The alternative business model that the world is moving to is Open Access. The difference being that instead of paying to access the journal or paper, the researcher or institution that wishes to publish pays up front to have the paper published.
Open Access has its own problems, such as predatory journals, where researchers who don't know better or who are desperate to publish are more or less lied to as to the reach and validity of a journal. It has become an area ripe for a new kind of scammers. This has prompted efforts such as Think, Check, Submit[1].
There's also the problem with raising the funds to publish something as Open Access. It's not always the case that the researcher actually has the means to pay for Open Access.
Nevertheless, Open Access is clearly the way where the research community is headed, and we're going to see a steady growth in percentage of research published as such over the next decade or so. But it does come with its own set of problems to solve.
It is not true that all open-access venues require authors to pay article processing charges (APCs) to publish with them. For instance, in my field, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_Methods_in_Computer_Sc... is a reputable journal which is free to read and free to publish; it is hosted by the Épisciences platform which is managed by a French public agency (CCSD). People usually use the name "diamond open access" to refer to such journals, which I believe are the best direction for scholarly publishing. By contrast, we talk of "gold open access" to refer to the situation where traditional publishers charge APCs: as you point out, this approach has several problems, in particular the fact that the APCs are often extortionate (e.g., $2000 for a 12-page PDF provided by the authors in a completely typeset and publishable form). However it's not correct to say that open access is expensive -- that's only the case if one stays with traditional publishers.
It's also important to keep in mind that "Think, Check, Submit" is an initiative backed by traditional publishers (of the "gold open access" kind), and I think they are making this a bigger problem than it actually is. In my area, everyone knows which conferences/journals are reputable, and everyone knows that all others are essentially scams (especially if they have APCs). I have never seen anyone make the mistake of publishing valuable material with a scam publisher.
This. Besides "diamond open access" some in the open access community try to establish the "fair open access principles" [1]. For a journal to comply to these principles means that they are owned by the scholarly community, free for authors and readers, authors retain copyright, and any other costs paid by the journal to a publisher are low and reasonable. We have started to put up a network for journals that follow these principles with the "Free Journal Network" [2] to promote and support each other.
Concerning other comments on funding, I wanted to add that some journals don't need much money (hosting is basically free, workload shared well by editorial board). On the other hand funding can and does come from universities and their libraries (money not spend on subscriptions), research institutions, museums, and donations (sometimes seen as volountary APCs by those who have the money from grants).
From what we've seen, the problem that Think, Check, Submit adresses is not necessarily a huge problem in countries that has a strong academic tradition. However, once you start looking at places where academia is just emerging, the difference can be huge.
Also, it's absolutely worth noting, like you point out, that different fields have different processes for accomplishing the same thing. It seems that younger academic fields are a bit more independent of the traditional structures. I hear that in Computer Science, conferences carry more importance than they do in some other fields, for example.
In other fields, there's a lot of inertia to deal with.
I'm going to be honest. IMHO publishing a paper should be like doing a PR on github and there is no reason it shouldn't be.
You do your research, read the "PR" i.e. submission guidelines and submit it, - sure let the committer and reviewers be anonymized until the PR has been accepted - then just pull it into a "Repo" aka journal and be done.
The vast majority of hours spent has nothing to do with any editorial functions. All reviewers volunteer their time to review submitted papers, so that's not a cost. Typesetting to a publishable state is not even included in some cases (see a3_nm's comment). What else is left? Filtering through already reviewed papers to list out already typeset documents? Why are researchers paying $2k+ for that?
I work for one of these publishers doing all of the nothing you're complaining about, so to clarify: how do you suppose we determine who reviews which paper? How do we convince them to actually write the review? How do we know the review is any good? Also, we do typeset and improve prose quality, not sure what those other slackers are doing...
> how do you suppose we determine who reviews which paper? How do we convince them to actually write the review? How do we know the review is any good?
At least in theoretical computer science these tasks are all done by the volunteer conference organizers.
It's possible that this is different than in fields that primarily publish in journals, but it certainly seems like the volunteer approach works just fine.
I have also never seen anything getting improved typesetting or prose. The reviews may reject based on bad writing, or the journal may reject due to latex warnings, but never more than that.
There are many academic fields where people work long hours for little pay, but I imagine theoretical CS is much more comfortable. I'm not surprised people have time and effort to spare, but they are still getting paid, you know. It just happens that the resume byline "conference organizer" is valuable enough in that field.
Sometimes conferences pay a publishing company to do the review process for submissions, by the way. I'm not sure that your submissions are actually getting processed for free by conference volunteers.
I'd rather not disclose details of my employer, sorry.
No conference in CS pays the publishing company (usually IEEE or ACM) to pick reviewers. None whatsoever. Instead, program committee (PC) chairs are selected, and they pick PC members who are responsible for reviews. All of this occurs on a volunteer basis, no matter which institution the PC chairs/members belong to.
> just happens that the resume byline "conference organizer" is valuable enough in that field.
Being editor of a journal/PC chair is a valuable thing in any field, not just CS.
> Sometimes conferences pay a publishing company to do the review process for submissions, by the way. I'm not sure that your submissions are actually getting processed for free by conference volunteers.
Well, I'm sure, because I also review for the same conferences and journals that I submit to!
I don't think anyone will say that publishers should do their work for free or are totally useless.
The problem is about the business practices of the big publishers - asking huge amounts of money for access to journals, forcing universities to buy bundles of journals, to get access to interesting articles they also have to subscribe to stuff they don't want, and so on.
What field are you in? Because at least in mine (information retrieval/machine learning) all the stuff you're talking about is done by volunteers, not paid staff.
> The vast majority of hours spent has nothing to do with any editorial functions.
Unfortunately, I have to admit that most of the money I pay for scholarly papers goes to Springer/Elsevier shareholders and not the editors who barely edit.
But the principle still remains. Reading through crap papers so you don't have to is hard work that should be paid for. (And editors have to do this before sending stuff out to reviewers, or else the reviewers drop out.)
ANd I would rather pay the editors out of my own pockets than expect the authors to do it, or an ad-supported mechanism, because if you're not the customer, you're the product.
> The editor has to put in the hours to reject the crap that people submit
Does that process need to be any different from PRs on github? Can't all that be distributed across a team of researchers working on the topic of the journal, just as PRs on github are distributed across all developers working on the software?
>Does that process need to be any different from PRs on github? Can't all that be distributed across a team of researchers working on the topic of the journal, just as PRs on github
It's not the same as a github PR because wading through a mountain of badly written papers is work researchers do not want to do. That's what a publisher (like Elsevier) does. See example of Elsevier employee Angelica Kerr.[1] It should be easy to see that scientists would think it's a waste of their time to do Angelica Kerr's work.
I didn't get a chance to respond to the reply by allenz that suggested that journal chiefs should hire their own editing and administration staff. Again, that "solution" makes the same mistake of thinking scientists will do something they have no interest in doing. They don't want the hassles of "contracting" an editing team.
The research publishing is not a "software problem" that's solvable by a "software platform solution." You can't solve it by applying social platform mechanics such as github PRs and/or votes of StackOverflow/Reddit. (My parent comment tries to explain this.[2])
So I read your links. How is Angela Kerr's job any different than a spam filter function? We've got production grade techniques for handling that now, and without going into technical details everything you mentioned as being in her set of tasks could be implemented using ML and NLP techniques, most of them not even that cutting edge. In many ways, an algorithmic approach could do her job better because some "crackpot" articles will not be crackpot but genius and if you give researchers the ability to tweak the filter settings by adjusting sensitivity / specificity to their own tastes you're mathematically guaranteed to increase the likelihood of getting the next breakthrough out there.
The actual problem, which I think you implicitly identify when talking about Nature and Cell, is the "prestige" factor. As long as researchers are motivated by a prestige level of a journal b/c they may fear being ostracized by their peers or not getting recognition for their research - which has monetary and career costs involved - I think it will be very difficult to convince anyone to switch, regardless of how effective the platform could be.
I haven't thought about that problem before so I'm not sure how to address it as of now.
To whom should you send it in order to get an expert review?
Which of those people has an ax to grind with one of the authors?
Of the remaining people, who do you think you could convince to invest a day or more to carefully evaluate the paper?
Okay, so you got replies back from two of your carefully selected referees (after two months of badgering one of them):
Referee A thinks the paper is great, insightful, and advances the field, but wants extensive changes.
Referee B thinks the paper is derivative drek and should be rejected because his friend C has already done something similar.
Your journal publishes twenty similar articles a week but receives three hundred a week. The careers of the authors are partially on the line, as is the prestige of the journal, the attention of the readership, and the future submission of articles by prospective authors.
Good luck training a neural net to do this well. I suspect a neural net can be trained to reject the worst crackpots, but little more, without rejecting insightful but unique/important papers.
The problem is that most of the (substantial) work you highlight above is done by the academic community (mostly paid by the public purse), while most of the (substantial and above-market) profits go to the private publishers.
> In addition to basic copy-editing, she prevents crackpot articles such as "Darwin's Theory of Evolution is proven wrong by Trump" from reaching the journal editors and wasting their time. (She may inadvertently forward some bad articles but she has enough education to reject many of them outright to minimize the effort by the journal's scientists.)
Do I read it right that an Elsevier manager with no degree in the subject rejects research papers without consulting the editors? To me as scientist this is a big red flag and concern about journal's quality. While the example given here looks obvious (and probably contrived), most real examples are less so. And while recognizing those takes little time and effort to a trained eye, this task certainly should not be left to a subject non-specialist. It will not save much time and create more concerns than help.
As a researcher, in a lot of cases, you want to be published in a reputable journal. Publishers have learned to charge for the reputation over the years. Reputation has a lot of inertia.
The PR model would have to answer the question of how reputation is built. A "star" system would likely be inadequate for a number of reasons. But the major obstacle would be in getting researchers on board with the new model.
Early adopters would have to withstand scoffs from their peers who haven't accepted the new model yet.
Even Open Access, which could be regarded as an incremental improvement, has years, if not decades, of grueling work behind it.
The network effect is very strong within the research community, which results in a situation which is very close to "all or nothing."
Also, the persons most comfortable with a radically different publishing model like PR are apt to be young researchers, but they are the ones most in need of establishing a reputation by publishing in established, prestigious journals.
Sounds like a case for "shaming" those who rely on 'prestige' since that seems like the only way to break entrenched habits.
I am not in research or publishing or anything else directly involved.
This is just a generalization that exposure and denigration of egregious cases tend to be the most effective initiators of systemic change, given our hard-wired approval seeking.
The reason the publishers charge their exorbitant rates is because they have acquired the journals leaving no freedom to switch to alternative providers offering better service at lower cost. Nor do they allow saving costs by not using services that are not needed.
Do you think Springer pays for reviewing? No publisher does. It's all voluntary work by the same people who write the papers. It's the modern day slavery.
The parent comment implied that reviewers would be anonymized with this Github-based approach unless the PR was approved, which seems like it would lead to more acceptances so that the reviewers could get credit.
By providing opportunity to find errors in research of people you don't like!
More seriously though, peer review is usually free or almost free, reviewers do not get anything near to the ridiculous amount of the money that "open access" journals demand.
Besides, having articles on github, with all the data, so that any reader can check the results, and comment, would be much more powerful than the type of peer review we have today.
First, I'd question that you really need to incentivize it. People - myself included - are doing research in a topic because they are passionate about it and most are more than happy to look at new research and ideas about things they are passionate about. Will you really need incentivization to get people to interact with the topic they have devoted their life towards studying?
Let's say however that you need incentivization, I suppose one approach would be at a legislative level where you require all researchers publish on a decentralized open access platform where every citizen - they are the one's funding the research after all - can freely and uninhibitedly access the information.
> Will you really need incentivization to get people to interact with the topic they have devoted their life towards studying?
Perhaps not. But people keep telling me in this thread that reviewers work because the journals expect them to or they will get future papers rejected/lose conference access, not for the love of the topic or because they get paid or otherwise any kind of special visibility for it. I wonder whether an approach that promised only publicity for having done reviews or relying on altruism would really produce the quality of reviews necessary.
> I suppose one approach would be at a legislative level where you require all researchers publish on a decentralized open access platform where every citizen - they are the one's funding the research after all - can freely and uninhibitedly access the information.
That's not really incentivizing the _reviewers_, though, right?
The same way we do now? There's a strong cultural expectation that one will agree to review, or have one's graduate students review, a reasonable number of papers. If you're a member of the Foo committee of the Society for Bar, you're not going to refuse to pull your weight as a reviewer for the Society for Bar's International Journal of Foo unless you want to get the cold shoulder at your next conference. It's not like anybody gets paid for this today.
But no seriously, this seems like an actual technology / problem fit, although you'd need a decent amount of tooling, product design, etc for it to work - but some of that's already being explored by the "open source + blockchain" endeavors.
In basic form, I imagine you'd basically turn the transaction fees into review fees.
(The product design and tooling comes from how you prevent abuses to that basic format, I think)
I work for an Open Access publisher/research discovery technology company, and we literally have this on the drawing board. We're small, but well connected in the world of publishing and research.
I for one would be also be interested in links.
One thing we don't want to do is reinvent the actual blockchain technology, so we're also interested in finding partnerships in terms of platform technology.
A proof of stake smart contract would be perfect for this. The currency is reputation earned by writing well-done reviews and 'staked' behind reviews they believe are well-done. Papers need a certain number of well-done reviews with the stakes on both sides accumulating behind approve/deny. You have to pay with the currency to have your paper reviewed and the currencies are distributed to the reviewers to allow monetization via exchanges with a small amount withdrawn as a siphon to support the continued development of the network and marketing/public relations.
Agreed! There's a lot in the blockchain model that seems to lend itself to this problem in particular.
Ideally, we'd also like to set up a foundation to maintain and manage the ecosystem and invite both old and new players to participate. A lot of blockchain efforts seem to be a little too much like a hope for a monopoly wrapped in a thick layer of talk about free markets and democracy.
We're actively looking for collaboration and partnerships around this. If you, or anyone, would like to get involved we'd be happy to discuss. My email is in my profile.
Neat. I'm at a crypto conference in a couple weeks, I'll see if there's any sparks on this idea.
I agree with an above post that the starting point is that you get paid to review, and you pay to get reviewed; although you'd need another way to monetize the token or it's limited to this use case.
The overlap with open-source seem clear: How do you validate the value of the crowd-sourced contributions? In code, you could do it via TDD...
OH! OR - (well, you could make both), you pay to review by _betting for it's validity_. There may be a way to combine or borrow from each approach to fill in the gaps in the other.
I'm one of the main developers of OpenReview.net, and I would love to discuss this more with you, but like the other commenter, I can't figure out how to get your email from your profile (I'm also generally new to HN and may just be missing something - for example, is there a direct message-like option here?)
I think this was meant as a suggestion, I've also never seen this happen. However, I am wondering why and so may I ask why you do not want to be mentioned as reviewer on a paper, maybe even with your review?
not parent, but research association conference presentations might help to centralize announcements/review efforts but also keep things under researcher purview..
I am curious who/what administration is impressed by publications in predatory journals when listed on a researcher's CV.
P.S. Jeffrey Beall kept a list of predatory publishers but was shut down.
> In January 2017, Beall shut down his blog and removed all its content, citing pressure from his employer.[] Beall's supervisor wrote a response stating that he did not pressure Beall to discontinue his work, or threaten his employment; and had tried hard to support Beall's academic freedom.[]
> The alternative business model that the world is moving to is Open Access. The difference being that instead of paying to access the journal or paper, the researcher or institution that wishes to publish pays up front to have the paper published.
Open Access is not a business model. It is about the Access, as the name says. The author pays is a business model, not the best one, and is the one with many problems.
> Open Access has its own problems, such as predatory journals, where researchers who don't know better or who are desperate to publish are more or less lied to as to the reach and validity of a journal.
This is not specific to Open Access, there are low quality subscription journals as well. No serious scientist would send articles to unknown journals without checking their credentials, whether the journals are open access or not.
> The alternative business model that the world is moving to is Open Access.
That's one of the possible alternative, not the only alternative. Another alternative would be to have peer review as done today where authors pay for PDF hosting, server maintenance costs etc. and not the cost of "publishing" as in the traditional sense.
Yes, many top journals charge for both subscription and publishing. The only thing that open access journals lack is reputation in many fields (low number of good citations). Hopefully this will change in the next few years.
Open Access has its own problems, such as predatory journals, where researchers who don't know better or who are desperate to publish are more or less lied to as to the reach and validity of a journal. It has become an area ripe for a new kind of scammers. This has prompted efforts such as Think, Check, Submit[1].
There's also the problem with raising the funds to publish something as Open Access. It's not always the case that the researcher actually has the means to pay for Open Access.
Nevertheless, Open Access is clearly the way where the research community is headed, and we're going to see a steady growth in percentage of research published as such over the next decade or so. But it does come with its own set of problems to solve.
1: https://thinkchecksubmit.org/