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?
The group of gatekeepers is not small. When Science Twitter was still a thing, two common topics were editors complaining about how difficult it is to find peer reviewers and academics complaining how many review requests they get. Pretty much every established researcher is involved in the gatekeeping, and they can devote as much time to it as they want.
In many fields, preprints have been an established practice for a long time. That allows us to see the alternative to peer review. The main variables that predict how much attention your preprint gets are your name and the topic. With all its imperfections, peer review at least gives a second chance for less known researchers working on less fashionable topics.
> There are a lot of good arguments [0] that peer review doesn't work
That is not a good argument. It points out that research productivity has changed and then tries to correlate this with the rise of peer review, before admitting that the entire argument is confounded and pointless. Then it goes on to the standard non-practitioner approach and cherry-picks examples where peer review didn’t find flaws, which I mean, duh. Of course peer review doesn’t work perfectly to find all errors and fraud, nobody is arguing the point. You could write a similar post demonstrating that fire departments don’t fight fires, or that restaurant health codes aren’t needed to prevent food poisoning.
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.
As a non-academic working in neurotech/sleeptech, we've seen some very questionable studies, and even in discussion with researchers, they've suggested how the study can be designed to get the result you are looking for.
I hope an open system with discussion can improve the state of research and access to research for a larger group.
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.
True, but in the meantime faculty need to find ways around the power of the administrators rather than waiting for fairy godparents to intervene, especially given that administrators control all the budgets and have entire departments devoted to flattering donors.
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.
Part of it is momentum, they date back from when a) everything was on paper, and b) producing and distributing the paper was hard.
However, I suspect much of the staying power is that organizing and executing on a top tier journal, or equivalently replacing it, is real work - and it is real work with no model for getting paid for or otherwise compensated for in an academic career.
There is also some value to being arms-length. A few top universities could gang together to pay for a flight of journals, but there would understandably be concerns about acceptance policies, etc.
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.
Then what’s stopping very very busy scientists from submitting to open access and “less prestigious” journals? Those journals exist today.
I’m not saying the onus is on scientists to fix the entire issue but the progress has to start by committees that hire and promote people in academia and to stop looking at publications in prestigious journals as a marker of career progression and differentiation.
What stops us is that many Universities and departments only count certain journals/conferences as “prestigious” and make both hiring and promotion decisions based on the number of publications in these venues. Even if you’re senior enough not to care about promotions, you will always have students and junior collaborators who need to run this gauntlet.
And more to the point, these prestigious conferences and journals often get the best researchers in the field to peer-review for them, because doing that work (for a prestigious venue) also holds some value in the promotion/hiring process. People like to dump on peer review, scientists more than most, but in retrospect many (some) of my papers have improved through the process of getting those people to sign off on the work.
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.
Anyone who wants their paper to be understood by a non-expert audience can write a blog post explaining the work. Here’s a great example [1]. Papers have become more intricate and technical because science has become more intricate and technical, in some cases because we found subtle errors and exceptions in the more casual early papers!
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.
