and fields
| actually have good peer review and can be more / less
| trusted.
|
| I just wanted to make a strong rhetorical case by
| highlighting some things that might be surprising to people
| making more naive defenses of journals via peer-review-based
| arguments.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I absolutely hate this style.
|
| If you're going to write an article titled "The one science
| reform we can all agree on, but we're too cowardly to do" and
| that one thing isn't explicitly stated in the first paragraph,
| I'm out.
|
| Stop with the meandering nonsense and make your argument.
| bsoles wrote:
| > So the solution here is straightforward: every government grant
| should ...
|
| People who write such sentences have no idea what they are
| talking about or are being intentionally naive for whatever
| reason.
|
| Just because your one-sentence solution reads simple doesn't make
| the actual solution simple. Because such a solution involves
| changes to laws, changes to entrenched interests, changes to
| distribution of money involved in the whole system, and changes
| to balance of powers between stakeholders. Unless the push for
| such changes is significant enough to overcome the current state
| of affairs (due to public opinion, redistribution of power or
| money, etc.), nothing will happen.
| eykanal wrote:
| This comment seems to confuse _straightforward_ with _easy_. On
| the merits, this proposal is well argued and has good points,
| and his solution--essentially extend the Biden approach with
| more strict requirements--makes sense.
|
| Everything you mention will also have to happen, which means
| that doing this will definitely not be _easy_. That said, it is
| still a very _straightforward_ solution.
| the__alchemist wrote:
| You sound like my parents. As I get older, I drift less into
| this mentality, and more into "I am tired of this defeatist
| bullshit, and accepting corruption and stagnation". I'm going
| to leave the world a better place, and never give in to this. I
| will vote for and donate to candidates who also want to fight,
| and run myself.
| bsoles wrote:
| > I will vote for and donate to candidates who also want to
| fight ...
|
| Fight for what? I bet to change one or more of the things
| that I have mentioned above. I have said "nothing will
| change" unless these things change; I didn't say you/we
| shouldn't do anything.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| This defeatist attitude is why we can't have nice things
| anymore.
|
| Fun fact, all of those things happened and this is already
| government policy for any NSF grant:
| https://www.nsf.gov/policies/document/faq-public-access
|
| So maybe consider that when you give up on obvious things that
| are good based on some conspiracy theory that the "man" is
| trying to keep you down, what you're actually doing is being
| part of the system and endorsing it. Changes like this do
| happen, they just happen despite you.
| bsoles wrote:
| Why would you claim that my statement is defeatist? It is
| just acknowledging the reality of how things work nowadays
| without saying anything about giving up. If anything, it
| cautions people that change will not come easily and to be
| prepared for it. I vote, give money to political/public
| causes, to go meetings of my federal representatives, post my
| opinions on HN, ... I am just being more realistic about my
| expectations.
| dlisboa wrote:
| A solution to a problem that doesn't change the current state
| of affairs, which by your definition makes it a simple
| solution, is not an actual solution.
|
| There are plenty of simple solutions to real problems whose
| only blocker is upsetting the status quo. "We have no
| housing...let's build more housing" is, in fact, a very simple
| solution. That it doesn't happen has nothing to do with it the
| solution itself.
| orzig wrote:
| Acknowledging, I am not a expert in this stuff, here is an idea:
| getting momentum for these sorts of things is so important, what
| is the journal that would be easiest to make a big example of, so
| that everyone understands that it is possible? Just completely
| mercilessly drive them out of business, and then hound their
| executives when they try to get other jobs. It appeals to peoples
| base instincts, but the last 10 years have shown those are pretty
| powerful. Then the movement which has formed around that can take
| down progressively bigger journals. Probably want a different
| organization building the alternative; the people with the
| personality to fight at the Vanguard of the revolution don't tend
| to be great at building in the long-term.
| harshreality wrote:
| Journals are not about providing access to science, much less
| _public_ access.
|
| Journals are an academic-career-advancement service. It therefore
| makes sense that they do not pay academics. You don't pay your
| customers.
|
| That means they need to generate a secondary customer base
| elsewhere, who will pay. Those secondary customers happen to be
| the employers of the academics who are the primary customers.
| That socializes the cost of providing the service, since
| academics individually wouldn't be willing and able to pay.
|
| Once journals have established a reputation, their policies and
| paywalls and fees are the result of trying to signal exclusivity
| and set an optimum market price.
|
| Until the supply side of the research market largely agrees on a
| way to use open-access repositories like arXiv as a primary
| career-advancement signal, complaining about closed-access
| journals is tilting at windmills.
|
| Changing the law to prevent journals from being able to copyright
| anything could potentially force the research industry to rapidly
| develop a new solution, but at the cost of short-term chaos and
| career instability for new academics.
| alexwebb2 wrote:
| > Robert Maxwell, one of the architects of the for-profit
| scientific publishing scheme. When he later went into debt, he
| plundered hundreds of millions of pounds from his employees'
| pension funds. You may be familiar with his daughter and
| lieutenant Ghislaine Maxwell, who went on to have a successful
| career in child trafficking.
|
| Wow! Surprised that hasn't been mentioned here already. Jumped
| out to me immediately as a morbidly curious bit of trivia.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| That reminds me of the recent term "Epstein class". It seems
| more and more fitting.
| arethuza wrote:
| A good biography of Maxwell - "Fall" by John Preston.
|
| And he apparently stole PS763m...
| snowwrestler wrote:
| I don't understand why people care so much about the cost of
| journal subscriptions. If we add up all the revenue from all
| major scientific journal publishers, is that a big number in the
| context of the national economy? Or even compared to one major
| tech company?
|
| I feel like this is one of those classic local minima where a
| community starving for resources fights vociferously amongst
| itself because they have internalized that they can't win
| externally. From where I sit outside academia the problem with
| science seems obvious: there is not nearly enough money going
| into it.
|
| I doubt bringing the heads of for-profit journals would change
| that under current national conditions in the U.S.
| asdff wrote:
| The big pain point is being between jobs where you lose your
| institutional access to the scientific literature.
| alansaber wrote:
| Like some other posters here I think that a paid service is
| probably a necessary evil for long term quality regulation
| (although currently it skews too much into evil)
| foltik wrote:
| And a non-profit can provide such a service.
| bo1024 wrote:
| This is not how computer science publishing works, however. Post
| it on arxiv, submit to a conference, get 3 peer reviews,
| accepted, "published". 99% of papers are effectively open access
| for free.
| mathisfun123 wrote:
| The title of the article of "science" not "computer science".
| bo1024 wrote:
| Yes, and it opens by talking about STEM fields. I consider CS
| part of both STEM and science generally.
| haritha-j wrote:
| Arxiv isn't the solution. But i think computer science
| conferences are. These have the same scientific rigour and
| standards in the review process as journals in other scientific
| fields, but don't price gouge. Yes, conferences are also a bit
| expensive, but you get a lot for your money, and they usally
| aren't out to make a big profit.
| abought wrote:
| Conferences can be truly wonderful, but not a universal
| replacement for publishing.
|
| If you think journals are expensive, try sending your whole lab
| to a conference in another country. That may not let you in.
| Where some of the attendees have to fill out paperwork before
| talking to a foreign national. (does _that_ ever make for
| awkward small talk...)
|
| For all their many faults, journals provide access to a really
| wide audience, and- in theory- make it possible to form
| connections who wouldn't be able to meet directly.
| stanford_labrat wrote:
| i am very glad to see others (presumably non-scientists) in this
| thread dunking on the false paradigm that "peer review = true".
| anyone who peddles this notion is naive or a moron.
|
| while the author is correct that the for-profit publishing is
| definitely a negative externality, i can't help but feel they are
| missing the forest for the trees when it comes to all the other
| worse issues in academia.
|
| a full explanation of which would be much too onerous for a hn
| comment, but in no particular order: rampant scientific fraud,
| waste of tax payer dollars, wage suppression via "students" and
| visa-dependent laborers (J1 visa abuse), publish or perish
| evaluation criteria, lack of management training, blatant and
| rampant racism, etc. etc. etc.
|
| the whole system needs to burn down and be rebuilt from the
| ground up.
| tdb7893 wrote:
| My experience with grad school is that they are shockingly
| stuck in their ways when it comes to organizational practices.
| They make even large tech companies look nimble.
|
| Though at least in my field part of that is budgets are so
| tight it seems like most of the effort is needed to just keep
| the lights on. I don't see anyone who has bandwidth to help
| burn things down or rebuild in my department as much of the
| staff are already working unpaid overtime (and good luck
| getting funding for hiring many more).
| kkfx wrote:
| Science has never been free, and it isn't mostly progressive;
| like the bulk of the population, it is hyper-conservative without
| admitting it. So, the first flaw lies in the very social
| structure of those who practice science.
|
| The second problem, however, is a modern one: the pure, naked,
| and raw commercialization of science through "publish or perish",
| whereby the researcher is a Ford-style assembly line worker to be
| managed and who must be replaceable.
|
| Without a MENTAL paradigm shift, even before a material one, we
| will only be able to plug small leaks on a ship with a torn hull.
| tikhonj wrote:
| Worth pointing out a success story: all ACM publications have
| gone open access starting this year[1]. Papers are now going to
| be CC licensed, with either the very open CC-BY[2] license or the
| pretty restrictive (but still better than nothing!) CC-BY-NC-
| ND[3] license.
|
| Computer science as a discipline has always been relatively open
| and has had its own norms on publication that are different from
| most other fields (the top venues are almost always conferences
| rather than journals, and turn-around times on publications are
| relatively short), so it isn't a surprise that CS is one of the
| first areas to embrace open access.
|
| Still, having a single example of how this approach works and how
| grass-roots efforts by CS researchers led to change in the
| community is useful to demonstrate that this idea is viable, and
| to motivate other research communities to follow suit.
|
| [1]: https://authors.acm.org/open-access/acm-open-for-authors-
| hom...
|
| [2]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
|
| [3]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en
| don_esteban wrote:
| That works nicely if your institution participates in ACM Open
| (no such institution in my country, and no, my country is not
| in the list of lower-middle income countries).
|
| The combination of 'publish or perish' with 'pay for
| publication' and 'miserly grant money' is deadly.
|
| While in theory the idea is nice, in practice this is a problem
| (maybe not in most rich countries, but here definitely).
|
| Nowadays, you could always get the article you are interested
| in, even if it is beyond a paywall. Hence, perversely, the old
| model (which I hate, for reasons well explained in the original
| post) worked better for me. :-(
| renewiltord wrote:
| > _Academia is so cutthroat that anyone who righteously gives up
| an advantage will be outcompeted by someone who has fewer
| scruples. What we have here is a collective action problem._
|
| And what, pray tell, is this advantage? If there is no utility to
| anyone in publishing in Science or Nature then how can it be an
| advantage.
|
| I suspect it's simply that these guys are a curation service.
| They separate the cranks from the science. They can be imperfect
| at this so long as important people separate the cranks from the
| science.
|
| This kind of winnowing is pretty useful in general. Many
| universities are pretty much that and people pay to attend them.
|
| It makes sense that a credentialing service would charge for the
| credential. It doesn't make that much sense to say "no
| credentials allowed; you and timecube guy must be considered the
| same". I want you to show your credentials. We all do because
| science is an empirical field and empiricism depends on facts. I
| cannot process your paper with pure reason.
|
| If you looked under the microscope and saw light I don't know
| that you didn't. At scale I need someone to figure out "this
| wasn't a Photoshop situation; that's totally fluorescence".
| Arguing that we should remove these organizations is similar to
| saying you should remove diplomas and so on. Anyone can continue
| to attend universities. They just can't hand out diplomas. So no
| credentials. Only learning. Simple thing. Or perhaps not so.
|
| The credential is the useful thing.
| cs702 wrote:
| The OP is exactly right, in my view: the current charade of
| paywalled-journal "peer review" is _broken beyond repair_.
|
| See also from the same author:
|
| * https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...
|
| * https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-dance-of-the-nake...
|
| * https://www.experimental-history.com/p/lets-build-a-fleet-an...
| dnautics wrote:
| we should
|
| 1) pay reviewers. 2) you can't publish unless a reviewer
| replicates your work.
|
| yes. It can be done.
|
| https://www.orgsyn.org/
| reenorap wrote:
| There should be a journal where it only publishes studies that
| have been replicated. Too much research slop is being generated
| for journals and we already know we have a severe reproducibility
| problem in science right now.
| Atlas667 wrote:
| Everybody hates capitalism, but no one understands that they do.
| What you promote as a solution is simply a pebble on the path of
| the people who want to capitalize.
|
| There are 3 realistic scenarios for your proposed solution:
| - it will not pass - it will be reformed later, or,
| if successful - it will just make the capitalists
| appear at another point in the supply chain
|
| The capitalists design the business models (profit making
| schemes) and legalize them. This is not an organic development of
| an industry.
|
| What you hate is capitalism and capitalism will do this to any
| industry wherever it can attain steady profits.
| weirdmantis69 wrote:
| The problem with communists always seem to be their math is
| ridiculously bad. 1 billion in profits to the journals seems like
| a rounding error in an industry with almost 1 trillion in annual
| spending.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| SciHub is an amazing resource. I have read so many papers from
| varied topics out of my personal interest. That would not be
| possible for me without SciHub. The hold on new papers has
| stopped me from keeping current. If I were able to also publish
| papers that others could review that opens "science" to
| everybody. Then the only benefit of research institutions would
| be a concentration of big brains. That completely changes the
| landscape for scientific progress.
|
| SciHub has shown us a new way to spread knowledge to all that are
| interested. I don't have the rigor for publishing but other
| individual experimenters might. It would be great if they could
| contribute to building human knowledge.
|
| I think the only real solution is a distributed federated
| publishing and review platform. A node would be a library of
| papers for the host's interests. Just like physical journal
| collections, bigger institution would host more topics. Anybody
| can participate in the publication and review process. SciHub
| nailed storage and retrieval. Review is the hard part. Any rating
| system can be gamed. It would be very hard to convince people it
| is trustworthy.
|
| There shouldn't be any prestige in publishing a paper. The
| prestige comes from being proven correct, from building our
| knowledge.
| sega_sai wrote:
| In astrophysics we now have Open Journal of Astrophysics that is
| basically an overlay on top of arxiv. https://astro.theoj.org/ It
| is now catching on with ~ 200 papers published last year, after
| some of the astro journals started to charge the Golden Open
| Access publishing fees. I think now people realize how crazy it
| is to pay for hosting a PDF and for sending your draft to a few
| referees without paying anything for their work.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| This post misunderstands why the journal system exists, and why
| they work this way. It is not because there is an evil
| corporation controlling everyone else.
|
| Universities do the research. They voluntarily choose to pay for
| and publish in journals. They could just decide not to do this.
| Literally, just don't publish in a journal, anymore, ever. Upload
| your study paper to a Dell Inspiron sitting in a closet in the
| university faculty lounge, connect it to the internet. Done. Why
| don't they do this?
|
| #1. No guarantee anyone will look at it. You just spent years of
| time and money to come up with a research conclusion. Will anyone
| read it? Comment on it? Learn from it? Is it any good? Will
| anyone review it? It's after all just a paper sitting on a
| server. Without some kind of process to vet it independently, and
| publish it in a place where people can find the latest vetted
| papers, it's too much hassle for most people to ever find, much
| less trust.
|
| #2. The reputation feedback loop. Universities give research
| grants to "well respected" researchers. You become a "well
| respected" researcher by having academic achievements. You get
| academic achievements by... doing research that gets published in
| a journal. Universities depend entirely on the _prestige_ of the
| researcher and journal to decide who gets a grant. Because...
|
| #3. Money is hard to get. In order to convince someone
| (government, private donor) to give your university money, you
| have to show them it's worth it. And the way they show that
| is.... the prestige of the researcher, being published in the
| prestigious journal. Look, we have cool peeps, publishing in cool
| journals! Give us more money!!
|
| Therefore, the reason journals still exist, is Universities
| _desperately need them_. They don 't want to pay an insane amount
| of money to a journal. But they don't really have a choice.
|
| Could Universities replace journals with something else? Well,
| they could work hard to replace the "prestige machine" with other
| processes (which must enable them to get money, by showing their
| researchers are good, with vetted papers, published somewhere
| people will see them). They could replace the journal system with
| their own intra-university system. But it turns out, that costs a
| considerable amount of money, time, and resources... which is
| entirely what the "evil journal publishers" do. Universities
| would have to spin out their own entire corporation to do all
| that work, which would be a journal publisher. They know this is
| expensive, difficult, time-consuming, and they also know the
| existing system benefits them.
|
| "Let's just throw papers on arXiv" does nothing to solve the
| money and prestige problem. So the world continues to turn as it
| has.
| shae wrote:
| I think the solution is to launder all research papers through
| LLMs so the papers are no longer copyrightable, and let the rich
| journal owners fight with the LLM owners.
| abought wrote:
| This is a fine example of where someone's understanding of the
| problem runs ahead of their understanding of the solution.
|
| A few scattered thoughts:
|
| 1. There is a difference between pre and post publication peer
| review. These discussions almost invariably conflate the two, but
| part of the runaway success of spam journals is that the benefits
| of pre greatly outweigh the risks of post. Historically, there
| was some link: if an article had problems, you would open the
| table of contents n months later and (might) see a letter or
| further discussion. Now, the table of contents is google, and
| many readers have weaker links to the same venue over time for
| followup. At the metrics level, the reputational hit of bad
| articles is weaker. (studies have shown that retractions are
| often cited with the original intent years after a correction was
| published)
|
| 2. The phrase "for profit" is doing a _lot_ of work in this
| article. Some mega publishers, like ACS, are technically non
| profit member societies stapled to a mega-publisher, and have
| been strongly opposed to OA policies in the past. [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Chemical_Society#Cont...
| [2]
| https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/about/aboutacs/financ...
|
| 3. Outsourcing trust to someone who isn't the current evil...
| will only get you so far. No matter who takes over publishing,
| scientists are going to need to evolve new ways of evaluating
| work and each other, as the field grows far beyond what a small
| network can handle. Journals are a bad metric, but how does your
| dean evaluate 50 people hired to be the world's leading experts
| on (new and emerging field)? I've read plenty of these
| publisher=bad screeds, and most stop there. PubPeer exists for
| some, Twitter walkthroughs of papers were a great thing for a
| while, or there's also talk of overlay journals that decouple the
| act of publication (as a preprint) from the review-and-prestige
| piece.
|
| 4. The current system does two things: (a) provides a record of
| work done by students, who may labor under graduation
| requirements to publish something, whether their project is
| successful or not, (b) a shared record of current state of human
| knowledge, be it from researchers at a small college, or google,
| or pharma. Goal (a) puts a lot of pressure on peer review in "low
| tier" journals that even the _reviewers_ don 't like to cite, and
| I've had my doubts as to whether this is the best yield for
| effort.
| jpeloquin wrote:
| Is the goal to get rid of the journals or ensure open access?
| Because the US already has open access mandates for federally
| funded research. Immediate and without embargo.
| https://www.lib.iastate.edu/news/upcoming-public-access-requ...
| sega_sai wrote:
| it is open access, but often 'golden' or 'diamond' OA, where
| the researcher has to pay few K$ for this.
| shellfishgene wrote:
| This is discussed in the article.
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