[j-pb]

I hope that there will never be a "legal-streaming" equivalent.

These papers have been paid for already, through the salary of the people that wrote and peer reviewed them.

There is a theft happening, but it's not the way commonly portrayed.

It's the publishers stealing from the scientific community, universities and tax payers, and the politicians and bureaucrats are complicit.

The only reason why people publish with these journals is so that they can get funding for their projects, because the people in charge of distributing these funds are using "most prestigious papers" as the only metric and often have a revolving door relationship with publishers.

The university library of my alma mater used to pay 15 Million Euros a year for online licenses. That is three large multi-institutional EU projects worth of money, equivalent to 200 PhD student positions.

We need to build a better research system, that cuts out the leaches, and distributes money to researchers more fairly. And as a bonus we'd also get rid of the paper mills.

[indigochill]

I'm of a separatist mindset in situations like these where the entire ecosystem has turned corrupt. It can't be legislated because legislators are part of the problem as you say.

So you need an independent organization that can fund and provide the resources needed by researchers, and which disregards publication in the corrupt publications. You also need a publication that can support free access.

Something like a hackerspace on steroids, perhaps.

In theory, if you can get enough momentum behind this sort of project, then libraries can turn that license money towards this project and accelerate the research that can be done, where rather than padding publisher's pockets the fees are going directly towards supporting research.

[08-15]

> It's the publishers stealing from the scientific community, universities and tax payers, and the politicians and bureaucrats are complicit.

Not really. The publishers provide hardly any value, definitely not commensurate with their prices. So why don't the scientists simply walk away? Why not publish on the internet, why not simply upload to arxiv.org?

It's because funding through quasi government agencies (NSF, NIH, etc.) is tied to your publication record, which is evaluated in "impact points", and those are actually tied not to your own publications, but to the journals they appear in. So your funding as a scientist depends on you publishing in these expensive journals.

It's actually the politicians and bureaucrats stealing from the tax payers, funneling the money to the publishers, all the while claiming they are funding science.

As a scientist, you have little leverage in this fouled up system, but it is your civic duty to use it: Please refuse to review papers for commercial journals without appropriate payment. You owe it to your fellow scientists to not subsidize predatory business models.

[ineedasername]

The publishers provide hardly any value

Here's an insider's view from having worked the tech side at a small scientific publisher. Prices are too high and the model is flawed [-1] but your opinion is not accurate, the publisher did a tremendous amount of work:

First a distinction, two types of editors: The publisher's editors, each of which handled a batch of journals. The journal editor, who did not actually work for the publisher. The publisher's editors were well educated in the fields they covered, though usually not specialists or researchers in their own right. The journal editors were typically researchers themselves, and being the editor of the journal was not their primary work.

-The publisher's editors organized individual journal editors, helping to find new ones when one left, keeping them on deadline, etc.

-The publisher's editors processed submissions to the journal working with criteria set by the journal editor to perform an initial review for off-topic, low quality, or otherwise flawed submissions.

-The publisher's editors coordinated an enormous network of peer reviewers and the logistics of getting them assigned to submissions and also staying on top of them for deadlines in submitting reviews & feedback.

Other publishing staff:

-performed proof reading & copy editing

-did the layout & type setting

-They used professional color matching labs for all color images, which itself was $100/image (tech for this has probably changed and made it cheaper) [0]

-They managed every aspect of the actual printing of the journal, dealing with printers, reviewing proofs, coordinating a final round of review by the journal editor and authors.

-warehousing copies for expected distribution over the life of the journal, re-prints when something was more popular than expected, and all order fulfillments to individuals & libraries. [1]

-They handled all of the financial logistics, from collecting subscription fees to paying the journal editor and handling royalty fees for decades after a journal was printed & back copies were purchased.

This setup might seem strange, but consider that for the journal itself, the journal editor is often a researcher themselves with very little interest in the mechanics of putting together a publication. They handle reviewing which articles that published and coordinate on the peer review process, and a bit more, but the lion's share of the work of actually turning raw, non-peer reviewed submissions into a printable journal was either coordinated by or directly done by the publisher. All of this cost a lot of money. (Incidentally, the publisher I worked for was ultimately purchased by Elsevier a while after I left, but then Elsevier had to take over all of this.) [2]

[-1] My own opinion is that research funded by the public in some way should have part of the grant dedicated to publication costs. This would keep subscription costs to a minimum and also ensure that not just positive results were published.

[0] Of course this would only apply to printed journals. If you were viewing them online you had to deal with whatever combination of monitor idiosyncrasies and color profiles available, and the difference could be large. It was obvious why they went through the trouble of paying for color matching on print versions.

[1] This was before print on demand was much of a thing. These days it's probably easier to manage

[2] This isn't always how it works. It was where I worked, but for a large publisher like Elsevier there are different models. It's definitely how it works for journals owned by Elsevier. More independent journals may do more of the work themselves, but they may also contract Elsevier to do it. Elsevier may simply license the rights to distribute a journals. But someone has to do the work outlined above.

[mcguire]

And all for the low, low price of $660/issue. (https://ordering.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/Lite/Subs.aspx?doi=...)

"This isn't always how it works."

In my experience, "Other publishing staff: performed proof reading & copy editing, did the layout & type setting" was not done by the publisher.

[ineedasername]

Whether it was done by the publisher or someone else, the work has to be done. If not by the publisher, then it's reflected in a lower share of the sub fees for the publisher.

But my point wasn't to say the high sub fees are okay, it was to rebut the idea that publishers add no value, when that is often (though not always) incorrect.

IIRC, the small publisher I worked for had net profits of about 10% on $5 million in revenue. Not unreasonable for handling pretty much every aspect of the process apart from final decisions on article inclusion and a few other high level details.

Even when I worked at the small company though, we hated Elsevier. Elsevier are little better than extortionists saying "nice library collection you have there. Shame is something happened to it. How about you pay us double this year?"

[NotSwift]

In the traditional model, journal editors and the referees do most of the work, for which they are usually not paid.

> The publisher's editors organized individual journal editors, helping to find new ones when one left, keeping them on deadline, etc.

Most journals have an editorial board and they are generally much better in finding new journal editors because of their contacts in the field.

Keeping deadlines is only important when you are printing separate issues. When you have a journal that consists of an electronic stream of articles, deadlines are not a serious issue.

> The publisher's editors processed submissions to the journal working with criteria set by the journal editor to perform an initial review for off-topic, low quality, or otherwise flawed submissions.

This can also been done by the journal editors. AFAIK all rejections I have ever seen were done by journal editors.

> Other publishing staff:

>-performed proof reading & copy editing

>-did the layout & type setting

>-They used professional color matching labs for all color images, which itself was $100/image (tech for this has probably changed and made it cheaper) [0]

>-They managed every aspect of the actual printing of the journal, dealing with printers, reviewing proofs, coordinating a final round of review by the journal editor and authors.

>-warehousing copies for expected distribution over the life of the journal, re-prints when something was more popular than expected, and all order fulfillments to individuals & libraries. [1]

>-They handled all of the financial logistics, from collecting subscription fees to paying the journal editor and handling royalty fees for decades after a journal was printed & back copies were purchased.

Most of these tasks are no longer needed when the journal changes to free electronic publications. Fortunately, that seems to be increasingly popular.

[08-15]

Clearly, publishers do a lot of work. But what is the value they provide?

[ineedasername]

I'm not sure I understand the question: is there not value in managing every single logistic detail of a complex process?

[08-15]

Only if that complex process provides any value.

So what is the value of a paper journal over a website? That the pictures look better?

I love how you compare a scientific journal to a cinema. It really brings your point home. But you're wrong: Science isn't entertainment. (I have experienced both NPG and AAAS treat it as if it was, though.)

[wolverine876]

One way to look at the question: What marginal value do they provide over arXiv or Sci-hub?

[ineedasername]

Sci-Hub and arXiv are merely distributors. Like a movie theatre for a movie. Elsevier is like the movie studio that actually produces the movie after authors write it. The question of marginal value is missing that point. It's looking at the fact that, under this analogy, Elsevier is the movie theatre and is blind to the fact that it is also the movie studio.

One way or another the work has to get done. Shifting it from one pile or person to another doesn't change that. You can live without some of the steps I outlined, but quality can suffer then. Not in all cases, but some. I've seen plenty of HN links to arXiv posts where it's clear the authors had little sense of the best way of presenting their material and therefore have a harder time communicating their work.

What marginal value do you place on having new scientific knowledge more clearly and consistently communicated to other researchers? That's what publishers do.

Subscription prices are certainly way too high compared to the cost, but saying the add little or no value just tells me that a person probably doesn't understand what publishers do, or that "researcher" skill sets don't always overlap with the skill sets to perform the work I outlined above.

[DangitBobby]

They are arguing that the complexity is artificial and provides little value.

[ineedasername]

Then they did not articulate that viewpoint very well. They also completely neglected to provide any justification. I stated a claim and provided extensive detail to support it. Replying with a comment that boils down to "nope" doesn't add anything to a conversation.