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.

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?

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

> 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.

> 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.

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...

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.

> 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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

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.

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/

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...

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.

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.

Based on title, I was figured it was referring to USA moving to the metric system

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.

> 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.

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.

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]

[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...

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.

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

What you hate is capitalism and capitalism will do this to any industry wherever it can attain steady profits.

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.