[drallison]

Matt Blaze is right on point, as usual; in fact, he probably does not go far enough in his critique of scientific publishing. Commercial publishers from Nature to those on the long tail are as bad or worse. The "in your face" commercial paywall in front of most technical journals is a frequent user experience here on Hacker News. And counterproductive to doing good science and engineering.

If the free exchange of information promotes the growth of human knowledge, then free it ought to be. The ACM an IEEE digital libraries have improved and simplified research in many ways. The fact that they are behind a paywall and available only to members (and some institutions) is a negative.

Many alternative venues for publication are appearing, for example, Arxiv, http://arxiv.org/. Google's Knol service is also a reasonable place for articles about new work. But they do not have the cachet of a peer-reviewed archival journal.

ACM and IEEE are membership organizations. Perhaps we need a grass roots effort to change the copyright policy to, say, one of the creative commons licenses and open the digital libraries and electronic journals to all comers.

On the other hand, a well run, professionally edited journal costs money to produce. In a world where content is free, how should we monetize publications so that the staff gets paid?

[MichaelSalib]

On the other hand, a well run, professionally edited journal costs money to produce.

Does it cost more money to produce than Wikipedia?

As I understand it, editors generally work for free. Reviewers generally work for free. Authors either work for free or pay for the privilege of publishing. Heck, authors generally supply their work already typeset. So what exactly is the cost here? I mean, I'm sure that IEEE/ACM have a staff that is used to getting paid, but what value are they adding if all the skilled labor is done for free by the community and all the technical wrangling is done by authors themselves?

[drallison]

There are different kinds of journals and so the costs and benefits can differ widely. Academic archival journals typically have volunteer editors whose salary is paid for by their employer rather than the publisher (usually a non-profit society such as ACM). These editors manage the peer-review and acceptance process. Once the papers have been accepted, they go into production and, depending upon the journal and its goals, they may be subject to simple editing for mark-up and obvious spelling/grammatical errors or they may be carefully edited to improve presentation, style, and content. Professional editing greatly enhances the quality and readability of every author's work. This is the traditional publications model used by professional societies. I have no idea what the relative costs are relative to a Wikipedia-style journal with a totally volunteer staff. What I do know is that the amount of human effort that goes into such a quality journal is significant and that no matter what the infrastructure is, someone has to put in that time, and their efforts should be compensated in some fashion.

[MichaelSalib]

I think it helps to distinguish different types of costs. If we're talking about general technical writing editing or assistance getting something latex-ified, that seems like the kind of thing that can be readily pushed back onto authors themselves. For example, the volunteer editor could easily tell an author: "the reviewers loved your work, but you need a technical editor to make this acceptable for publication: hire one, get it fixed up, and submit it in 2 weeks if you want it published". The same thing could be done for Latex help.

From an author's perspective, paying for a tech writer to help them edit would only need to be done if they're actually bad at writing, in which case it seems perfectly fair to have them spend a few hundred dollars paying a local editor to help get their work publishable. The net financial benefit to having another published paper on their CV is certainly worth far more than whatever a good tech writer would charge.

[rick_2047]

I think what you are suggesting here is already being done. I don't have much experience but from what I hear you are required to submit a "Camera Ready" copy of your submission after you have been excepted. That would mean a well formatted and edited work.

[chalst]

It's common to ask authors to have their articles edited at their own expense.

[bedris]

In addition, professionally edited journals frequently have feature/news stories and research highlights, which require staff to select relevant topics and to write and edit the articles. Also, journals can have advertisements for products or for open academic and faculty positions, which require curation and communication with the entities posting the products for sale or jobs for hire. These things require money in the form of paying staff.

[caf]

Well, if those feature/news stories and research highlight articles can't economically stand on their own, then perhaps they're not a good use of resources and shouldn't be produced?

And if the advertisements aren't bringing in at least enough revenue to cover their own costs, then they shouldn't be included either.

[neutronicus]

Authors either work for free or pay for the privilege of publishing.

I don't know where you get this. IEEE/ACM may not be paying them, but they are sure as hell getting paid to write the papers that go in those journals.

Does it cost more money to produce than Wikipedia?

The difference being that there are only 4 or 5 people in the world capable of producing or verifying the articles that appear in scientific journal.

[MichaelSalib]

I don't know where you get this.

From publishing an article in an IEEE journal? I mean, I did DARPA funded work in grad school and got it published in a journal. I understand very well that authors are generally paid. My point remains: they are not paid BY THE JOURNAL. From the journal's perspective, authors do not cost them anything.

The difference being that there are only 4 or 5 people in the world capable of producing or verifying the articles that appear in scientific journal.

And academic journals generally don't pay them a damn thing.

[streptomycin]

It's expensive to run a journal. PLoS isn't evil, but they still spend millions of dollars every year http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v441/n7096/full/441914a...

[chalst]

Other scholarly societies have very small overheads.

[pbiggar]

> I don't know where you get this. IEEE/ACM may not be paying them, but they are sure as hell getting paid to write the papers that go in those journals.

I'd like to know where you get this. ACM is paying nobody for writing papers. (I've published in ACM journals and conferences, btw).

[Anechoic]

On the other hand, a well run, professionally edited journal costs money to produce

But how much? I'm not familiar with ACM/IEEE but looking at the journals and standards bodies that I do contribute to, I know that they don't pay authors for contributions (in some cases the authors have to pay the journals) and they don't pay editors or reviewers. As far as I can tell, they only thing they pay for is administrators and the materials to publish hard copies.

If it were a case where the content producers were getting paid for their labor, I'd have a much easier time justifying the cost for papers and standards, but paying $50-$200 per PDF is a bit ridiculous.

[oiuyhtgyhuj]

The reason is that live on institution subscriptions. If they switched to an iTunes $5/paper download then there would be less pressure on university libraries to pay $1000s/year for a subscription (the library pays a lot more than members for a journal)

It's like the cable companies, they want your $100/month irrespective of whats showing - they don't want you to pay $1/show for what you actually want to watch.

[drallison]

Even a $5/paper fee is too costly. On an average day I probably read 5 papers and browse another 5 papers. That means my research habit would cost $17,250. And that is too expensive for just casual reading.

[chalst]

I wouldn't trust Apple to maintain an archive of peer-reviewed science for the next 100 years, which is what librarians aim to do. Institutional subscriptions are part of this picture: libraries receive all the publications of the journals they subscribe to and archive them.

[te_chris]

You should be upvoted more. These organisations exist to extract millions of dollars of subscription fees out of University Libraries each year.

[michael_dorfman]

Commercial publishers from Nature to those on the long tail are as bad or worse.

I think this point needs repeating. Let's remember that Knuth took the Journal of Algorithms from Elsevier to the ACM (where it was reborn as TALG) for this very reason. (Cf http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf)

The ACM, to its credit, has avoided the extortionate fees charged by many of the commercial scientific journals.

[modeless]

Physical Review Letters recently adopted a system where authors can pay a fee to have their submissions published under a Creative Commons license. The fee replaces journal subscription/paywall revenue.

http://prl.aps.org/edannounce/CC-launch-press-release

[bbb]

Oh, sure, Springer will also let you publish "open access" articles. However, the publishing fee goes up from a few hundred dollars to a couple of thousand. Now find me a prof that will actually sacrifice his precious grant dollars for that.

[mechanical_fish]

how should we monetize publications so that the staff gets paid?

That's a toughie in general, but for scientific publications the model is obvious: They get paid with government money, the same money that pays for most of them now (and that also pays for most of the scientists and the studies).

But, of course, right now there are lots of middlemen: The government gives grants to researchers, who pass on a substantial fraction of said grants to their institutions, who fund institutional libraries, who buy subscriptions from the journal publishers, who pay the editors.

We could cut out some or all of those intermediaries, but the for-profit journal publishers -- as the first on the list to be disintermediated -- are not going quietly.

[jdp23]

> ACM and IEEE are membership organizations. Perhaps we need a grass roots effort to change the copyright policy to, say, one of the creative commons licenses and open the digital libraries and electronic journals to all comers.

Sounds like a great idea, especially in conjunction with the boycott/strike Matt's proposing.

[oiuyhtgyhuj]

No problem with Nature's paywall they are a business. I do have a problem with no longer owning the copyright to a paper I wrote and gave to them for free - or even paid page charges to some journals

So I put a sample of code in a paper to explain an algorithm and I can no longer use that code, or include it in a GPLed work?

In fact between my university's policy that it owns anything I do that can be commercially exploited, the journal claiming it owns everything and I can't post it online and the various different international laws on software patents and publishing code that has anything to do with crypto/security - in theory I would spend a year talking to lawyers before publishing each paper.

[drallison]

Just because the journal Nature is run as a business does not mean that charging for access to published material promotes scientific progress. If the growth of scientific knowledge is of primary importance and depends upon the wide dissemination of knowledge, charging for access is socially irresponsible.

It could be that the conflict here is with our rather strange notion of intellectual property and a free market economy. Robert Laughlin's The Crime of Reason: And the Closing of the Scientific Mind makes the case that the two are antithetical. A free market requires that something be secret and not generally available to create an artificial shortage and pump the price.

Perhaps we need to rethink what constitutes intellectual property. What sort of an intellectual property policy would you propose to your university? Who should own ideas? Or should they be held in common? Will Mickey Mouse ever slip into the public domain?

[eegilbert]

Nature, however, provides a very unique academic service: they can give you a "no" within two weeks. This is light-speed in academic publishing. Most ACM conferences take 4 months to return an answer. Journals in other fields can take years.

[oiuyhtgyhuj]

I don't think Nature charging holds back progress - so long as I am also free(speech) to make the work available for free(beer).

Nature is paid to do two jobs.

1, Provide a copy of the paper on paper to sit in a library for 100s of years.

2, Certify that a paper has at least been written by somebody vaguely reputable and has been peer reviewed

Originally the first job was the main role, now with the internet the second is far more important. I am happy for my institution to pay for a paper copy of Nature in order that there is a universally recognised 'I am not a crank' stamp to put on my work. Think of it as an SSL-cert for my pages.

Yes I would like there to be a free open online web-of-trust for peer reviewed papers - but for now I have no objection to Nature doing that.

And I would much rather have a commercial publisher do it than have it mixed in with a professional body like IEEE/ACM/IOP who have a whole other set of agendas.

[Lost_BiomedE]

If that was true, I wonder if discreetly publishing the code online first, then submitting the paper would work.