[throwaway984393]

> Reed Elsevier and the other rent seekers got no reason to live.

Listen to me, HN. Stop listening to this meme. You aren't using your brains.

Everyone has a hard-on for Elsevier, and no other publisher. Why is that? Because they don't know anything about publishing. They've just heard the name Elsevier (and it kind of looks evil) and so they just parrot it ad-nauseam. What about Springer? Taylor & Francis? Wiley-Blackwell? And what about the hundreds of smaller publishers that control major journals? Everyone gives Elsevier shit about suing Sci-Hub, but nobody gives the American Chemical Society shit for suing Sci-Hub. The fact is that people only hold up Elsevier as the great evil because people are tying to over-simplify a complex problem by finding a "single evil", because then they don't have to think about a more complex, nuanced problem.

The fact is that there is a reason that paid journals keep existing, and it's not the profit margins of the Big Four. It's the academic research industry. Every single academic research institute in the world that publishes papers depends on the reputation of journals. Getting your paper published in a "prestigious journal" is literally the only way to progress a researcher's career, and thus get more funding. Without funding, there is no research! And the journals are providing real due diligence happening in the process of creating those journals, and somebody has to pay for that process.

If the paid journals went away tomorrow, researchers would be fucked, and academic institutions would have no idea what to do with themselves. So please stop with this ridiculous meme that Elsevier is The Great Satan holding back science. Sure, they should profit a lot less! But getting rid of them entirely with no system to replace them will be destructive to scientific research.

[matthewdgreen]

With due respect, if Elsevier and Springer (and IEEE etc.) went away tomorrow Science would not “be fucked”. We would be forced to sit down and work through a set of new open access journals and conferences. It would be an annoying few months and some publishing activities would be modestly disrupted. But all of the reviewing and editing and conference chairing is already run by volunteers. The only reason we don’t replace the journals now is because of (huge amounts of) path dependence and because nobody can solve the coordination problem of getting everyone to drop everything and do it. But if those publishers went away tomorrow, you’d solve both those problems in an instant.

[robwwilliams]

Absolutely agree. The loss of prestige journals would be salutary and force researchers to focus on content, not cover.

GK Marinov, BJ Wold, and colleagues analyzed the quality of nearly 800 ChIP-seq datasets in the NIH GEO database (see figure S8 in their 2014 G3 paper: https://doi.org/10.1534/g3.113.008680 ). They independently scored the quality of data generation and analysis and then compare their summary quality scores to the journal impact factor in which each dataset was published.

Can you guess the polarity of the correlation? Yes, it was negative, and consistently so over a five year span.

[AlbertCory]

Thanks, the question isn't "do they still provide a service?" but "what would happen if they disappeared?"

As you showed, research might be unsettled for a while, but pretty soon they'd just be a bad memory.

[turbinerneiter]

Good point, but I think the opposite is true: scientific research is already broken, and blowing up the publishers would force us to rebuild it proper.

I co-authored a peer reviewed paper. Because our English is bad and our context is different, we called a system operating at 100Hz a "high frequency sensor" instead of a "fast sample rate (context) sensor". They gave that paper to an HF (radio) engineer to review it. He said "I think I was given this paper by mistake, this is not HF. Anyway, nice paper, change the color of this graph please."

Pair that with the general replication problem (no one has the money, time or incentive to replicate anything), that publish or perish mentality, the idiotic bias against publishing negative results - jeez, the situation is baaad.

[robertlagrant]

> Reed Elsevier and the other rent seekers

I don't think your fundamental thesis of "only Elsevier is blamed" holds up to the post you replied to.

[nerdponx]

> And the journals are providing real due diligence happening in the process of creating those journals, and somebody has to pay for that process.

Both things can be true. They can be providing valuable due diligence and also sucking a lot of value (much of it funded by public/taxpayer money) along the way.

[kragen]

I worked for Reed Elsevier for a few months in the 01990s (on an outsourced IT contract). They were already internally distributing propaganda encouraging their employees to promote extensions of copyright to factual information (so-called sui generis database rights). They are a profoundly evil institution to their core, in a way that the American Chemical Society just is not.

Your position seems to be that impact factors and bibliometrics are crucial to the progress of science. Nothing could be further from the truth.

[AlbertCory]

as for Springer, Taylor & Francis, and Wiley-Blackwell: yeah, them too. Forgot to mention those.

The paid journals take research which is mostly paid for with public or non-profit money, and hide it behind paywalls. You can't avoid this fact.

Their "reputation" is mostly just a legacy, like the New York Times'. At one time they sent out paper journals, which was the only way information could be disseminated, and charged libraries reasonable fees. There was a manageable number of such journals so a library could get most or all of them. That world is gone.

[Someone]

> The paid journals take research which is mostly paid for with public or non-profit money, and hide it behind paywalls. You can't avoid this fact.

Commercial publishers have paywalls, but for new research they no longer have to be the only source for publications.

Nowadays, I think it’s often the indifference/laziness/whatever of the authors that prevent accepted manuscripts (same text, but different layout) from also being freely accessible.

For example https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/sharing allows putting accepted manuscripts on arXiv.

The way I read it, the main limitations are:

- you can’t put your paper on a commercial site.

- you have to mention the DOI, which, I guess, resolves to Elsevier’s site.

Reading https://www.elsevier.com/about/policies/hosting (“Sites or repositories that provide a service to other organizations or agencies, even if those other organizations or agencies are themselves non-commercial entities, are considered to be providing a commercial service, and this service activity will also require a commercial arrangement with Elsevier”), they make special exceptions for arXiv and RePEc.

So, that’s not optimal, but (for new papers) also not as bleak as it typically is described.

[throwaway984393]

Who is paying and who has access is only one part of the puzzle. Most people only care about access, but they don't understand why that access continues to be limited.

Why do journals exist? It's not to provide information. Ever since the Internet was invented, we can distribute information virtually for free. Everybody knows this. Yet the journals persist for decades. So their purpose is not to provide information.

Yes, of course, their reputation is invented and legacy. It's been shown time and again that papers published in "reputable journals" can be quite problematic. But everybody knows this too. It's not like academic institutes are completely brainless. They know they could have somebody "less reputable" publish their information and it would have the same scientific merit, or that they could even publish it themselves on a blog. But they don't; they publish on the "reputable journals", even though the reputation is clearly not impacting the research results.

So why do these publishers exist? The true purpose of paid, "reputable" journals is to provide an excuse for research institutions to dole out money to people who meet a quasi-arbitrary barrier to the money. They know they don't have any good system of how to assign money, or who to promote, because in general it's hard to quantify. So they hide behind "the reputable journal" and thus the "reputation" of their researchers. This way they can receive more money (because "our scientists are published by reputable journals") and they can dole it out just as easily.

Opening access and reducing cost is a great idea. But shunting money away from journals will result in the entire research industry scrambling to put together a replacement that will allow them to continue being funded, determine how to dole out that funding, organize journals "for free", and retain some sort of rigor/due-diligence/quality from the publishing process. Can this be done? Sure! But we should make that our goal and not ignore the big pink elephant in the room, which is that journals are still a necessary evil for research funding. If we want to get rid of paid journals, let's actually think through the resulting impact and build a resilient system to replace them. Imploding them and "hoping for the best" is just going to hurt research.

[da39a3ee]

Yes, that’s how it worked. The rather major point you are missing is that things change.

[nlitened]

Can’t tell if the parent comment is sarcastic or not.