[hollerith]

The universities aren't the ones collecting the money. In fact, they the main targets of the extortion.

Most professors care mostly about prestige (reputation for being smart, wise or innovative) and would prefer to ignore or disdain the economic and legal aspects of life. OK, that is a little unfair: most profs want to focus on their specialty and sometimes don't pay enough attention to how their actions interact with the law and the economy to affect university libraries far away.

Academic publishers, e.g., Elsevier, give professors prestige in exchange for the professors' assigning copyright (legal ownership) of the professor's writings to the publishers with the result that a university library (which is typically far away from the publishing professor's own university) must pay the publishers to give its students and faculty access the academic literature without constantly running into the paywalls that people who are not students or faculty run into.

[setr]

I think prestige is a very unfair characterization. It’s my belief that most people just want their research to be seen and engaged with by their peers (it is, of course, the fundamental purpose of producing a paper). Universities however want prestige, and enforce the policy “publish or perish”.

The problem is still as you say — the only way to do so reliably is to give up your ownership to a prestigious journal (because prestigious journals are widely read by the relevant folk).

Ultimately the fix is up to the top universities. If Stanford suddenly says all CS papers are now being published on SciHub first (or through some new filter), who’s going to argue? Every CS researcher will immediately add it to their reading list... because they want the good shit

[impendia]

I am an academic researcher (math). Unfortunately, prestige hits the mark.

Whenever I am being compared with my peers -- for raises, for possible grant funding, if I apply for a job at another university -- people will look at publication lists and see who has published in "good" journals.

And when you say that "prestigious journals are widely read" -- honestly, journals aren't really ever read as such. Researchers will look for individual papers they're interested in. The choice of journal is a signaling mechanism and little else.

It is true that universities want prestige... but, honestly, tenured faculty don't often care too much about what their employers want. What a panel at a granting agency thinks of my record, is more important than what my department chair and dean think.

Your idea that e.g. Stanford should order their faculty to publish on SciHub is an interesting one. For better or worse, university administrators don't tend to have or exercise much authority, and any attempt to order faculty to do anything is likely to be met with fierce resistance.

[rland]

I wonder if this could be solved by a sort of collective contract:

A university (and its faculty) sign a contract to publish only in open-access journals. But the contract doesn't actually go into effect until it has signatories of n% of top universities (ivies, UCs, etc).

Therefore, the awful transition (of an individual university being disadvantaged) can be alleviated. Once the contract goes into effect, the pressure is directed towards the other party: those who don't publish open access will need to justify it.

[Vinnl]

> Ultimately the fix is up to the top universities. If Stanford suddenly says all CS papers are now being published on SciHub first (or through some new filter), who’s going to argue?

Unfortunately, if they have staff that also intend to, or should prepare for, working somewhere else after Stanford (which is very common in an academic career), then those are likely to revolt.

You could see this happen with the introduction of "Plan S" in many European countries, where researchers were afraid that "top" journals were no longer accessible to them and that that would hurt their standing in the field and future opportunities in, primarily, the US.

[BeetleB]

> It’s my belief that most people just want their research to be seen and engaged with by their peers (it is, of course, the fundamental purpose of producing a paper). Universities however want prestige, and enforce the policy “publish or perish”.

The two are one and the same. What you call "Universities" is simply "professors at the universities". Department policies for tenure are set by a bunch of professors. The dean of the college is always a professor. There's no "us" vs "them".

[setr]

Sure there is. Developers have very different goals and responsibilities than their managers (regardless of whether they were once developers themselves).

The dean serves a different master than the researching/teaching professor. It would be absurd to assume their incentives and goals are always the same, or even aligned.

[BeetleB]

The difference is that managers ultimately have to answer to a different type of crowd (consumers, shareholders, whatever). External pressures play a role. At universities, it is professors all the way. The people who are on NSF grant committees are professors. Journal editors are research professors.

There is no external pressure on these people. NSF grantors don't value Nature publications because they have to answer to the public. They value it because they value it.

If a professor becomes a dean or head of NSF, and they decide to make changes to what is considered prestigious, the only opposition they'll get is from their peers.

[hollerith]

I agree that it was harsh for me to focus on the desire for prestige. It would've been kinder of me to focus on the need for the professor or apprentice professor to remain employed and, like you say, to have a positive influence on the community of professors.

[danaris]

I can't speak for "most" professors, since I haven't done any kind of scientific survey. However, I work in academia, and every professor I personally know hates Elsevier, and wants to get away from them in any reasonable way.

But when the journals that literally define their field are monopolized by Elsevier, there's only so much they can do for the time being. To avoid them, they'd have to accept their research being ignored, their careers stagnating, and their ability to continue to do their jobs properly being threatened.

[kevin_thibedeau]

SciHub is missing an opportunity by not providing a platform for researchers to self organize and run the peer review process directly on SciHub (or a new sister domain safe from interference). That would give them immediate legitimacy.

[ravel-bar-foo]

Couple funny stories about Elsevier. I published with them, and created an account. They started sending me spam advertising new journals. So I logged in and unsubscribed from all their mailing lists. Reliably, exactly one year after unsubscribing I get spam from them. When I go to unsubscribe I find a new category of mailing list, opted in automatically.

One might call it a mistake, but is remarkably suspicious that the spam regularly arrives exactly one year (to the day) after I most recently unsubscribed.

There are the financial aspects to their exploitation, but I guess this struck a nerve because it is scummy behavior that affects me more personally.

[randomswede]

As a possible hypothesis test, next time, could you leave the new opt-in in place for a month before unsubscribing?

If that reliably then has a new list added exactly one year later, it is a strong signal that it indeed based on you unsubscribing. But, if it instead happens at 11 months, it is a string signal that new lists are added at a specific month/day.

I mean, I would not be surprised if it happens one year later, due to Elsevier tracking when you unsubscribed, but this is a testable hypothesis, so testing it would be a Good Thing.

[xhkkffbf]

I think it's extraordinarily unfair to think of this as extortion. The professors have always been free to publish wherever they like and they each chose the copyrighted journals. Do we say that a fancy hotel "extorted" the fees from the guests who chose to book a room?

Some young researchers often claim that they feel pressured by the system to choose the so-called prestige journals. This pressure is coming from older researchers who are making a decision from their experience. They don't need to reward journal writers but they do. Indeed, the open access professors could announce that they will penalize the tenure reviews for those who publish in copyrighted journals. But they don't, and I think it's because they realize that, for all of the costs, the copyrighted journals do a good job curating the information.

[betterunix2]

The copyrighted journals do a terrible job curating articles, something which has been demonstrated repeatedly by people who managed to get utter nonsense through the peer-review process. I have seen Springer editors introduce spelling, grammar, and factual errors into published papers. Never in my career have I seen an academic publisher add any positive value to any part of the research process or community -- at best all they do is put their own worthless name on a journal, and at worst they have negative value.

University administrators, grant-writing bodies, and others pressure professors and graduate students to publish with specific publishers. It is not because those publishers are more trustworthy; it is simply inertia, institutional tradition, and credentialism. It is the same attitude that leads some companies to turn away candidates who never completed a bachelor's degree. To give an example of just how bad this situation is, we sometimes hear complaints about people citing the IACR eprint version of a paper rather than the "officially published" version -- not because they are any different, nor because there is something better about the official version (in fact the eprint version typically includes details that are absent from the official copy), but simply because European universities use citation counts to judge professors and only consider citations of articles published by specific publishing companies.

Academic publishers have raised their fees even as their costs have greatly declined. The number of journals that are actually printed and distributed on paper has been shrinking, and the cost of distributing over the Internet is almost a rounding error. Yet in that same period of time the publishers have increased subscription fees to the point where some university systems could not justify paying for the subscription. These companies have outlived their usefulness and they know it -- now they are trying to extract as much money as they can before the business model completely fails.

[hollerith]

I agree that it is unfair to call it extortion. I'll try to be more careful in the future.

>But they don't, and I think it's because they realize that . . .

They don't realize any such thing: they're just doing what benefits them personally (e.g., surviving as a professor or apprentice professor) at the expense of the broader ecosystem.

It is a problem of coordination: if the professors, students and the governments and foundations that fund research acted in unison (and were sufficiently informed and clear-thinking), then the entire academic literature would probably be available without restriction (like, e.g., Wikipedia is) on the internet by now.

Such an arrangement would satisfy the values of the professor, students, etc, better than the current system does. But it is hard to get there because it is hard for 10s of 1000s to act in unison.

[Vinnl]

If I give you the choice between a bullet through the head or a slap in the face, it'd be ridiculous for me to claim that you were free not to choose the slap in the face.

Sure, it's not the publishers themselves that are de facto forcing researchers to publish with them, but they do make use of the fact that they're being put in a position of being a rent-seeker, and they lobby a lot to keep it that way.

Of course, the question is not "who's to blame?", but "how to change this"? And indeed, the publishers aren't too relevant to that question - it's the incentive structures that should change.

(Disclosure: I contribute to https://plaudit.pub, which aims to change these incentive structures.)