Of course one has to examine why this system is still in place. And it's mostly to do with policies in universities, where certain journals/conferences are valued more, and changing that is hard, because e.g. Springer happens to own the name. So we all pay millions to Springer, for the use of this name (that we, together, made great, not Springer), and in return, they charge us the privilege of reading the papers that we reviewed, edited, and wrote. It's insane, but it can't be changed as long as universities refuse to change.
So the hard truth is, it's not Springer/IEEE/Nature/etc, it's ultimately, us.
Relatively soon after starting work on my PhD, one of my more-experienced colleagues explained the affect of "impact factor" on academic publishing. Back then I was young and naive, and assumed that at least impact factor itself would be some kind of open system based on freely-available data.
Many years later, I read up on this and discovered Web of Science/Clarivate :(
How is it possible that scientists and academics are gated from the most important metrics based on their own output and by which they measure themselves and are measured by those who fund them?
It's completely nuts.
Academics are periodically called upon to pass judgment on other academics. It's an unsavory part of our job, but given that there are fewer jobs, less grant funding, etc. than the number of strong applications, it's a necessary evil.
To the best we can, we try to evaluate their research record directly. But it is maddeningly difficult to evaluate work even slightly out of your field, and so journals serve as a signaling mechanism.
And here I agree again with what you say: we are paying millions to Springer, Elsevier, etc. for the use of their names. ("Ooh, this person published in Inventiones Mathematicae!") Which we we made great.
As much as I despise this system, if you believe that universities can change this, at the level of policy, I am very curious to hear what you propose.
MIT did not renew their contract with Elsevier in 2020, a major reason being their inequitable profit model, and refusal to honor open access agreements. They have a postmortem saying the loss had little impact to their researchers.
How about that for a policy change?
> we are paying millions to Springer, Elsevier, etc. for the use of their names.
As an academic researcher, you are (or your institution is) paying them millions in publication and subscription fees so you can keep your job. Publish or perish.
If it's you who made the existing journals great, you probably can do it again?
Using your logic any publishing is a scam including blogging where monetary renumeration does matters [1]
> Nowadays everyone puts their papers also on arxiv.org so at least we can read each other's papers for free
Do you realize that not everyone can get their paper published in Arxiv, it's a free journal masquerading as a pre-print server? [2]
> Of course one has to examine why this system is still in place.
Hmm because it does work albeit the imperfections?
[1] How Do Bloggers Actually Make Money?
https://www.gillianperkins.com/blog/bloggers-actually-make-m...
[2] alphaXiv: Open research discussion on top of arXiv:
While publishers as they exist now are not necessary for this, the publishing process does typically incorporate peer review which has significant value. I agree that things need to change, but I don't think it's true that zero value is added by publishers.
Significant value which is given gratis by said peers, which journals use to boost their reputability and, by association, their profits. Publishers are profiting off of free labor from subject matter experts. Even more disappointing is this free labor is viewed as a right of passage. Don't forget that the author spent hundreds to thousands of dollars to access these unpaid peers. Publishers are increasingly well-known as scammy. It's why MIT ended their Elsevier contract, and why many other R1s are following suit.
Also don't get me started on the dubious quality of peer review in todays "Publish or Perish" climate.
Publishers don't add value, they subtract it.
People probably have hard time undersanding this because the system is so absurd and so obvious racket they don't think such can exist.
Relevant for the HN crowd is the Journal of Open Source Software: joss.theoj.org.
[I am an editor at JOSS]
But - writers could, then, and can now, use the "standard trick" to get past IEEE copyright transfer requirements:
https://academia.stackexchange.com/a/119002/7319
that works for a person who actually holds copyrights and can trasfer them - so that IEEE gets its papers, and eventually the author regains the right to also publish, modify, distribute etc. their paper.
For public domain it could be a bit trickier, and would require looking at the text of the current IEEE forms. I would guess that an appropriate loophole can be found to achieve a similar result.
https://innovate.ieee.org/techrxiv_launch/
Everybody should use preprint servers, and TechRxiv deserves more love and attention than it gets.
1. Do they still require transfer of copyright to IEEE?
2. Or, conversely, do they publish public domain articles?
2. Preprint servers aren't really for the publication of articles that were already published elsewhere. But you can have an article published on TechRxiv peer-reviewed and subsequently published in an IEEE journal -- or a non-IEEE journal, for that matter.
I'm a little salty about TechRxiv/IEEE as IEEE has a copyright transfer policy that permits posting preprints at approved servers. I applied to have engrXiv recognized as an approved server but received no response. Shortly after that TechRxiv was launched. Currently the only approved servers are still ArXiv and TechRxiv.
Discussed in 2011: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3051014
Furthermore, the concept of a "public domain" paper in academia just seems weird to me. the concept of "public domain" means that the contents can be reused in whole or in part without attribution of any sorts to the original author(s). that goes against the ethos of academia (i.e. plagiarism) in regards to authoring papers, so unsure what public domain for the actual paper gives users vs. the document being what I'd refer to as "freely available" (i.e. no one else can charge for access to the document, only the 'copyright' holder can).
If the author has a right to freely distribute the document (and anyone who gets the document from the author maintains the same right), I don't see what public domain "assignment" gains anyone. i.e. copyright assignment (to the publisher) with the ability to freely distribute the paper accomplishes all these goals. The only thing (I can imagine) that it doesn't accomplish is giving others the ability to collect a bunch of papers together and sell it for "profit". But that doesn't seem to be a something DJB views as needed (and in fact, rails against the publishers who are requesting the copyright assignment for that very purpose).
1. make science self-publishing using decentralised protocols the default 2. redefine traditional journals and publishers as curators or labellers on top of the network, instead of owners
Governments are another matter, because they lack the expertise to judge your work. Immigration officials in particular are something academics often have to deal with. For some type-2 fun, try applying for a visa that requires something beyond a PhD from a reputable university and a job offer.
However, and, crucially, journals differ in their effect on the consensus, e.g. IEEE or PNAS have much higher impact factors, and the competition both among researchers and institutions creates a market opportunity for gatekeeping, that naturally sorts those same researchers and institutions for the next ground of grants.
Again, I think it's hard to understand what a fix would look like, if we don't first recognize how distributed consensus should work for science. Algos like Paxos require a leader, and editorial boards for journals are effectively leaders.
Many Germans incorrectly believe that copyrights cannot be abandoned. The actual situation in German law is as follows:
"Nutzungsrechte" (literally "usage rights") include the rights of copying, modification, distribution, etc. These rights can be waived, as in other countries.
"Urheberrechte" (literally "originator rights") include reputation rights and generally cannot be waived. This protection against fraud, libel, etc. has nothing to do with whether something is in the public domain.
