The problem isn't access, it's citations. arXiV is not considered a credible citation source since anyone can publish anything. TPCs don't use it in their list of citations, neither do grant funding agencies or government institutions.

The current academic enterprise relies heavily on third-party gatekeeping. We rely on others to do the vetting for us. The first thing an academic does is check where a paper is published, before even reading it. It's a crutch.

Any gatekeeper will naturally tend towards charging for access over time: It's a captive market, the economics demands it. Unless we eliminate that dependency, we cannot change the system.

This article pointed to a few cases where people tried to do the thing, i.e. the pledge taken by individual researchers, and the requirements placed by certain funding channels, and those sound like a solid attempt to do the thing. This shows that people care and are somewhat willing to organise about it.

But the thing I don't understand is why this can't happen at the department level? If you're an influential figure at a top-5 department in your field, you're friends with your counterparts at the other 4. You see them in person every year. You all hate $journal. Why don't you club together and say "why don't we all have moratorium on publishing in $journal for our departments?"

No temptation for individual research groups to violate the pledge. No dependence on individual funding channels to influence the policy. Just, suddenly, $journal isn't the top publication in that field any more?

I'm sure there are lots of varied reasons why this is difficult but fundamentally it seems like the obvious approach?

Computer science as a discipline has always been relatively open and has had its own norms on publication that are different from most other fields (the top venues are almost always conferences rather than journals, and turn-around times on publications are relatively short), so it isn't a surprise that CS is one of the first areas to embrace open access.

Still, having a single example of how this approach works and how grass-roots efforts by CS researchers led to change in the community is useful to demonstrate that this idea is viable, and to motivate other research communities to follow suit.

[1]: https://authors.acm.org/open-access/acm-open-for-authors-hom...

[2]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

[3]: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/deed.en

Wow! Surprised that hasn't been mentioned here already. Jumped out to me immediately as a morbidly curious bit of trivia.

People who write such sentences have no idea what they are talking about or are being intentionally naive for whatever reason.

Just because your one-sentence solution reads simple doesn't make the actual solution simple. Because such a solution involves changes to laws, changes to entrenched interests, changes to distribution of money involved in the whole system, and changes to balance of powers between stakeholders. Unless the push for such changes is significant enough to overcome the current state of affairs (due to public opinion, redistribution of power or money, etc.), nothing will happen.

SciHub has shown us a new way to spread knowledge to all that are interested. I don't have the rigor for publishing but other individual experimenters might. It would be great if they could contribute to building human knowledge.

I think the only real solution is a distributed federated publishing and review platform. A node would be a library of papers for the host's interests. Just like physical journal collections, bigger institution would host more topics. Anybody can participate in the publication and review process. SciHub nailed storage and retrieval. Review is the hard part. Any rating system can be gamed. It would be very hard to convince people it is trustworthy.

There shouldn't be any prestige in publishing a paper. The prestige comes from being proven correct, from building our knowledge.

Journals are an academic-career-advancement service. It therefore makes sense that they do not pay academics. You don't pay your customers.

That means they need to generate a secondary customer base elsewhere, who will pay. Those secondary customers happen to be the employers of the academics who are the primary customers. That socializes the cost of providing the service, since academics individually wouldn't be willing and able to pay.

Once journals have established a reputation, their policies and paywalls and fees are the result of trying to signal exclusivity and set an optimum market price.

Until the supply side of the research market largely agrees on a way to use open-access repositories like arXiv as a primary career-advancement signal, complaining about closed-access journals is tilting at windmills.

Changing the law to prevent journals from being able to copyright anything could potentially force the research industry to rapidly develop a new solution, but at the cost of short-term chaos and career instability for new academics.

Universities do the research. They voluntarily choose to pay for and publish in journals. They could just decide not to do this. Literally, just don't publish in a journal, anymore, ever. Upload your study paper to a Dell Inspiron sitting in a closet in the university faculty lounge, connect it to the internet. Done. Why don't they do this?

#1. No guarantee anyone will look at it. You just spent years of time and money to come up with a research conclusion. Will anyone read it? Comment on it? Learn from it? Is it any good? Will anyone review it? It's after all just a paper sitting on a server. Without some kind of process to vet it independently, and publish it in a place where people can find the latest vetted papers, it's too much hassle for most people to ever find, much less trust.

#2. The reputation feedback loop. Universities give research grants to "well respected" researchers. You become a "well respected" researcher by having academic achievements. You get academic achievements by... doing research that gets published in a journal. Universities depend entirely on the prestige of the researcher and journal to decide who gets a grant. Because...

#3. Money is hard to get. In order to convince someone (government, private donor) to give your university money, you have to show them it's worth it. And the way they show that is.... the prestige of the researcher, being published in the prestigious journal. Look, we have cool peeps, publishing in cool journals! Give us more money!!

Therefore, the reason journals still exist, is Universities desperately need them. They don't want to pay an insane amount of money to a journal. But they don't really have a choice.

Could Universities replace journals with something else? Well, they could work hard to replace the "prestige machine" with other processes (which must enable them to get money, by showing their researchers are good, with vetted papers, published somewhere people will see them). They could replace the journal system with their own intra-university system. But it turns out, that costs a considerable amount of money, time, and resources... which is entirely what the "evil journal publishers" do. Universities would have to spin out their own entire corporation to do all that work, which would be a journal publisher. They know this is expensive, difficult, time-consuming, and they also know the existing system benefits them.

"Let's just throw papers on arXiv" does nothing to solve the money and prestige problem. So the world continues to turn as it has.

I feel like this is one of those classic local minima where a community starving for resources fights vociferously amongst itself because they have internalized that they can’t win externally. From where I sit outside academia the problem with science seems obvious: there is not nearly enough money going into it.

I doubt bringing the heads of for-profit journals would change that under current national conditions in the U.S.

while the author is correct that the for-profit publishing is definitely a negative externality, i can't help but feel they are missing the forest for the trees when it comes to all the other worse issues in academia.

a full explanation of which would be much too onerous for a hn comment, but in no particular order: rampant scientific fraud, waste of tax payer dollars, wage suppression via "students" and visa-dependent laborers (J1 visa abuse), publish or perish evaluation criteria, lack of management training, blatant and rampant racism, etc. etc. etc.

the whole system needs to burn down and be rebuilt from the ground up.

1) pay reviewers. 2) you can't publish unless a reviewer replicates your work.

yes. It can be done.

https://www.orgsyn.org/

See also from the same author:

* https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...

* https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-dance-of-the-nake...

* https://www.experimental-history.com/p/lets-build-a-fleet-an...

It doesn't. Not even close.

Peer review doesn't even mean that it's free from errors, free from fraud, free from methodological mischief; it doesn't mean anything at this point. Yet we continue to act like it does.

Darwin's work wasn't peer reviewed. Nor Einstein's. It's something we cooked up in the mid 1900's to deal with the fallout from another mistake ("publish or perish") that meant people had to try to publish even if they had nothing to say.

A few scattered thoughts:

1. There is a difference between pre and post publication peer review. These discussions almost invariably conflate the two, but part of the runaway success of spam journals is that the benefits of pre greatly outweigh the risks of post. Historically, there was some link: if an article had problems, you would open the table of contents n months later and (might) see a letter or further discussion. Now, the table of contents is google, and many readers have weaker links to the same venue over time for followup. At the metrics level, the reputational hit of bad articles is weaker. (studies have shown that retractions are often cited with the original intent years after a correction was published)

2. The phrase "for profit" is doing a lot of work in this article. Some mega publishers, like ACS, are technically non profit member societies stapled to a mega-publisher, and have been strongly opposed to OA policies in the past. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Chemical_Society#Cont... [2] https://www.acs.org/content/dam/acsorg/about/aboutacs/financ...

3. Outsourcing trust to someone who isn't the current evil... will only get you so far. No matter who takes over publishing, scientists are going to need to evolve new ways of evaluating work and each other, as the field grows far beyond what a small network can handle. Journals are a bad metric, but how does your dean evaluate 50 people hired to be the world's leading experts on (new and emerging field)? I've read plenty of these publisher=bad screeds, and most stop there. PubPeer exists for some, Twitter walkthroughs of papers were a great thing for a while, or there's also talk of overlay journals that decouple the act of publication (as a preprint) from the review-and-prestige piece.

4. The current system does two things: (a) provides a record of work done by students, who may labor under graduation requirements to publish something, whether their project is successful or not, (b) a shared record of current state of human knowledge, be it from researchers at a small college, or google, or pharma. Goal (a) puts a lot of pressure on peer review in "low tier" journals that even the reviewers don't like to cite, and I've had my doubts as to whether this is the best yield for effort.

And what, pray tell, is this advantage? If there is no utility to anyone in publishing in Science or Nature then how can it be an advantage.

I suspect it’s simply that these guys are a curation service. They separate the cranks from the science. They can be imperfect at this so long as important people separate the cranks from the science.

This kind of winnowing is pretty useful in general. Many universities are pretty much that and people pay to attend them.

It makes sense that a credentialing service would charge for the credential. It doesn’t make that much sense to say “no credentials allowed; you and timecube guy must be considered the same”. I want you to show your credentials. We all do because science is an empirical field and empiricism depends on facts. I cannot process your paper with pure reason.

If you looked under the microscope and saw light I don’t know that you didn’t. At scale I need someone to figure out “this wasn’t a Photoshop situation; that’s totally fluorescence”. Arguing that we should remove these organizations is similar to saying you should remove diplomas and so on. Anyone can continue to attend universities. They just can’t hand out diplomas. So no credentials. Only learning. Simple thing. Or perhaps not so.

The credential is the useful thing.

The second problem, however, is a modern one: the pure, naked, and raw commercialization of science through "publish or perish", whereby the researcher is a Ford-style assembly line worker to be managed and who must be replaceable.

Without a MENTAL paradigm shift, even before a material one, we will only be able to plug small leaks on a ship with a torn hull.

Because someone is surely going to try to defend journals via peer review in this thread, I want to provide a counter to the arguments that journal peer review does much good. Also, since everyone knows that if you just go to a poor enough journal, you can be published, I am going to focus on the (IMO mostly false) claim that higher-profile journals are still doing a good thing here.

There are numerous studies showing that higher-profile journals in general have more retractions and research misconduct [1-2], lower research quality [3], in fact weaker statistical power and reliability [4], and that statistical reliability even in high prestige journals is still extremely poor overall [5]. Also, making it through peer review is highly random and dependent on who you get as a reviewer [6], or is just basically a coin toss even when looking at reviewer groups:

    In 2014, 49.5% of the papers accepted by the first committee were rejected by the second (with a fairly wide confidence interval as the experiment included only 116 papers).  This year, this number was 50.6%.  We can also look at the probability that a randomly chosen rejected paper would have been accepted if it were re-reviewed.  This number was 14.9% this year, compared to 17.5% in 2014. [7]

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3187237/

[2] https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1212247109

[3] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9382220/

[4] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371%2Fj...

[5] https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti...

[6] https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourn...

[7] https://blog.neurips.cc/2021/12/08/the-neurips-2021-consiste...

There are 3 realistic scenarios for your proposed solution:

    - it will not pass

    - it will be reformed later, or, if successful

    - it will just make the capitalists appear at another point in the supply chain

What you hate is capitalism and capitalism will do this to any industry wherever it can attain steady profits.

If you're going to write an article titled "The one science reform we can all agree on, but we're too cowardly to do" and that one thing isn't explicitly stated in the first paragraph, I'm out.

Stop with the meandering nonsense and make your argument.