Open access, as is mentioned in the article, is both important and difficult to achieve. As a PhD student or associate professor, you work on a strict schedule to publish or perish. The only acceptable publication venues are the 4-6 respectable journals in your field. You have no time or power to push for open access.
Only large research institutions like (I’m familiar only with the CS research community) MSR, Google Research, Facebook Research, ... as well as already tenured professors can really force the issue.
I work at a smaller industrial research lab. We try to push for open access whenever we publish, but publishing in non open access journals is important to maintaining our perceived prestige, which in turn is important in hiring (especially when we poach from academia).
I publish pretty regularly and try to be selective, but ultimately the push has to come from an institutional level such as universities or large industrial research labs to say “we will only publish in open access journals”. This is especially true in the US where EU style legislation is a long way off.
> Only large research institutions like (I’m familiar only with the CS research community) MSR, Google Research, Facebook Research, ... as well as already tenured professors can really force the issue.
Well, they can to a certain extent, by submitting their work to open access (preferably fair OA [1]) journals, thus increasing their prestige. I think a more important role here lies with funders, though, and more specifically the people that decide who to fund (although these often are researchers as well).
By currently strongly relying on journal brand names as indicators of "excellence", they're providing the incentive that keeps/forces academics to publish in traditional, paywalled or high-APC journals. They need to find other ways to decide whom to give funding to. (And perhaps have less of a focus on an ill-defined idea of "excellence" as well.)
Disclaimer: I'm part of a just-launched initiative that aims to provide such an alternative. I'd love to hear people's thoughts about this though.
Not the OP, but I've started putting all my first-author papers in the EarthArXiv [1]. The original ArXiv only accepts preprints from a few fields, but the Open Science Framework has recently made a federation of preprint servers that fills many of the gaps, and can be searched in one place [2].
What to do about the entrenched scientific publishing-funding complex has been a concern since the first full text of journal articles started appearing in the 1990s.
The response to date has been for funding agencies (nonprofits and governments) to require publication in open access journals as a condition of funding research. This has happened in both the US and EU.
However, I'm pessimistic this approach will address the problem, and it could well create a number of unintended consequences. For one, publishers that have introduced OA models can charge thousands of dollars to the research teams publishing the work. That could mean fewer publications, and more information silos.
The article hints at, but doesn't fully describe another, more pressing problem. Peer review is in trouble. The number of papers the average researcher is being asked to review is increasing while the abundance of papers means the few bother to read them.
I suspect the solution lies somewhere else entirely. Post-publication peer review is one option, and Fighare has built an interesting model that could be a component of a future system:
Regardless, the problem is cultural, not technical. The crazy economic incentives described in the article work because everyone involved has a (sometimes perverse) incentive to keep it in place. Until that changes, it will be mostly status quo ante.
> the number of papers the average researcher is being asked to review is increasing
The quality of review becomes proportional to the impact factor of the journal. And given that the high impact journals have not substantially expanded the number of articles they publish, it might mean that there are now more candidate reviewers.
What has become substantially more burdensome is the number of funding applications that (esp. young) investigators have to submit per year. http://www.pnas.org/content/112/2/313
> Post-publication peer review is one option, and Fighare
There are interesting proposals. E.g. elifesciences proposes to publish everything, under the condition that the reviews will be published eponymously along with the paper
Peer review at elife works slightly differently. The author(s) are not subjected to multiple rounds with multiple reviewers, instead the review feedback from the peer reviewers is aggregated by the editorial staff before being sent back to the author. There may be multiple rounds of this however.
I think the OA requirement is a good step but, as you mention, not enough to get us the entire way there.
The EU and several European funding bodies have made the next step [1], which is to require funded researchers to only publish in journals in which all research is Open Access, pressuring journals to flip their models, and by putting a cap on the publishing fees those journals are allowed to ask.
That said, that still doesn't get us all the way there. Firstly, it remains to be seen how publishers will deal with that - for all we know, they'll set up sibling journals for European researchers. More importantly, though, is that they haven't specified yet how they will decide who gets funded, if the name of the journals one has published can no longer be a factor.
Then again, I'm hopeful that this drastic plan will shake things up enough for a solution to arise eventually.
Disclaimer: I'm part of a just-launched project that aims to provide a solution for this.
> The number of papers the average researcher is being asked to review is increasing.
"No" isn't just a word, it's a full sentence. Just refuse to review for free, demand an appropriate consultation fee instead.
If the journal actually pays you---good. If it doesn't, you did your part to make their exploitative business model unattractive.
I just realized that this analogy of the academic publishing industry is also quite similar to that of the search engine industry.
Most web pages are provided to the public free of charge, but they typically don't obtain them directly (technically they can, but it's often too tedious). A search engine takes them and redistribute to the public. They do it by using the metrics mostly provided by the (unpaid) public: PageRank. And they make a hefty profit for doing that. They also amass a lot of power. Both industries are essentially doing the same thing: content curation.
The difference is that search engines don't get complaints like academic publishers.
I think the reason is that the academic publishing is much simpler and actually more transparent than search engines; you can easily see the inner workings and the flow of money. On the other hand, people don't really understand how Google makes so much money. We're effectively blinded by the complexity.
The search engines have sidestepped grief because of their third-party pays model - advertisers fund their content curation and discovery expenses and the system retains open access at no (direct, monetary) cost to the consumers.
The peer review process might be more expensive/intensive than PageRank for all I know, so perhaps journal publishers are doing much more work than search engines.
Perhaps if journal publishers used an ad-supported model they wouldn't be demonized so readily since they'd be incentivized for open access since they're selling eyeballs
I'm not advocating, just working with the parent's comparison.
> The peer review process might be more expensive/intensive than PageRank for all I know, so perhaps journal publishers are doing much more work than search engines.
The peer review process is labor intensive, but to add insult to injury, publishers aren't the ones doing it and they don't pay reviewers. It's all done for free by researchers.
At best publishers add some proof reading services, but in many cases not even that.
> (4 paragraph analogy of implausible and outrageous scheme of bakeries which is total fiction).
> ...Yet the story is broadly analogous to what happens in the publication of academic journals.
While I think there are lots of problems with the academic journal system, please, please, please do not reason from analogy like this article does. This is a complex topic that deserves being reasoned about directly. Presenting an analogy which is obviously artificial just primes readers with a false, oversimplified narrative. Don't do this. This is highly misleading, and the bias that results from the priming is corrosive to clear reasoning.
What I don't understand is why peer reviewers agree to perform uncompensated labor on behalf of these gargantuan, highly profitable publishers. What is the benefit to them, other than the warm glow of fulfilling one's professional obligations?
Its very hard to turn down a request to review a paper you are qualified to comment on from an editor you know, or who regularly handles your papers. Editor X from Journal Y sends you a paper which you are well-qualified to review. You've submitted 5 papers to Journal Y in the last few years, some of them handled by Editor X. Are you really going to turn down Editor X's request?
What if the paper is written by Author Z, whose work you are familiar with and whose papers you read anyway. Why not review it?
Often it is a favor to a colleague that is serving as the (also unpaid) editor to get a line on their CV. Given that the fields are highly specialized, you tend to work with the same small community of people (writing articles and getting project funding together, reviewing each other's articles, etc.), so it pays to be well-liked among your peers.
But there are other motives. Regular reviews give you some perspective that you otherwise wouldn't get. For example, you see what mistakes others make and that can help you improve your own papers. Another motivation for me is sometimes that I don't want the paper to be reviewed by someone less qualified in my areas of specialization.
Aside from the other explanations, you also get a slight competitive benefit. If the paper is good, you get to use the ideas in the paper ahead of other people. Though everyone uses arxiv now, so not so much anymore.
Also you get a sense of power anonymously judging your colleague's work..
Other than your opinion, do you have any arguments to offer?
Otherwise I can just tell you my opinion as someone who works in academia: It makes perfect sense, and so far I haven't met anyone who was able to offer any better alternative to peer reviewing.
That being said, there are some reasons why there are more shady papers and journals today than there used to be.
The #1 reason is that many policy makers and science administrators got this unhealthy obsession with merely counting indicators, which leads young researchers to chase publication after publication regardless of the quality.
The #2 reason is that there are way more researchers competing for tenure, but jobs have barely increased and public spending on education and universities are overall low in comparison to other areas. You get what you pay for.
So there you go, another opinion, but at least a qualified one.
I enjoyed your comment. I agree with your reasons, though I don't think they are complete. I am not an expert on academia and I don't claim to be, so I have no solutions. I can just see the parallels and the general mechanisms.
I think the issue isn't with peer review. The issue is peer review coupled with barriers to entry. Some of it is monetary, which could conceivably be resolved through open access. Some of it is because it is socially walled off, this can be resolved through outreach and expansion into different media.
Consider how much more approachable a DEF CON talk is as compared to a research paper. What if we promulgated biological research in a similar fashion. Chubbyemu [1] explains diseases in a very approachable fashion. Perhaps we could do more do make research and academia approachable for the average person?
TL;DR: I think the issue is the need to demystify academia, peer review is only a part of that.
Geologist here. Interactive public review plus transparent peer review has become standard on the journals of the European Geophysical Union [1]. These are also open-access.
Yeah that's just what I need. Aside from being reviewed by people with a passing familiarity with what I am doing, I would like every certified internet genius who has never heard of my field to comment on my unpublished work.
The point isn't that, I think. It's that valuable reviews are easily downed out by YouTube-comment-quality reviews. Schemes like curation of reviews by up-/downvoting don't work for most papers, as they are of interest to only a relatively small number of people engaged in that particular niche of scientific inquiry (which, by the way, is kind of the nature of things as a field specializes more and more). The concern is that there wouldn't be enough "genuine" people to counteract the noise.
I'd wager that the whole concept has staled. In 1800, when you could have the smartest polymaths in the world look at your paper, that stamp of approval meant something.
I never looked at the peer review process in that way ("stamp of approval"). For a journal article, as long as it's not a desk-rejection (because the study is not in scope of the journal or such), it's usually an iterative process involving the authors, the reviewers, and the editor, which results in an often greatly improved article. A key person in that process is often the editor, rather than the reviewers (if they do their job well).
Peer review as such does not provide much of a signal as to how important a paper is or a binary "good paper"/"bad paper" decision; ideally, it's a process that helps maintain a certain standard. Conference proceedings typically don't use this process, but (more or less) ask for a simple yes/no (or a 1-5 rating where everyone knows that it's going to be rejected if you don't give a high enough rating because of a 30% acceptance rate etc.).
You are aware that half of these certified internet geniuses are trolls and crackpots who try to prove why Special Relativity Theory is wrong or promote their own free energy devices, though, right? RIGHT?
it is not whether it can hold up against an onslaught of cranks, trolls, and well meaning idiots, but whether a researcher should be expected to have to defend their hard work against them in order to get published. Bullshit can always be cranked put faster than you could ever address. Or do you think that everytime an astronomer tries to publish a paper she should have to address the very serious concerns of flat-earthrs and young-earth creationists???
I guess so. I was imagining what a massive waste of time and energy it will be to just read the comments much less respond to them. It's already bad enough when you have people in your field who refuse to understand your work no matter how you re-word your explanation (yeah, going through this right now), but when you have people like the Wikipedia editors or reddit commenters who have all the time and energy in the world and no understanding of your field, you can imagine how much of a disaster it will be.
Reminds me of a time when this person in my field decided to move its most popular wiki to Wikipedia and delete the wiki site. Well it resulted in the wiki site being gone, and a bunch of scattered Wikipedia pages with no content because it was way too much trouble to get the Wikipedia editors to change the content so that it will be actually informative.
> Well, maybe because it's all done by a priest-caste cartel, shielded from reality in ivory towers, and then presented to the public in a similar way religion once was forced on peasants (taxes included). Academia is the modern priesthood: usurping the right to all knowledge, in bed with the state, corrupted to the bones, fighting heretics.
I don't mean to be rude....I actually fuck that. I mean to be rude. You are an irrefutable argument against public-review.
> The fact nobody has ever suggested public-review on-top of peer review makes me think academia really doesn't think about this issue much at all.
There are not only such suggestions, there is even a whole research discipline solely dedicated to evaluating peer reviewing, and there is a metric ton of papers about the topic written by disciples from many different areas.
"Academia is the modern priesthood: usurping the right to all knowledge, in bed with state, corrupted to the bones."
That goes way too far. There are plenty of areas where great work is being done. But yes, there are some where bad work is done. And a lot of the people that talk about science in public have an agenda and they get heard over the people who do real science.
> There are plenty of areas where great work is being done.
You could say the same stuff about the historical priesthood. For ages, knowledge, and science were cultivated by priests. They were the ones that could read, write, they hand-copied books, they advised rules, helped peasants, took care of sick, poor and so an so.
Which doesn't invalidate my critique about the corruption. The mechanisms are exactly the same.
You just have to be careful not to reject all scientists. When I listen to my neighbor he rejects all climate science (because they all have an agenda) but trusts the deniers who are a very loud, very small minority. This make no sense.
Human psychology. Negative statements are given greater weight. You neighbor is happily living in the matrix and sees no need to observe reality with objective reason when the negative pundits give him regular doses of satisfying outrage to feel good about.
This is mostly just hot air and empty claims. Do you interact much with professors at leading universities? I do. In my experience it is a very talented, competitive, and hard-working group of people. Not at all like some distant, unaccountable caste.
I think you're missing the point. Sure, the professors I've met have been great people who are some of the most introspective and dedicated people I've met. But most people haven't met many, if any, research professors. To most of the public, academia is a largely closed off institution. The fact that they're often geographically separated, and socially separated through admissions requirements further exacerbates this problem. Not to mention rather politically homogeneous. To much of the country, professors are an insular, caste-like group of elites. People who have had the education opportunities that we have know differently, but chances are we aren't representative of the rest of the population.
> I only chose to respond because I found the “priestly caste” analogy to be utterly without foundation, but yet presented as if it was full of insight.
My point is that there is foundation in the public mind (which is almost certainly what the above poster was referring to).,
We are off-topic, in the way my original reply tried to bring out.
But let's pursue this line of thinking. Your claim is that significant elements of the public scorn professors because they are perceived as, and act as, an elitist caste. I call BS on this as well. A large segment of academia is very devoted to public outreach, including by pop science TV/youtube, press releases, free in-person and video lectures, public outreach, blogging, and posting papers on arxiv. This is the best of academic culture.
A sensible person can take advantage of this wealth of free knowledge. A bigoted person can invent some kind of culture war and play out stick figures in their head.
I come from people who had greatly varying degrees of education. Many didn't go to college, some failed out. A couple are (or were, RIP) sometimes bigoted towards people who have specialized expertise and training, but aside from those very few, the vast majority have respect for specialized knowledge in general, and academia in particular.
I think it does a great disservice to the common sense of that vast majority of non-academics, to suppose they are bigoted towards academia because of some kind of culture war stereotype.
Only large research institutions like (I’m familiar only with the CS research community) MSR, Google Research, Facebook Research, ... as well as already tenured professors can really force the issue.
I work at a smaller industrial research lab. We try to push for open access whenever we publish, but publishing in non open access journals is important to maintaining our perceived prestige, which in turn is important in hiring (especially when we poach from academia).
I publish pretty regularly and try to be selective, but ultimately the push has to come from an institutional level such as universities or large industrial research labs to say “we will only publish in open access journals”. This is especially true in the US where EU style legislation is a long way off.