[ThePhysicist]

Personally, I think civil disobedience is more effective at changing the status quo than e-mail campaigns, although they can help to increase awareness. What I would really like to see is a big institution / university take a stand and build something like Scihub to provide free and unlimited access to all of their own papers, even those that are stuck behind a paywall for "historic" reasons. It would be interesting to see if the publishing industry would dare to sue them in that case, as this could easily tip the public opinion against them.

In the end, I think the publishers know perfectly well that their business models have been made obsolete by the Internet long ago and that their value proposition is getting smaller and smaller, so they just want to squeeze the last remaining profits from their historically earned privileged position.

[NotOscarWilde]

There are a lot of steps a university can take, even without a risk of getting sued:

* Cut 25% of your journal subscriptions to the worst offenders and keep cutting every year with some smaller percent.

* Publicly recommend to all scientific boards that the hiring process should judge applicants by the merit of their publications, not by their journal's ranking.

* Promote open-access submissions by your researchers: a small monetary bonus would probably suffice.

* Lobby your government to drop funding allocation based on journal rankings. Instead, promote some sort of combination of citation count [1] and expert consensus.

[1]: I realize currently the citation count is correlated with journal ranking (because the impact factor is computed by an average citation count) but it does not mean it is a bad measure. Plus of course, a comment on HN should not be the right place to design a really fair publication metric.

[chias]

> Promote open-access submissions by your researchers: a small monetary bonus would probably suffice.

Simply paying for open-access submissions would probably suffice. I'm a scientific researcher myself, but most of my work gets published non-open-access: publishing open-access costs ~$500, and as a grad student as much as I think open-access should be the de-facto standard, I'm not in a position to be paying that myself.

Sadly, that's more or less what my department says as well.

[infogulch]

How much is the department paying for those journal subscriptions?

Just redirect that cut journal subscription money that GP suggested into the open-access submission fee.

[cowsandmilk]

How budgets generally work:

University pays for journal subscriptions.

Lab (sometimes Department) pays to submit articles.

These are wholly different budgets. Some universities have open access funds to try to encourage researchers to publish open access articles. Some have open access policies that basically unilaterally declare all their research articles will be distributed by the university as open access.

This is a fight that has to occur monetarily at the university level, a lab that hasn't had a grant renewed and is having all its students TA'ing to pay their salaries doesn't have the funds to pay what is often several thousand dollars per publication[1][2] to always publish open access. A semi-productive lab could easily pay as much in publication fees for a year as they would for a graduate student.

[1] http://acsopenaccess.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ACS_Sale... [2] http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/s/publication-fees

[ac]

It's not the departments that pay for subscriptions: it's the universities themselves (usually, the library).

[coolnow]

Is it possible for you to release a PDF/LaTeX source via other means?

[ac]

Depends on the publisher. Both ACM and IEEE allow publishing a copy on your website, don't know about Springer or Elsevier. Most authors in CS that I know publish copies as soon as they are accepted for publication.

[dubbel]

Then you are running into problems with the commercial journals, and you need their peer-review.

[NotOscarWilde]

It really depends on your field; as far as I am aware (I am a PhD student in theoretical CS) even Elsevier and Springer do not go against preprints on arXiv.

[coolnow]

Am i correct in assuming that getting peer reviewed binds you to their terms, one of which must be to disallow other means of distribution?

I know at uni, our tutors told us to politely email researchers for a copy in case our subscription didn't cover their research. I didn't bother with this as booksc (libgen) and sci-hub are faster.

Reminds me of the pre-netflix era.

[ac]

> * Publicly recommend to all scientific boards that the hiring process should judge applicants by the merit of their publications, not by their journal's ranking.

Unfortunately, that's just not practical. Science has become (always been?) so hyper-specialized that adequately judging impact of publications outside your speciality, let alone your field, has become very hard, unless it's a Huge Deal, in which case nobody would care to gather the board for the hire. (I'm talking about Computer Science, no idea about other fields.) Basically, you need to follow the current state-of-the-art to adequately judge the novelty, importance and merit of the paper. You might have a person from that field on the board, but that's unlikely -- departments usually try to diversify the range of research directions in their hiring decisions.

But, suppose, you require the board to carefully review all the publications on their own merit anyway. Suppose that reviewing one paper thoroughly takes at least 4 hours --- more, if you don't know anything about the area. And, say, an average applicant has 20 papers. You need at least 80 hours to judge the merit of one candidate's publications. Considering that hiring committees consist of professors, who are often already overloaded with teaching, research and administration, it's simply unrealistic to require them to spend so much time on one candidate.

Journal and conference rankings are helpful, because the ranking usually correlates with the quality of the peer review (though, recently, there have been some embarrassing examples to the contrary). So, the hiring committees can and do make use of rankings and citation counts as a proxy measure for the quality and merit of the candidates' publications. That might not be very thorough, but, at least, it scales.

[NotOscarWilde]

Rephrasing the gist of your argument: The professors are overloaded, so they cannot do a thorough job when they are on a hiring committee. Therefore, we should use the existing structures that make it trivial to rank applicants, with the unfortunate consequence of us supporting the closed-access journals of today.

My biggest disagreement is with the "Therefore" implication, and allow me to illustrate why.

As a PhD student, I am also obligated to teach (T.A., mostly). The hiring process we mentioned completely ignores teaching skills, and at my uni there is very little negative feedback if you do a "modest but not very good" job.

Therefore, some PhD students actually do not think too hard about their teaching, and just reuse exercises that were given last year, so they can do other things (research). Not all PhD students do this, mind you, but it is clearly a good strategy if you want to get hired.

You can use the same argument you just made to say: "The students are overloaded (they are), therefore we should be okay with them doing a sloppy job when teaching." But is it something that you can actually agree with? In my opinion, we should come back from the other way: The teaching has to be good, so we have to give the students enough time to prepare and not overload them, so they do a good job at whatever we assign to them.

And this argument translates to the professors' case as well, at least for me. The hiring process has to be fair, and the research has to be free, so we should give enough incentive to the professors on the scientific board to spend enough time so they do a thorough job. Or maybe invent new ways of ranking, so that we do not depend on the closed-access journals of old. Either way, we should not give up open-access research just for this triviality.

[ac]

> As a PhD student [..]. The hiring process we mentioned completely ignores teaching skills [...]

As a PhD student myself, I have observed the hiring process at my department many times. Here teaching experience counts, and teaching skills are evaluated: the candidate has to give a talk, which is used to evaluate how well the person can teach. I'm pretty sure it's the same in other universities.

Also, if you're interviewing for a teaching professor position, then you have to give a mock lecture with actual students in attendance.

I sympathize with your ideals about how things should be, but at some point one needs to accept the reality. There's no way to magically find time in professors' time for a review of papers "out of the left field". There aren't any incentives for that, and I don't imagine any universities investing extra money into that. I mean, most professors aren't formally paid for administrative tasks, unless they hold some kind of official title (Department Director, Dean etc.). What they're paid for is research and teaching.

One relatively easy way to fix that would be to publish reviews along with the papers. While you and I would both agree that many reviews are rubbish, many others still are quite insightful and can serve a more expressive indicator of quality than journal/conference ranking and citation count.

[tdaltonc]

> a comment on HN should not be the right place to design a really fair publication metric.

Where is? Because I'm interested in this question ad really disappointed in everything I've read.

[tokai]

Try these

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology; ISSN: 2330-1643.

Scientometrics; ISSN: 0138-9130.

Journal of Informetrics; ISSN: 1751-1577.

[bo1024]

Harvard has an open-access policy[1] and it may be that other institutions do as well. When submitting to a journal with a copyright agreement, authors attach a modification to the agreement, giving the university rights to distribute the research for non-commercial purposes. I do not know how universally-used this is across the institution or if there are journals refusing to accept this modification or not.

[1] https://osc.hul.harvard.edu/

[jsprogrammer]

>What I would really like to see is a big institution / university take a stand and build something like Scihub to provide free and unlimited access to all of their own papers, even those that are stuck behind a paywall for "historic" reasons.

The University of California has already done this.*

Unfortunately their policy does not extend to papers created before their policy was enacted, despite what they had originally claimed.*

* http://escholarship.org/ * http://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/10/groundbreaking...

[tomjen3]

Honestly given that sci hub exist and is so simple to use, why not just have the universitites promote the shit out of it?

[mhurron]

> civil disobedience is more effective at changing the status quo than e-mail campaigns

Email campaigns and signing petitions is much easier to do as people don't need to get up off their assess but still get to feel like they've helped.

[nxzero]

"Feeling" like you've helped more often then not does more harm than good unless it leads to action; signing petition unless there's an expressed count required for action that's enforceable is often meaningless.

[amelius]

This sounds a lot like the civil disobedience of Google when they started Google Books.

[coliveira]

When a corporation does it, it's not called civil disobedience. It is called corporate theft.