Absurd cost for publications was a major reason I left academia as a postdoc. Senior scientists with large grants and salaries write it off as a business expense but paying 2-3k for a paper is insane for junior staff that are already being underpaid.
Arxiv and opensource publishing options exist. But for neuroscience, the funding and direction of research is implicitly governed by the reviewers and chief editors whom are embedded in these journals. Thus for your work to get exposure and citations it is critical to publish in the given journal for your domain.
Journals have a reciprocal relationship with chief editors in that journals will publish "special" editions essentially allowing the editors to publish their work with their collaborators carte blanche. Switching to an open source model is objectively a better option, but there are entrenched incentives that prohibit this change.
It comes out of the grant that also pays salaries, so excessive paper costs might mean that a research group can't afford to pay as many postdocs and grad students.
Absolutely relevant. Had a huge issue with the University recently about being able to publish in a journal because they wouldn't pay the fees - every point at which there can be a problem, there will be.
Why do we even need publishers? What is stopping the scientific community from saying "Fuck this" and simply posting their PDFs on their own websites, or on an archival site? Is it simply bureaucratic inertia?
It's not about the publishing itself, it is all about the review.
Anyone with an internet connection can write a "paper" and publish it, but that doesn't mean it is useful to the scientific community. Peer review allows the community to filter out quack papers, research which is inherently flawed, or research which has been done before.
This leaves the journals filled with novel research meeting a minimum quality standard, allowing other scientists to build upon them. If you can't get your research published it ostensibly isn't worth anything, so a lot of institutions use the number of papers published and the citations they get as a measurement of a researcher's output. There is nothing wrong with this process.
However, the issue is that journals have been captured by rent-seeking publishers who charge exorbitant fees. This is made even worse because some journals have historically been more strict than others, so getting a paper published in a strict one leads to a higher valuation - and of course the publishers charge higher fees for the more prestigious journals.
Changing this entire model is difficult. Publishing in one of those journals is literally how your worth is valued. Breaking this circle can be done, but it won't be easy.
There are a lot of good arguments [0] that peer review doesn't work, and leads to worse outcomes than just publishing openly and letting the marketplace of ideas decide which papers are actually worthwhile. Think about it. A small group of gatekeepers decides what research is worthwhile and what is not. How well does that kind of gatekeeping work in other areas? For example, Einstein only had one paper peer reviewed (which was rejected) and things turned out well for him. What if his papers had gone through a committee?
This is why we're building OpenReview. We provide the algorithms and UI to match papers with qualified reviewers for peer review, host the discussion forums, and archive the data after the conference/journal is over. Many of the top ML conferences like ICML, NeurIPS, and ICLR have already switched to OpenReview.
It's not even about the review. If it was, people who have Nature papers retracted would be in very dire straits (despite the fact, they tend to do very well anyway).
It's a metric that you need to advance your career. A line on your CV, a reference in your next grant proposal or facility proposal. It shows that people are invested in your work and think it is worthwhile to carry out (regardless of the verifiability of it).
The culture doesn't allow it. If you don't publish enough, in prestigious enough journals, instead of tenure you get replaced. That's one reason this is a pretty interesting move - by providing an alternative publishing location based on principles that the universities supposedly value, this sort of departure _could_ help push the academic culture toward a less-abusive publishing model. Institutional change is hard.
I keep trying to organize my academic friends to join unions and engage in organizational sabotage of administrators, who have completely taken over the academy and left most faculty in a state of abject misery. Huge endowments seem like part of the problem, universities are essentially run as financial concerns with a vestigial teaching staff attached that many regents would rather do away with completely.
Researchers do post PDFs on their websites, and on preprint servers like the arXiv, bioaRxiv, etc. Unfortunately, publishers act like gatekeepers towards career progress in academia. Climbing the ladder depends on getting publications in high impact journals and getting your papers cited by other publications. Competition for academic jobs and funding is already very high, and anyone who refuses to play the game will most likely fall behind.
> is because academics are assessed on their achievements based on how many articles they have published in prestigious journals
Why have these companies been so successful at curating prestigious journals?
I hate our academic publishing model. But I'm careful dismissing the journals as pure rent seekers. Their is a source to their staying power beyond merely habit.
Academia is addicted to pedigree and prestige. People in academia could very well create their own publishing and peer review platforms that they all use, cutting out the middle men but there's an obsession with top journals/conferences and how that is tied to career progression that stands in the way.
My academic career is checkered at best. I think about this [1] from time to time. For a long time, it seems like, university was a place to hide the weirdos and occasionally neat stuff would pop out that changed the world. That institution mostly survived industrialization. but I'm pretty skeptical it'll survive monetization.
We already have both systems running in parallel. Many researchers post PDFs immediately. Then they go through the process of trying to get them into a journal. Both have advantages. While the peer review and typesetting process of publishing in a journal has many issues, the changes generally make the papers better. It's usually easier to read the final published version than an early preprint.
It's not just inertia that keeps scientists using the old journals. Anyone can issue a preprint. The material that ends up in the journal is usually the better material. The filtering helps and so does the editing. The filtering may be flawed, but it's better than nothing.
Peer review is a recent development in science that has slowed scientific progress immensly, as well as making all papers read for reviewers and not actually be understandable for other people to read them. If you've ever seen a scientific paper before peer review, you can see that they were actually made to be understandable (unlike papers today). There's a reason Einstein hated peer review. Peer review is an experiment on the scientific method, one that has failed spectacularly.
Archiving, especially of scientific data sets, can already be done for free too. Researchers could simply upload them to archive.org.
With suitable metadata linking the data back to the published article, and links to archive.org included in the article, there’s little risk that the data would get lost. Authors putting things on their own websites won’t have the same success rate.
If you are a US taxpayer, you should be highly critical of exorbitant publishing fees of major journals. Grant money is automatically reduced by the rent seeking behavior of firms like Elsevier i.e. you are not getting your money's worth out of taxes which make their way through NSF et al.
> "Elsevier, based in Amsterdam, says that the APCs cover the costs associated with publishing an article in an open-access journal, including editorial and peer-review services, copyediting, typesetting, archiving, indexing, marketing and administrative costs."
Taking Elsevier claims at face value is a bad idea, but an obvious solution would be make the authors responsible for all of the above. Which is basically the arxiv publishing model:
"copyediting and typesetting"? Ah, that would be where they take your article, already formatted using the LaTeX template they made available, and completely change the formatting so that all the formulae and all the tables become unreadable.
In CS you get this service for free. Neuroscientists have to pay for the privilege? Wow.
The arxiv publishing model does not do peer review, though. The papers on there aren't validated beyond a very cursory look into whether it is basically spam or not.
The publishers are working hard to give the term "open-access" a bad reputation in the scientific community, by charging researchers extortionate fees.
They say their charge is going to be about half of the Elsevier fee, but Elsevier's net profit margin is 19%. So basically they are saying they can be more efficient than Elsevier, but they're still going to have a fee to publish as open access.
Not only that, i ve noticed they now charge more for reprinting an old picture in a new article. Years ago, in Rightslink the reuse rights for almost all the images was $0 , now it's $70-90 and everybody has to pay, including students, nonprofits etc. The whole thing is just insane and the needle doesnt seem to move
> fee at Nature Neuroscience, published by Springer Nature, is $11,690
WHAT!? That's our f** average annual income! No wonder independent science is in such weak and obscure state :(
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Absurd cost for publications was a major reason I left academia as a postdoc. Senior scientists with large grants and salaries write it off as a business expense but paying 2-3k for a paper is insane for junior staff that are already being underpaid.
Arxiv and opensource publishing options exist. But for neuroscience, the funding and direction of research is implicitly governed by the reviewers and chief editors whom are embedded in these journals. Thus for your work to get exposure and citations it is critical to publish in the given journal for your domain.
Journals have a reciprocal relationship with chief editors in that journals will publish "special" editions essentially allowing the editors to publish their work with their collaborators carte blanche. Switching to an open source model is objectively a better option, but there are entrenched incentives that prohibit this change.
Anyone with an internet connection can write a "paper" and publish it, but that doesn't mean it is useful to the scientific community. Peer review allows the community to filter out quack papers, research which is inherently flawed, or research which has been done before.
This leaves the journals filled with novel research meeting a minimum quality standard, allowing other scientists to build upon them. If you can't get your research published it ostensibly isn't worth anything, so a lot of institutions use the number of papers published and the citations they get as a measurement of a researcher's output. There is nothing wrong with this process.
However, the issue is that journals have been captured by rent-seeking publishers who charge exorbitant fees. This is made even worse because some journals have historically been more strict than others, so getting a paper published in a strict one leads to a higher valuation - and of course the publishers charge higher fees for the more prestigious journals.
Changing this entire model is difficult. Publishing in one of those journals is literally how your worth is valued. Breaking this circle can be done, but it won't be easy.
[0] https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-...
It's a metric that you need to advance your career. A line on your CV, a reference in your next grant proposal or facility proposal. It shows that people are invested in your work and think it is worthwhile to carry out (regardless of the verifiability of it).
Why have these companies been so successful at curating prestigious journals?
I hate our academic publishing model. But I'm careful dismissing the journals as pure rent seekers. Their is a source to their staying power beyond merely habit.
Deleted Comment
1. https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/vl/notes/dijkstra.html
It's not just inertia that keeps scientists using the old journals. Anyone can issue a preprint. The material that ends up in the journal is usually the better material. The filtering helps and so does the editing. The filtering may be flawed, but it's better than nothing.
it's quite reasonable to have a policy not to cite an original source without a literature review attached
Every author should do this - either the final version if it's open access, or a preprint if it's an awful closed journal.
Though I prefer boycotting awful publishers like Elsevier in the first place.
With suitable metadata linking the data back to the published article, and links to archive.org included in the article, there’s little risk that the data would get lost. Authors putting things on their own websites won’t have the same success rate.
Probably cost and reach.
Taking Elsevier claims at face value is a bad idea, but an obvious solution would be make the authors responsible for all of the above. Which is basically the arxiv publishing model:
https://info.arxiv.org/help/submit/index.html
https://www.google.com/finance/quote/REN:AMS
In CS you get this service for free. Neuroscientists have to pay for the privilege? Wow.