[Calloutman]

I have a PhD in physics. I have zero problem with anyone downloading any of my papers from scihub. My publishers paid me nothing, and also paid the academics who peer reviewed my paper nothing. If I had stayed in academia (I didn't partially because of the toxic nature of publishing) I would also have been expected to peer review other journals for free. Information should be free access information general, but publishers are the least deserving key holders.

[matheusmoreira]

> My publishers paid me nothing, and also paid the academics who peer reviewed my paper nothing.

Why are these intermediaries still around? Peer review is the real value provided by a scientitic journal and the people who do that have no reason to be loyal to these companies since they don't get paid.

[dariosalvi78]

reputation. There are hundreds of publishers, but it takes time to build reputation. Unfortunately it's a chicken and egg problem, very hard to tackle, but some new publishers are slowly emerging. (Classic) scientific publishing is a giant monstrous stinking dinosaur. Everybody hates it and SciHub is doing its fair job of accelerating its death.

[contravariant]

At this point their main purpose is providing artificial scarcity, in the hopes that this increases the quality of the papers that do get published.

[DrAwdeOccarim]

It's a great question. Inertia/legacy is a big part. But you're seeing new journals pop up with heavy weight support (eLife, PLoS, etc.) that are getting cited more and becoming higher impact. You also now have pre-prints like Arxive and bioarxive. I guess the point is peer-review, modern science moves slow because it takes time to disrupt the trust people put in a Nature, Science, Cell, etc publication. Once higher impact papers start going to other journals, the pre-tenure profs will feel comfortable to follow.

[einpoklum]

> Why are these intermediaries still around?

Because publishing a decent journal - even online but certainly in the real world - involves a whole lot of work: Administrative, some technical, some networking, some advertizing, maintaining relations within the relevant fields etc. That's all when we ignore the peer review itself which requires domain expertise.

[TeMPOraL]

> Administrative, some technical, some networking, some advertizing, maintaining relations within the relevant fields etc.

Taking into account that they don't really do peer-review and don't pay for it either, and that their editing is close to nonexistent (and as likely to introduce errors as to improve anything), all the other costs seem to be a self-perpetuating loop - the work is being done just to support itself, with no actual surplus value being produced. It's a resource leak, a circular reference in the economy.

[afiori]

My understanding is that the real job of a publisher in academia is brand recognition.

[einpoklum]

That's part of it, sure.

It's not meaningless, either. If you have a hundred venues for publication - what should you choose to follow? What should a library subscribe to? What do you recommend to students? etc.

[einpoklum]

I have never been involved in running an academic journal. But I have been involved in a group which published a periodical. And from my experience I can tell you that you're dead wrong. Without all that work, there is no journal, no publication, no readership, and limited interest and exposure of people to the content.

[specialp]

This isn't really true. I work for a non profit scholarly society publisher, and we pay millions of dollars a year for copy-editing/formatting and also the work to find referees that do not have conflicts of interest/are not busy/actually respond and are qualified to assess the paper is indeed costly. If it were zero or negative sum there'd be loads of open platforms out there for peer-review and publishing.

I am also a big fan of open-access and hate paywalls myself. I also don't like big, for profit, predatory journals. There is value in curated and managed journals. Just not the value that these big corporations are reaping from them.

[adamsea]

Some probably do those things some of the time.

The others require the appearance of having done so.

[dna_polymerase]

Personally I don’t see the quid pro quo nature of peer review (you review in return for your stuff being reviewed) as a problem. But I dislike the fact that the publishers limit access to something that others provided without compensation. Seriously their subscription models are outrageous, nothing they provide alongside the actual content makes it worth it.

[Calloutman]

You're still providing a valuable service for free. Why can't everyone get paid?

[mschuster91]

Reviewers are getting paid from the university, as are the paper authors. The problem is that the journals exploit the taxpayers and grant providers.

[chdlr]

I would disagree for the first part: Review usually does not happen during paid hours or is even somehow formally accredited by universities.

[markus92]

At my university, reviewing is explicitly mentioned to be on your own time: we cannot write any hours for it.

[pastage]

That honestly seems like a bigger problem, if researchers are not paid for reviewing who will do it?

[prepend]

My experience is that reviewers do this as part of their duties and takes place during work hours.

[nelgaard]

Universities pay you for teaching and researching. Reviewing is part of the researching.

[jbay808]

Not all reviewers even work for universities. Some of us are in industry, and our companies certainly don't pay us to anonymously review scientific papers.

[azangru]

> I have a PhD in physics. I have zero problem with anyone downloading any of my papers from scihub.

Out of curiosity: why don't you just host your papers on your website then - or, if you do, why don't you think it's enough?

[martin_vejmelka]

> why don't you just host your papers on your website then - or, if you do, why don't you think it's enough?

Most publishers prevented you from doing this as of a few years ago (I left academic research around that time). You were not allowed to post any content that contains any work by the publisher (even formatting/editing changes after first round of reviews). Thus you could only publish a "preprint" which no-one can rely on to cite because they don't know what's in the final peer-reviewed version. Some publishers are more lenient than others but there's definitely friction induced.

[improbable22]

The norm at least in parts of physics is to update the arxiv version once the paper is accepted, with a note saying "v3: matches version to appear in XXX", with a DOI link. Where "matches" means the content, but not the journal's formatting, spelling & comma preferences, etc.

(And ideally this note would also mention any substantial changes, like "new section 4 explaining..." or "derivation in 3.2 re-written, but no change to conclusions", for the benefit of those who already read v2.)

[neffy]

I do the same (over in comp sci.) - usually the journals will let you put pre-print articles up on arxiv, researchgate, and web pages, and then the final article - sometimes with added spelling mistakes - many of the journals have off shored the editorial process - is on their site.

[frenchyatwork]

I'm curious what would happen if a new paper tried to reference previous papers published in ArXiv instead of the traditional publishers. From a strictly academic perspective, I can't think of any reason why this would be a problem, apart from the existential problem it causes for traditional publishers.

[improbable22]

Citing papers which aren't yet published by their arxiv numbers is routine. (And, before 1991, people did the same using the author's institute's preprint numbers.) If they have appeared in a journal by the time yours is accepted by a journal, then you should add the journal info too. (Although many journals now allow you to leave the arxiv numbers as an additional part of each reference.)

[jhrmnn]

I (not OP) do, https://jan.hermann.name/publications/ (note the copyright notices, required by the journals, which pop up when you hover of the pdf link [didn't figure out a good alternative on mobile]). In rare cases, the journals don't allow this at all, in some cases they allow you to self-publish only the submitted manuscript, before any modifications based on peer review.

As for why it's not enough—because hiring committees and funding agencies almost never take unpublished (that is, in a proper journal) manuscripts into account when evaluating you and your funding proposals. This is what needs to change in the first place to break the loop.

[lrem]

Many (most?) do, that's where Google Scholar took its PDFs from pre-scihub.

[lorenzhs]

Google Scholar still gets its PDFs from preprint servers and author's websites. I suppose you meant to say that Google Scholar's web indexing is how many people got their PDFs pre-scihub?

[lrem]

Yes, you managed to unmangle my pre-coffee reply attempt correctly :)

[gewa]

Im not sure if it's legally flawless to upload the published journal article to your Website and open it up to the public. As far as i know, you're only allowed to pass it on a personal, per-request basis. This explicitly refers to the final peer reviewed article and not to the manuscript, which can make a great difference.

[prepend]

It’s granted individually on a personal, per http request.

[Thrymr]

Many publishers explicitly allow you to post your own articles on your personal/professional website. Some only allow "preprint" form and not the published version.

[semi-extrinsic]

Most journals explicitly allow preprints or postprints (the final article, but without the layout of the publisher) to be posted on personal webpages.

[vasili111]

>If I had stayed in academia (I didn't partially because of the toxic nature of publishing)

Which country are you from? Where are you now, in industry? Is there less toxic environment than in academia?

[refurb]

Are you planning to publish all of your own papers in open access journals? That would be putting your money where your mouth is.

I’ve seen plenty of researchers say “information should be free” and then later publish everything in closed journals because the open access ones have low impact factor.

Seems hypocritical to me.

[SeanAppleby]

When you say "low impact factor", you're referring to a combination of lack of prestige and lack of readership that leads to few citations and subsequently little influence on the field, right?

If so, why is the prestigious curation of the journal that leads academics to reading your paper and taking it seriously inextricably tied to whether or not it's behind a paywall at all?

What's stopping someone from building an alternative curation pipeline on top of open access journals that gives academics equal or better signal/noise to the journals they read, and a similar socially accepted prestige for getting into that curation pipeline?

I get that there's not a clear path to monetization, but maybe it's possible, particularly if you could execute more targeted curation for academic subfields that are too small to have their own journals, that you could find some donors and lean on academics supporting the curation process themselves out of their seeming discontent with publishing to drive down costs.

[refurb]

Yes, many (but not all) of the top journals are closed.

A lot of scientists talk big when it comes to open access, but when it comes time for them to publish their own work, they published in closed journals since they have a bigger impact factor.

They basically put their own careers ahead of their belief in supporting open access.

[qpiox]

The publishers want to have some financial income from your papers. So if you want a paper to be openly accessible, so preventing them from a future income from that paper, as an author you will have to pay their potential incomes, and this can cost up to 3000$ per publication.

That is a substantial sum even for professors from wealthy countries.

[Calloutman]

I understand that completely. Feeling good about yourself for sticking it to the man doesn't support a family.