[HN Gopher] MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations
___________________________________________________________________
MIT Ends Elsevier Negotiations
Author : davrosthedalek
Score : 734 points
Date : 2020-06-11 14:12 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (news.mit.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (news.mit.edu)
| omershapira wrote:
| This, alongside JSTOR's declaration of open access[1], shows that
| all major players in the Aaron Swartz case had other choices.
|
| RIP
|
| [1] https://about.jstor.org/oa-and-free/
| bogomipz wrote:
| >"MIT has long been a leader in open access. Adopted in 2009, the
| MIT Faculty Open Access Policy was one of the first and most far-
| reaching initiatives of its kind in the United States. Forty-
| seven percent of faculty journal articles published since the
| adoption of the policy are freely available to the world.
|
| Could someone comment on the figure of 47%? What are the reasons
| this wouldn't be higher than this given that the policy has been
| in effect well over a decade now?
| djohnston wrote:
| Excellent
| czzr wrote:
| When thinking about the cost of providing the services journals
| provide, I'm always struck by the example of PloS - non-profit,
| set up with the mission of promoting open access, and just about
| surviving by charging authors $2000-$3000 per article.
|
| I can only conclude that managing journals is not as cost free as
| most people in this thread seem to think, for whatever reason.
| zucker42 wrote:
| Better to get institutional support up front and make
| scientific knowledge freely available then to not charge
| authors and then limit access with noisome subscription fees.
| dfdz wrote:
| You should not be getting down voted.
|
| I am an early career academic; there are some new non-profit
| open access journals that I would consider publishing in that
| cost ~$500 dollars to publish a paper. Everything is on arXix
| so I cannot justify the expense (perhaps if I was late in my
| career with lots of grant money I would help to support these
| journals..)
| czzr wrote:
| That's interesting. I always thought that it was early career
| researchers who had to publish in journals to establish their
| reputations. Does it not work that way for you?
| pas wrote:
| What!? 2-3K? For .. what? Where does that money go?
|
| I mean referees don't get paid. And there's nothing else to do
| really if it's a digital journal.
| dannykwells wrote:
| Woohoo! First UC now Elsevier! The arc of the moral universe is
| long, but ever so often, it does indeed bend towards justice.
|
| RIP A.S.
| pwillia7 wrote:
| Maybe Aaron will get to see his dream come true posthumously -- I
| sure hope so.
| obiefernandez wrote:
| Further indications that Aaron Swartz didn't die completely in
| vain...
| wegs wrote:
| Let's not get carried away here.
|
| MIT administrators still use Swartz as an example to threaten
| potential whistleblowers. Faced with that, people back down.
| For all the public repentance, this was intentional and
| malicious by at least parts of the Central Admin.
|
| MIT has good guys and bad guys. The good guys won here,
| rejecting Elsevier. The bad players on the Swartz front are
| still there, and still making decision similar to Swartz.
|
| People back down much more quickly with that example held up as
| what happens if you don't play ball.
| dbuder wrote:
| Sounds like MIT needs a new statue right outside the main
| admin offices.
| ramraj07 wrote:
| Just came across his name yesterday when I was looking for
| python markdown parsers!
|
| Thinking about what happened to him, I'm a bit ambivalent. He
| was a great dude, for sure, but what he did with downloading
| the entire JSTOR database sneakily does sound a bit out there.
| It's definitely a Robinhood move, but Robinhood also had an
| arrest warrant on him. Expecting no less of a retaliation would
| have been naive at best.
|
| Many other hackers have been arrested, spent jail time and have
| come out of it to still go on with their life. I suppose you
| have to know which side of the law (agreeable or not) when you
| go the hacker route. He unfortunately elected to end his life
| over this. That is a great, great loss, but I'm not convinced
| we should start judging things in the world because someone
| killed themselves over it.
| woofie11 wrote:
| There are two pieces here: How the legal system behaved, and
| how MIT behaved. What you're saying makes 100% sense for an
| aggressive prosecutor. On the other hand, MIT was behaving in
| a way which was pure evil.
|
| To go back to the Robinhood analogy, I would expect the
| Sheriff of Nottingham to go after Robinhood with perfect
| dedication -- that's his job. On the other hand, if Friar
| Tuck made it his life's work to go after Robinhood, that'd be
| a different story.
| pas wrote:
| The current copyright regime is too strict. As someone else
| pointed out JSTOR went open access without much ado. So
| basically the whole thing led to the death of some dude
| because he dared to show how much what he did did not really
| matter. It's not like universities just stopped paying for
| access because there's SciHub. And it's not like academics
| stopped paying journals for publishing because old stuff is
| open access.
| oldsklgdfth wrote:
| Came here to see that Aaron Swartz was mentioned, for people to
| remember and to learn about him and his incident.
|
| I don't see it as MIT "doing the right" thing, as much as
| virtue signaling. As an institution and bureaucracy it tries to
| self-preserve. Either by saying "he are against technology
| being used for piracy" or "we are for the open spread of
| information". Of course I am cynical, but I don't think MIT
| decided this out of the "goodness" of their heart.
| h91wka wrote:
| Great news. Elsevier is a parasite.
| underdeserver wrote:
| I honestly don't understand why JSTOR, Elsevier and others like
| them still need to exist.
|
| Top universities should just found a non-profit, per subject,
| with a single paid facilitator and a single paid editor (per
| journal) to find peer reviewers and edit the papers into a
| monthly journal.
|
| Modern tech has made it ridiculously easy to type, edit and
| publish such a thing if the inputs are LaTeX, Word, Markdown
| files or a Google Doc. And if you want it printed, there are
| shops that can do that for you for a small fee as well.
|
| This should be 100% open access to everyone, extremely cheap and
| could be 100% funded by those who are still willing to pay for
| paper versions or by tiny contributions from the top 100
| universities.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Then you'll have replaced the problem of making research
| results actually available somewhere. But what it doesn't
| solve, is the problems of a) deciding what research to read and
| b) deciding which researchers to hire.
|
| Note that the current system, which relies on the brand name of
| the journals in which works (or an author's works) are
| published, is very flawed, but it's what people use, and is
| therefore what's making people refrain from actually publishing
| in those journals the universities would found.
|
| (Disclosure: I volunteer for https://plaudit.pub, a project
| that aims to contribute to solving the mentioned problems to
| enable transitioning to Open Access journals.)
| sitkack wrote:
| I love the idea of plaudit, it wold be interesting to tie
| into dlbp or semanticscholar. As it is now, I have to see if
| a researcher tweets paper recommendations. Are you working
| with either?
|
| I am sure you are aware, posting for the wider audience.
|
| Availability is the hard part, formats, indexing, a handle so
| that it can be referenced. We already have an awesome model
| for this with the e-print archives [2..=4].
|
| As for what to read, this is what overlay journals are for!
| [1]. By splitting the mechanics of submission, serving, basic
| vetting, etc. any other group of people can create as many
| overlay journals as they deem necessary. Sorting, ranking and
| clustering of the research now is not coupled to getting the
| knowledge recorded.
|
| This excellent article [5] linked from the wikipedia entry
| has the perfect description of the concept,
|
| >>> The Open Journal of Astrophysics works in tandem with
| manuscripts posted on the pre-print server arXiv. Researchers
| submit their papers from arXiv directly to the journal, which
| evaluates them by conventional peer review. Accepted versions
| of the papers are then re-posted to arXiv and assigned a DOI,
| and the journal publishes links to them.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlay_journal
|
| [2] https://arxiv.org/
|
| [3] https://www.biorxiv.org/
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Eprint_archives
|
| [5] https://www.nature.com/news/open-journals-that-piggyback-
| on-...
| beamatronic wrote:
| Why does MIT pay anyone for software?
| abhv wrote:
| I'm an academic.
|
| For years, my academic niche has tried to break free from the
| likes of Springer/Elsevier. Here are the bottlenecks:
|
| * There are wonderful "pre-print" servers like arxiv and
| eprint.iacr.org. However, these do not maintain the "archival
| quality" document storage that is needed for academic
| scientific literature. In day-to-day, all researchers use these
| to stay informed on recent results. But how to guarantee that
| nobody hacks in and figures out how to change a few bytes in
| one paper that is 10years old? How to guarantee that these
| documents are available 75 years from now? I'm sure that many
| of you can devise solutions to this, but they will be costly,
| and they will need constant labor to implement. How do you pay
| for this? It is OK when 20,000 researchers in a field are
| downloading papers every once in a while, but what happens when
| every student in the world wants to read these? The bandwidth
| charge becomes non-trivial. It seems like it needs to be
| outsourced, and some commercial entity with experience handles
| it.
|
| * The tenure process is slow to change. Many academics need
| publications in prestigious journals with "high impact factors"
| in order to get tenure because the upper-level tenure
| committees in older institutions use these metrics to evaluate
| cases. These people are not stupid: it is just hard to evaluate
| cases across a university when you are not an expert. Instead,
| you assume that certain journals represent "the highest quality
| work" and thus use the presence of those publications to judge
| researchers. This means that the top papers still end up in
| Elsevier/Springer journals.
|
| When I was a grad student at MIT, it was easy to read papers;
| if your IP was from MIT, every paper was 1 click away. I wonder
| how it is going to work now that Elsevier's catalog won't work
| this way...
| hedora wrote:
| I'm also an academic. Hash each paper, then hash the hashes.
| Publish the result with the proceedings. After year one,
| include the hash of the prior year(s). Problem solved.
|
| Recently I downloaded one of my old peer-reviewed papers. The
| "archival" service added a spammy logo to the bottom left
| corner of each page.
|
| I've been meaning to find the original and put it on my web
| page. Honestly, I might just add a list of all my papers with
| links to SciHub instead.
|
| I'm allowed to post them on my personal web page according to
| every copyright agreement I recall signing.
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| >Problem solved
|
| Not at all. There are corrections and amendments. It isn't
| as complicated as in law, but still.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| Signed declarations of amendment, then amended papers
| being added as new one with proof of amendment and link
| with the original. Kind of like how a keyserver deals
| with revoked keys.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| Corrections and amendments are _separate_ (but related)
| documents. Preventing them from being retroactively
| applied to the original version of the source document is
| _the specific thing that a archival-quality document
| storage is supposed to do_ (as opposed a non-archival-
| quality storage, which only needs to protect against data
| loss (as in turn opposed to a cache, which can rely on a
| backing storage)).
| code4tee wrote:
| These are valid concerns but in 2020 very easy problems to
| solve. There's little reason why a small consortium of
| institutions couldn't build a very robust system to
| accomplish all that. Use digital signatures and distributed
| mirrored storage and problem solved. Charge a very modest fee
| to members to cover fixed costs and make it free to the
| public. Heck a few we'll organized S3 buckets with a search
| engine attached would be better than a lot of what's out
| there today.
|
| Not to pick on academics but the commercial publishing houses
| basically prey on the stubbornness of the academic community
| here. In the pure private sector someone would come along
| tomorrow and make Elsevier and others obsolete and they would
| go bust quickly. MIT is making the moves that might just whip
| something into shape to remove Elsevier's role in the market.
|
| On "high impact" if the top universities in the world en-mass
| unsubscribe from the commercial players that will change
| quick.
| gwern wrote:
| > However, these do not maintain the "archival quality"
| document storage that is needed for academic scientific
| literature. In day-to-day, all researchers use these to stay
| informed on recent results. But how to guarantee that nobody
| hacks in and figures out how to change a few bytes in one
| paper that is 10years old? How to guarantee that these
| documents are available 75 years from now?
|
| I have never had a link to Arxiv or Biorxiv break, and I have
| never had difficulty finding a copy of a paper on them
| either, going back to Arxiv's founding in 1991. On the other
| hand, on a daily basis, I struggle to get a copy of a paper
| published often just years or decades old from these
| 'archival quality' publishers like Elsevier, and they break
| my links so frequently that I spend some time every day
| fixing broken links on y website (and for new links, I have
| simply stopped link them entirely & host any PDF I need so I
| don't have to deal with their bullshit in the future). I
| guess "archival-quality publisher" is used in much the same
| way as the phrase "academic-quality source code"...
| MrGunn wrote:
| Hey Gwern, big fan of your GPT2 work. I notice I'm
| surprised to hear you say you struggle daily to fix broken
| links to the Elsevier catalog at ScienceDirect, because the
| links are used by libraries all over the world & they don't
| have the same feedback. Would you have a few examples
| available for me to send to the folks responsible?
| gwern wrote:
| Nature does it all the time. Here's one I fixed just this
| morning when I noticed it by accident: http://www.nature.
| com/mp/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/mp201522... (Note, by
| the way, how very helpfully Nature redirects it to the
| homepage without an error. That's what the reader wants,
| right? To go to the homepage and for Nature to
| deliberately conceal the error from the website
| maintainer? This is definitely what every 'archival
| quality' journal should do, IMO, just to show off their
| top-notch quality and helpful ways and why we pay them so
| much taxpayer money.) Oh, SpringerLink broke a whole
| bunch which I am still fixing, here's two from yesterday:
| http://www.springerlink.com/content/5mmg0gmtg69g6978/
| http://www.springerlink.com/content/p26143p057591031/ And
| here's an amusing ScienceDirect example: https://www.scie
| ncedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000632071... (I would
| have loads more specifically ScienceDirect examples
| except I learned many years ago to never link
| ScienceDirect PDFs because the links expire or otherwise
| break.)
| tialaramex wrote:
| > But how to guarantee that nobody hacks in and figures out
| how to change a few bytes in one paper that is 10years old?
|
| Mostly you should stop worrying about this. Other people have
| explained various countermeasures that could be used, which
| are very cheap, but mostly nobody cares.
|
| And already today, without anybody altering anything, it is
| _very_ common for papers to use misleading citations. You
| take a paper that found some clowns like cake, you write
| "Almost all clowns like cake" and you cite that paper. It's
| possible a reviewer will notice and push back, but very
| likely you will get published even though you've stretched
| that citation beyond breaking point. Why "hack in" to change
| the paper when you can just distort what it said and get away
| with it?
| olau wrote:
| Just about the bandwidth costs: You can rent a server at
| Hetzner.de for 40 EUR with 1 Gbit/s. Let's say each PDF is
| around 100 kb, then you can serve 1000 PDFs per second. Say
| there are 50 million active research students in the world,
| then the single 40 EUR server can serve them about 10
| PDFs/week on average.
| dheera wrote:
| > I wonder how it is going to work now that Elsevier's
| catalog won't work this way
|
| MIT alum here. In my experience you can always request a copy
| directly from the author by e-mail. There is ResearchGate
| which aims to make this easier, but doesn't because the
| fundamental problem is academics don't have time to respond
| to every e-mail, much less every ResearchGate notification.
| So yes sometimes you have to ping them by e-mail about 2 or 3
| times.
|
| I think ResearchGate -- or even Google Scholar -- should add
| a feature to allow manuscript requests to be auto-replied
| with a copy of the document instead of waiting for the author
| to manually send a copy.
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| >But how to guarantee that nobody hacks in and figures out
| how to change a few bytes in one paper that is 10years old?
|
| And how Springer/Elsevier guarantee that? Is it written into
| cintracts?
| pas wrote:
| Even if it is... who enforces it? Who checks it? What does
| that guarantee worth? Who cares really about papers getting
| numbers changed...
|
| 90% of them are absolute crap and only max. 10% of the
| remaining 10% replicates just based on the text of the
| paper alone.
| wolco wrote:
| This is the first blockchain example that makes sense.
| jopsen wrote:
| I heard the archiving argument before.
|
| But I can't imagine that this is an expensive role for an
| organization like library of Congress or similar to take on.
| Many counties have a national library of sorts.
|
| Bandwidth/storage costs are limited, we're talking about
| PDFs.
| bduerst wrote:
| >When I was a grad student at MIT, it was easy to read
| papers; if your IP was from MIT, every paper was 1 click
| away.
|
| Isn't this predatory pricing?
| huhtenberg wrote:
| > _But how to guarantee that nobody hacks in and figures out
| how to change a few bytes in one paper that is 10years old?_
|
| Trusted timestamping.
|
| https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3161.txt
|
| It also happens to be very widely deployed and supported by
| well-established companies, because it's an integral part of
| executable cross-signing. That is, this exists _right now_.
| malikNF wrote:
| Wouldn't saving the hash of the document on some blockchain
| be a more simpler solution to proving the integrity of a
| document?
| sdinsn wrote:
| No, because you need to convince 3rd parties to
| participate, and you need to convince a majority of these
| parties to be honest.
| nihil75 wrote:
| From my brief time working at Springer, seeing how their
| business model shifted towards services and processes aimed
| at enabling as many publications as possible -
|
| I think basing tenure decisions on the fact papers were
| published there is based on archaic notions and misguided.
| oefrha wrote:
| Digital archival of PDFs weighing a few hundred KBs to a few
| MBs is definitely a solved problem. And there are already
| arXiv overlay journals out there, and platforms supporting
| them. Tim Gowers' (Fields medalist) blog posts on this topic
| are quite informative:
|
| https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-
| an...
|
| https://gowers.wordpress.com/2019/10/30/advances-in-
| combinat...
|
| Highlights: $10 per submission, plus some fixed costs,
| including archival with CLOCKSS. No Elsevier extortion ring
| needed.
|
| Impact factors are of course kind of a chicken and egg
| problem. Need to have enough high profile journals move off
| Big Publishing, or have enough high profile ones started.
|
| > When I was a grad student at MIT, it was easy to read
| papers; if your IP was from MIT, every paper was 1 click
| away.
|
| When I was a grad student at <institution of similar
| caliber>, or an undergrad at <another institution of similar
| caliber>, accessing papers was rather painful off campus. One
| either has to use EZproxy, which might decide to block you if
| it doesn't like your IP range (say in a foreign country), or
| use some godawful proprietary VPN client that I would stay
| the hell away from unless necessary.
| aduitsis wrote:
| Today it's much easier, practically all universities
| participate as Identity Providers in SAML Federations and
| digital libraries participate as Service Providers. So you
| can just use your institutional login credentials to the
| identity provider page of your university. The service
| provider receives a signed SAML assertion that, well,
| asserts that you belong to your university and you are,
| say, a student. Most popular software is Internet2
| Shibboleth (IdP and SP) in the academic field. It all works
| very well and has been for some time.
|
| In the country where I live, you get access to office365,
| (physical) books, digital libraries (including Elsevier :))
| and a wide variety of other services all via your
| institutional login.
| mcv wrote:
| > _Many academics need publications in prestigious journals
| with "high impact factors"_
|
| It wouldn't surprise me if this is a massive part of the
| problem. Any new system to replace Elsevier may be perfect in
| lots of ways, but it doesn't count as prestigious, which
| means everybody will still want/need to publish with
| Elsevier. How do you magically grant a new publishing
| platform this 'prestige'?
| bonoboTP wrote:
| When the prestigious expert editorial board resigns at the
| same time and creates a new journal. It has happened
| several times, e. g. Glossa for linguistics.
|
| Also JMLR in machine learning is independent and still well
| regarded.
| Vinnl wrote:
| "Flipping" journals is an option, but doesn't happen often
| because it's risk for the editors with little personal
| benefit.
|
| The answer the project I volunteer for [1] is that the
| prestige of a journal comes from the researchers who submit
| or review for it, so we can also employ their reputations
| without the middleman - by having them endorse works, thus
| having _their_ names instead of the journal names attached
| to the works.
|
| [1] https://plaudit.pub/
| vegetablepotpie wrote:
| When they mess up is when it changes. When you look at old
| institutions and powerful people, sometimes their rule ends
| abruptly because of scandal, bad decisions, or corruption.
| Bear Sterns, Enron, and Nixon are examples of this. For a
| new publishing platform to succeed, the old one needs die.
| For an organization built on prestige to die, it needs to
| be mired in scandal wrapped up and packaged in the
| political zeitgeist at that moment that not only affects
| its small community but also develops the ire of the entire
| society. At that point a new platform will emerge, likely
| backed by, and inheriting its prestige from, another
| institution.
|
| Edit: I realize, unfortunately, this post doesn't give
| anything actionable that anyone can enact. It at least
| offers hope that things can change.
| 1MoreThing wrote:
| > But how to guarantee that nobody hacks in and figures out
| how to change a few bytes in one paper that is 10years old?
|
| I can't believe I'm going to say this, but this sounds like
| an actual problem well-suited to a blockchain solution.
| x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
| I don't mean to be rude, but I think you are greatly
| exaggerating the technical and cost considerations behind
| this effort.
| underdeserver wrote:
| I'm a random industry software engineer. :)
|
| > In day-to-day, all researchers use these to stay informed
| on recent results. But how to guarantee that nobody hacks in
| and figures out how to change a few bytes in one paper that
| is 10years old?
|
| Printed versions + digitally signed and timestamped PDFs.
| This is a solved problem in the world, at least up to the
| level that Springer can solve it.
|
| > How to guarantee that these documents are available 75
| years from now?
|
| I trust MIT and Harvard to keep PDFs and printed versions
| available much more than I trust Elsevier or Springer to be
| around in 75 years.
|
| > Many academics need publications in prestigious journals
| with "high impact factors" in order to get tenure because the
| upper-level tenure committees in older institutions use these
| metrics to evaluate cases. These people are not stupid: it is
| just hard to evaluate cases across a university when you are
| not an expert. Instead, you assume that certain journals
| represent "the highest quality work" and thus use the
| presence of those publications to judge researchers. This
| means that the top papers still end up in Elsevier/Springer
| journals.
|
| I don't disagree. This is why the change and the first wave
| of papers will likely come from already-tenured professors,
| who still publish high impact papers.
|
| > When I was a grad student at MIT, it was easy to read
| papers; if your IP was from MIT, every paper was 1 click
| away. I wonder how it is going to work now that Elsevier's
| catalog won't work this way...
|
| Now imagine the same situation, except you don't need your IP
| to be from MIT.
| lozaning wrote:
| I don't have to imagine it: https://scihub.wikicn.top/
| ikiris wrote:
| this site doesn't even load.
| Recursing wrote:
| Might want to change your DNS to 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8
| mywittyname wrote:
| Just pointing out that Elsevier is ancient in business
| terms, it's origins as a publisher goes back to the mid
| 16th century and the modern version of the company is from
| around the 19th century. I'd be surprised if the company
| isn't around when I die.
|
| In addition to publishing, they (RELX) is one of the
| biggest companies you've never heard of. They provide
| information systems to governments all over the world and
| span multiple market segments. I guarantee you're in a
| dozen of their databases right now. And that your local,
| state, and federal taxes all funnel into their pockets in
| one form or another. Along with some of the money you pay
| for various insurances throughout the year. When you buy a
| house, rent an apartment, get a job, or basically have any
| major event in your life, they get paid.
| gwern wrote:
| > Just pointing out that Elsevier is ancient in business
| terms, it's origins as a publisher goes back to the mid
| 16th century and the modern version of the company is
| from around the 19th century.
|
| The 16th century publisher has nothing whatsoever to do
| with the current one, which shamelessly pirated and stole
| everything to plagiarize the prestige (so its ideas of
| business ethics go right back to its founding).
| Apparently, it worked.
| njharman wrote:
| It's not so much as they aren't an established company
| it's that that their business model has been
| broken/bypassed by technology. They've been reduced to
| being a middle-man that obstructs value rather than
| providing it.
|
| The only part of biz model left is "prestige" (very
| fickle), "customer lock in / inertia" (which is already
| going away re: OA), and lobbying government to prop
| up/expand their monopoly (ever extending/expanding
| copyrights, which is the one thing that doesn't seem they
| will ever lose on cause ever other bypassed dinosaur
| broke ass business model publisher spends tons on it).
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Tends to be ignored but the process of extracting a
| profit has costs. Both internal costs and external costs.
| Sometimes the external costs imposed exceed the profit
| extracted by a large amount.
| mywittyname wrote:
| I disagree. It seems like you only know Elsevier as a
| publisher of journals, but that's only about 1/3 of their
| overall business. They (RELX) provide a lot of useful
| services to companies and governments.
|
| About half their revenue and profits come from Risk and
| Legal services, which are not things you hear about in
| the news. They offer services for police, airlines, legal
| firms, insurance companies, accounting firms Hell, they
| have an analytics tool for agricultural businesses. They
| also have enough money to throw around in these spaces to
| prevent any startups from getting large enough to be a
| threat.
| lazyjeff wrote:
| Everyone here is imagining all the technical ways to
| replace publishers. That's quite feasible as you and others
| point out. I think there is also real work needed to solve
| social (people) problems, for example:
|
| - explain to the stakeholders by preparing various text and
| other media about how your format/venue/website is
| different and better, and convince them that this solves a
| real problem they should care about
|
| - solicit requirements from universities, funding agencies,
| various governments, about archiving and metadata
| requirements. Consider security, accessibility, long-term
| preservation, financial model, etc.
|
| - respond to the questions and pushback from numerous
| stakeholders about problems (real or not) about your
| proposed solution, debate them in a polite and professional
| way in semi-public forums, converge on a solution that's
| acceptable (or at least not overly repulsive) to the key
| stakeholders. Deal with any PR backlash, response from
| existing publishers, etc.
|
| - inform authors, potential authors, readers, journalists,
| universities administrators, students, etc. that there is a
| new publishing format/venue/website and that it is well
| managed and has a plan to be around for a long time
|
| - coordinate and schedule a team of people to work on this
| with you, to figure out policies (author plagiarism,
| recruiting editors if needed, dealing with potential
| lawsuits, bad actors, copyright and IP issues, etc.)
| pfortuny wrote:
| Oh dear, the burden of organizing peer-review and of
| consolidating some sort of "quality" stamp (I said "some sort
| of") is much more expensive than "nothing".
|
| I am not pro-Elsevier, I am just stating a fact.
| foepys wrote:
| The only people getting paid in the reviewing process are the
| journals that are only coordinating the reviews. Actual
| reviewers (aka other researchers in the same field as the
| paper) are working for free.
| pfortuny wrote:
| I know: I just stated that "organizing" it was expensive.
|
| I do know that reviewing is free (I have done it).
| dwheeler wrote:
| Organizing is not expensive.
|
| What is expensive is paying the typesetters to place the
| movable type in various places, and to create plates with
| the various graphics. Oh wait, we don't need to do that
| anymore.
|
| At this point, there is no rational justification for
| what Elsevier is doing now except greed. They actually
| have some other services that makes sense, but this lock
| on academic papers is simply a historical accident that
| is no longer relevant.
| nihil75 wrote:
| I don't think that's true 100% of the time. There are
| review-as-a-service solutions offered (and charged for) by
| the publishers.
| r00fus wrote:
| Perhaps this is the real change that's needed. Getting a
| review structure that rewards really thorough reviews,
| monetarily. Those reviewers then become like YT stars where
| yes, everyone can review, but _these_ reviewers are top-
| notch. The payment structure would depend on fees from
| accessing the works or fees for subscription to access.
|
| That might finally break (or finally justif) Elsevier and
| their ilk.
| mattkrause wrote:
| "Rockstar reviewers" seem like a cure that's almost as
| bad as the disease. Some scientific fields already have a
| problem with groupthink, with a few well-defined and
| vigorously-opposed schools of thought. I would vastly
| prefer a _broader_ reviewer pool to the usual suspects
| from the same few labs.
|
| Everybody likes money, but I'm also not sure that's the
| way to go either. It would be great if reviewing directly
| impacted people's academic/research careers; I suspect
| the ability to review well is highly correlated with the
| ability to successfully run a research group. However,
| there are lots of thorny issues involving power and
| interpersonal relationships.
| buboard wrote:
| Wikipedia editing doesn't cost much. Open, public review is
| free anyway. We would need a prestige-setting institution, i
| m sure we can come up with a substitute.
| manquer wrote:
| Why though? It is not like you don't have access to high
| quality cheap talent in the form of RAs/TAs etc why cannot
| that part be done by students ? It will also actually help
| them learn their subjects
| meej wrote:
| And yet much of the work of peer review is done on a
| volunteer basis.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Organizing it and providing the "quality stamp" is what I
| was referring to.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| > Organizing it and providing the "quality stamp" is what
| I was referring to.
|
| Lol that's also done by volunteers.
| underdeserver wrote:
| OK, maybe I exaggerated when I said nothing.
|
| Per subject, per journal, the same person who edits a journal
| today at Elsevier could do the same thing for the same salary
| at a university consortium-backed non-profit.
| pfortuny wrote:
| Yes, per subject per journal but then how many non-profits
| do you need? How do you organize them? How do you get a
| coordinated best-effort, etc...
|
| I mean: corporations do not exist in a vacuum, they
| (usually) DO provide benefits to the society also.
|
| I insist: I am not trying to defend abuses, I am trying to
| clarify that a for-profit corporation dealing with those
| many editorial issues is not bad per se.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > I honestly don't understand why JSTOR, Elsevier and others
| like them still need to exist.
|
| I suspect you're being rhetorical here, but just in case: your
| premise is wrong; they don't need to exist, in fact they need
| to not exist; preferably they need to die in a fire.
| specialist wrote:
| _" Top universities should just [fund]..."_
|
| I want something more crazy, daring.
|
| Kickstarter, meets blogging, meets X-Prizes, meets startup
| incubator, meets moon-shots, meets those McArthur genius
| grants, meets Y-Combinator classes (cohorts?).
|
| Start with a fund.
|
| Recruit some lunatics, err, mavericks, err, battle weary
| scientists to judge proposals.
|
| Make a couple lofty problem statements. Maybe one per year.
|
| "Create next generation peer review system."
|
| "Invent open access research thingamajig."
|
| "Launch competitive journals for emerging disciplines."
|
| "Deploy FOSS collaborative content management system for
| science reporting."
|
| Define some semi-plausible victory conditions. Number of papers
| refereed. Number of research projects hosted. Number of
| citations.
|
| Each applicant does a pitch.
|
| Fund a reasonable number for groups each round.
|
| Beer and pizza.
|
| Wet, lather, rinse, repeat.
| supernova87a wrote:
| Well, despite the parasitic nature of the modern commercial
| journal world (and originally they did come from more
| benevolent aims, but got consumed by corporations) -- they do
| serve an important filtering and quality control mechanism.
|
| A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity without
| having some judgement and bias applied. One that's hard for an
| intrepid band of volunteers to recreate without funding and
| full time commitment. Who will be the editors? There's also the
| problem of how to create a new journal that has the prestige of
| an old established one. Which new journal will we select to
| have the prestige?
|
| But yes, they have become parasites, who prey on the free labor
| of eager young academics, take their work and sell access to
| it, enforce copyrights on knowledge created by taxpayer money,
| and bundle useless journals in with important ones so everyone
| has to pay more.
|
| It's in the public interest for academic fields and the
| universities to come up with a reasonable alternative.
| chrispeel wrote:
| > One that's hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to
| recreate without funding and full time commitment. Who will
| be the editors?
|
| I've been a reviewer and editor for various IEEE and other
| engineering publications and have never been paid. Of course
| funding for editors is helpful, yet it may be like open
| source where some are willing to put in work for free.
| underdeserver wrote:
| > Well, despite the parasitic nature of the modern commercial
| journal world (and originally they did come from more
| benevolent aims, but got consumed by corporations) -- they do
| serve an important filtering and quality control mechanism.
|
| No they don't. Their editors do, not the entire organization,
| and really it's the selected (volunteer) peer reviewers who
| do.
|
| > A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity
| without having some judgement and bias applied.
|
| Agreed.
|
| > One that's hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to
| recreate without funding and full time commitment. Who will
| be the editors?
|
| That's why I think universities should be the founders. The
| top professors in a certain field can nominate a good editor,
| who will be paid full-time.
|
| > There's also the problem of how to create a new journal
| that has the prestige of an old established one. Which new
| journal will we select to have the prestige?
|
| Prestige comes from being relevant and innovative. Also, who
| said this has to be a new journal? Why not convert an
| established on?
| MrGunn wrote:
| The majority (70% or so) of submissions are desk-rejected
| without even being sent for review, and the ability to do
| that well is something that's learned over time with
| extensive detailed knowledge of the particular field served
| by the journal. Note that there are more kinds of editors
| than just academic editors, too, even at places like PLOS &
| eLife.
| nerdponx wrote:
| _A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity
| without having some judgement and bias applied._
|
| How does this follow? "Open" doesn't mean "anyone can
| publish", it means "anyone can read".
|
| Funding for editors and webhosting should come from the
| universities themselves. Replace Elsevier with a nonprofit
| consortium funded directly by universities, and a lot of
| these problems just go away.
| cycomanic wrote:
| > Well, despite the parasitic nature of the modern commercial
| journal world (and originally they did come from more
| benevolent aims, but got consumed by corporations) -- they do
| serve an important filtering and quality control mechanism.
|
| I generally agree with you here
|
| > A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity
| without having some judgement and bias applied. One that's
| hard for an intrepid band of volunteers to recreate without
| funding and full time commitment. Who will be the editors?
|
| But the editors in the majority of journals are already
| volunteers. They might get some minor amount of money for
| their work (we are typically talking maybe $100 a month max),
| but that's it. The only journals that have full time editors
| are the highest impact journals like nature and science, but
| it shows again and again that they are not really domain
| experts and are not necessarily acting in the interest of
| science. I actually have heard a nature editor say "our
| business is to sell journals, not to publish the best
| science".
|
| >There's also the problem of how to create a new journal that
| has the prestige of an old established one. Which new journal
| will we select to have the prestige?
|
| Well if the big universities and funding agencies would push,
| this would happen quite fast.
|
| > But yes, they have become parasites, who prey on the free
| labor of eager young academics, take their work and sell
| access to it, enforce copyrights on knowledge created by
| taxpayer money, and bundle useless journals in with important
| ones so everyone has to pay more.
|
| > It's in the public interest for academic fields and the
| universities to come up with a reasonable alternative.
| brownbat wrote:
| > "A 100% open and free journal cannot achieve selectivity
| without having some judgement and bias applied."
|
| Establishing reputation is the central challenge for a lot of
| the internet. Sorting spam from mail, sorting useful search
| results from SEO, sorting legit programs from malware on app
| stores.
|
| "Let's just have a small handful of people manually review
| everything" is not a terrible _first_ approach! It is the
| naive solution, and will work if you don 't have to scale. It
| even worked for search for a couple years.
|
| And you might argue that it's ok for journals to keep doing
| that because they don't have to scale. They don't have to
| review, rate, and publish everything good. They can have a
| very, very tiny output and it's ok.
|
| But there is some cost to rate limiting scientific output.
|
| So I'm surprised there hasn't at least been a good competitor
| incorporating what we've learned from other domains. It
| wouldn't be the same, but at least trying to use some things
| like citation counts and reader behavior for an initial guess
| at what deserves review.
|
| All the arguments that "we need a small group of
| professionals curating these" lose a little weight in a
| replication crisis.
|
| If you really wanted to try this, you might want to go after
| low hanging fruit. Someone should make a nutritional science
| journal, using purely algorithmic data to score proposals.
| Not much to lose there.
|
| https://io9.gizmodo.com/i-fooled-millions-into-thinking-
| choc...
| mihaaly wrote:
| I believe peer review should be supplemented or even replaced
| by social review methods where not only arbitrary reviewers but
| the whole scientific community might have chance judging,
| discussing and commenting any paper. Online. The logic and
| safeguards may not be that easy to create in the first place
| but in my opinion it would worth the effort eventually!
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| We will never be all experts on all subjects. _Peer_ review
| is by peers, not laypersons. From the STEM perspective, a
| democratic solution would be a disaster. Two immediate
| reasons come to mind, the loss of peer expertise in the
| noise, and brigading.
| mihaaly wrote:
| I wrote "scientific community". What I meant is the
| "relevant scientific community", it wasn't evident
| apparently.
|
| Also the selection of the reviewers is just partially
| depends on the expertness already, several other aspects
| affect it quite a lot. Not to mention that why a certain
| selection should be the one why not an other, why not the
| relevant community chooses the reviewers then? Just because
| not every details are fined carved the idea should not be
| dropped. (I was participating in certain peer review
| processes where I was an almost outsider and very far from
| being an expert, I have little conviction that the current
| one works well)
| xtracto wrote:
| Imagine that you have voting rights to review a paper (a-la
| slashdot, where random people got opportunity to tag
| something as insightful, interesting, etc).
|
| Now imagine that there comes an article in X subject (say,
| Agent Based Modeling).
|
| When you "vote" in that article, the "dimension" of your
| vote is proportional to your "impact factor" in that
| subject (i.e., say you published 20 articles in ABM and you
| got 10 "votes" on them, then each of your votes count as 10
| votes). On the contrary, if your impact factor is negative,
| your vote doesn't count. That way people that are
| considered "knowledgable" in their subject, will be able to
| peer-review other articles.
|
| Another method would be something like what StackOverflow
| has: Initially everybody gets 1 vote (or 10, or 1 every
| month, or whatever), and you "transfer it" by voting for an
| article (maybe to the 1st author, or evenly distributed),
| so because the "votes" are scarce, people with care for
| them. And people with articles that are most voted, can
| themselves vote more.
|
| There are plenty of systems that could work. And the beauty
| of it is that they could be "layered" on top of Arxiv with
| a Chrome extension or similar.
|
| Mhmm, sounds like a good weekend project .
| chrisseaton wrote:
| You can already judge, discuss and comment on any paper you
| want - create a blog and do it.
| mihaaly wrote:
| Hm, perhaps the HN should be closed as well and everyone
| should have their own blog instead?... or ask the peer
| reviewers to discuss and judge papers on their blogs
| instead?
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Not sure what you mean, sorry?
|
| When a conference chooses which papers to accept, that's
| _them_ accepting the paper.
|
| If you don't want to accept the paper then you don't have
| to, but yes you don't get a right to veto some other
| conference doing it.
| heyblinkin wrote:
| As a former employee of Elsevier, you really do love to see it.
| rvz wrote:
| Finally. But several years late on the side of MIT in this case
| but at last better late than never.
| stevespang wrote:
| Glad to see MIT give Elsevier "the finger"
| DataWorker wrote:
| Come a long way since Aaron Swartz. Let's hope the reform
| continues.
| monadic2 wrote:
| Welp, apparently we aren't shifting away from toxic publishing
| mechanisms any time soon.
| birktj wrote:
| Recently (I believe around a year ago or so) my university lost
| access to many publisher services because of some negotiations.
| The negotiations were about a new Norwegian law requiring all
| publicly funded research to be publicly available. I don't
| remember exactly what happened with the negotiations, but I
| presume they somehow found a solution.
|
| EDIT: Found a relevant website about open access in Norway
| https://www.openaccess.no/english/
| Nemo_bis wrote:
| The Norwegian case and many others are listed in the SPARC
| cancellation tracker: https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-
| cancellation-trackin...
| nomercy400 wrote:
| I'm curious (playing devil's advocate): Does this mean that MIT
| can now do research and not be required to publish this anywhere,
| not even journals?
|
| And, if somebody from MIT does publish something under this
| framework, can they claim copyright and disallow any use of the
| contents of the papers if so convenient? Move away from patents
| and straight into copyright. We all know how well the US
| copyright system works, right?
|
| I mean, doesn't Elsevier guarantee that the paper will be 'free-
| from-copyright' of the original institution/country, to any other
| research institution part of their network. Like, share the
| knowledge to those connected.
|
| Do these moves away from Elsevier mean a more open-access, or a
| more-copyrighted-access to papers? I see no commitment for MIT to
| relinquish copyright, nor any commitment to make everything open
| access.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| > Does this mean that MIT can now do research and not be
| required to publish this anywhere, not even journals?
|
| They were never required. Scientists do research and share
| their results so they can be improved and combined and provide
| insight. It started out with private letters between scientists
| in the early days, then journals appeared that would distribute
| the incoming letters to other interested parties. Over time it
| became a formalized system with metrics, incentives, publish or
| perish etc. But the original goal was to share and announce
| your results.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Pretty much every research grant that feeds university
| researchers (as opposed to industry researchers) will require
| that the results of the research must be published; often
| with some more specific criteria - e.g. a peer-reviewed
| journal with an impact rating in the top quartile, not just
| on your webpage.
| Vinnl wrote:
| I don't really get your questions. Elsevier was never the one
| who demanded that MIT published research, so this shouldn't
| change anything there.
|
| When a researcher publishes with Elsevier, the common practice
| when _not_ transferring copyright is to give them a perpetual
| licence to publish the work.
|
| Additionally, presumably MIT requires their researchers to
| publish their work as Open Access, i.e. with a licence that
| allows re-use and distribution for everyone - so they cannot
| disallow use of the contents of the papers arbitrarily.
| Elsevier is not needed for that.
| ghoshbishakh wrote:
| This would make Aron Swartz proud
| mdoshi wrote:
| This is great news! Going from prosecuting Swartz to ending a
| contract with Elsevier.
| [deleted]
| wpietri wrote:
| It is a rare pleasure to see people taking their principles
| seriously: "... the MIT Framework is grounded in the conviction
| that openly sharing research and educational materials is key to
| the Institute's mission of advancing knowledge and bringing that
| knowledge to bear on the world's greatest challenges".
|
| Take note, corporations: this is how you live a mission
| statement.
| 3mcd wrote:
| You should check out https://www.knowledgefutures.org, a non-
| profit founded by the MIT Press and the MIT Media Lab to build
| open authoring/publishing tools and a distributed knowledge
| platform.
| q3k wrote:
| You don't have permission to access
| "http://news.mit.edu/2020/guided-by-open-access-principles-mit-
| ends-elsevier-negotiations-0611" on this server.
| Reference #18.9d580317.1591886472.57240f92
| qntmfred wrote:
| the irony
| ghaff wrote:
| The site is just being hugged a bit too hard.
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| Here is the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts:
|
| https://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly/publishing/framework/
|
| It requires that:
|
| 1. No author will be required to waive any institutional or
| funder open access policy to publish in any of the publisher's
| journals.
|
| 2. No author will be required to relinquish copyright, but
| instead will be provided with options that enable publication
| while also providing authors with generous reuse rights.
|
| 3. Publishers will directly deposit scholarly articles in
| institutional repositories immediately upon publication or will
| provide tools/mechanisms that facilitate immediate deposit.
|
| 4. Publishers will provide computational access to subscribed
| content as a standard part of all contracts, with no restrictions
| on non-consumptive, computational analysis of the corpus of
| subscribed content.
|
| 5. Publishers will ensure the long-term digital preservation and
| accessibility of their content through participation in trusted
| digital archives.
|
| 6. Institutions will pay a fair and sustainable price to
| publishers for value-added services, based on transparent and
| cost-based pricing models.
|
| Not surprising that Elsevier couldn't meet these requirements. #2
| in particular seems antithetical to Elsevier's philosophy.
|
| What was surprising was the number of institutions which had
| signed onto the framework - my alma mater included. I'm curious
| how many of these still have an Elsevier contract.
| enriquto wrote:
| > What was surprising was the number of institutions which had
| signed onto the framework - my alma mater included. I'm curious
| how many of these still have an Elsevier contract.
|
| If you ever tried to dig deep into the internals of a large
| organization, you will notice that they are perfectly capable
| of managing a set of self-contradictory rules. It is actually
| an amazing power. At least, this was my experience.
|
| For a mathematician used to third-excluded logic, it may seem
| impossible, since you can prove anything from "p and not p".
| Yet, these organizations manage to not be able to do arbitrary
| things from contradictory inputs, but somewhat sane things
| (some of the time).
| skywhopper wrote:
| I mean, the reality of any large institution (or even a
| single human being) is that there will inevitably exist many
| contradictory "rules" that must be handled. I'm not sure how
| it is amazing. It's a fundamental necessity for their
| existence.
| oliwarner wrote:
| Policy compliance is a constant battle of wills in most large
| organisation. Enough of a battle in some places that they
| have compliance staff.
|
| Just because they sign up to do something in a particular way
| doesn't mean everybody in that org is going to follow those
| rules.
| arcturus17 wrote:
| Just like the humans that make them, then.
| rini17 wrote:
| Ruthlessly applying logical rules onto reality tends to
| create singularities :)
| Tainnor wrote:
| Totally a tangent, but: the law of the excluded middle
| ("tertium non datur") doesn't state that "a and not a" is
| always invalid, it states that "a or not a" is always valid.
| This is a somewhat important distinction since there are
| logic systems (intuitionism) where "a or not a" is not a
| tautology, yet I don't know of any logic that accepts "a and
| not a".
| jiveturkey wrote:
| > they are perfectly capable of managing a set of self-
| contradictory rules. It is actually an amazing power.
|
| Not amazing. Rules are for the ruled. The executive is not
| bound by them.
| mcphage wrote:
| > you will notice that they are perfectly capable of managing
| a set of self-contradictory rules. It is actually an amazing
| power.
|
| That's how life is, though--a jumble of rules that don't all
| agree and aren't all consistent. So you get used to juggling
| them all, making them work together as well as you can, so
| you can get your job done and move on.
| ptero wrote:
| Yes, but to me this (the contradictory nature of a large
| set of rules in life) is a nuisance, not a feature to be
| welcomed. Sometimes it is unavoidable or very expensive to
| clean, but we should discourage adding complex rules
| contradicting our existing set if possible. My 2c.
| fnovd wrote:
| Light behaves as both a wave and a particle. This goes
| well beyond human eccentricities. The universe does not
| care that our simple brains want to model it simply.
| marksbrown wrote:
| The wave and particle models are our own. They don't
| necessarily respect the true nature of reality. A bit
| like the old anecdote about blindfolded people feeling an
| elephant.
| fnovd wrote:
| The dual, contradictory model predicts reality better
| than a unified one can. A set of contradictory rules
| might create better outcomes than a set of
| straightforward rules.
| crdrost wrote:
| I don't think this is downvote-worthy, even if it is
| something of a personal opinion. Heck, half of what
| transpires for discourse on HN technical topics boils
| down to personal opinion. On days when I am being
| cynical, I think that the phrase "Best practices say
| that" is a veiled synonym for "I prefer that", for
| example.
|
| This thing -- that different rules get layered in
| inconsistent ways that cannot easily be algorithmized --
| is indeed an inconvenient part of adulthood. But it is a
| subset of an even more difficult problem. Shermer put it
| this way, that "smart people are very good at defending
| beliefs which they arrived at by non-smart reasons."
| Perhaps the most jarring studies proving this happen on
| split-brain patients -- people who, because of for
| example seizures, had a medical procedure where their
| corpus callosum was severed and now their two halves of
| the brain cannot talk to each other anymore. Some studies
| of such patients document trying to prompt their right
| half of the brain to do something, then verbally ask the
| left half why they are doing that thing. The shocking
| thing is that they usually do not get some "I don't know"
| response from the left-brain; they apparently usually get
| a comprehensive justification of the action complete with
| all sorts of details except for the crucial one ("I did
| it because you asked me to"). So like if the behavior was
| standing up they will explain how they felt uncomfortable
| about sitting too long and needed to stretch their legs,
| but the actual reason was that the experimenters asked
| the other half of their brain to stand up and it felt
| agreeable to that suggestion.
|
| Justification is in other words something that we
| generally backtrack to find. And this in many ways kindly
| resolves the problems of inconsistencies. Because a
| better way to look at it is that we have various values
| which our actions can either serve or betray. Those
| values are not perfectly orthogonal, and thus alien to
| any sort of conflict: rather, certain actions will invite
| you to trade off your value of (say) living an ambitious
| daring life of adventures with the value of (say) being
| compassionate to others. So if you were to have an affair
| you will need to evaluate a moderate betrayal of your
| value of simplicity/honesty and a large betrayal of your
| compassion (and if you have this value a massive betrayal
| of your humility and self-vanishing) for a minor benefit
| to your curiosity and a moderate benefit to your risky
| ambitiousness. All of these values come in to speak a
| separate statement over that choice, and the judgment
| must be made by you-as-judge to weigh whether the
| benefits are worth the costs. [This particular schema of
| five values was in fact the result of a large amount of
| introspection in my more vulnerable years but now I am
| not sure that I find it correct -- but it is still useful
| for this discussion I think.] In my case my judgment is
| simply that I'd lose way more than I'd gain, so cheating
| is immoral -- and not just immoral "for me" but that in
| my ideology pretty much everyone will lose way more than
| they'd gain, so that "all other things being equal" it is
| immoral to cheat on your spouse. And indeed if these
| values are objective, as we have some reason to believe
| they would be -- like, human biology just functions
| better if we can generate societies, and those societies
| just function better if they can have values such as
| these -- then objectively cheating is immoral. So the
| fact that we can backtrack from our actions to our values
| and weigh those actions with those values really frees us
| from having to somehow "orthogonalize" our values into
| nonoverlapping Kantian precepts that might hopefully
| never conflict with each other and generate a logical
| derivation of what we should do, "People should never lie
| unless they are saving folks from Nazis or they are
| preserving the surprise of a surprise party or... or...
| or..."
| zentiggr wrote:
| Consider the state and intent of a group of humanity as a
| spin glass, and you can apply a little bit of vaguely
| applicable analysis.
|
| I've tried for most of my life to internalize that most
| of the difficulty in life is caused by different people
| having different viewpoints and goals and conditions. Any
| endeavour only works as well as the sum of its
| implementors.
| devit wrote:
| It's easy to make this non-contradictory by making the rules
| apply only to future contracts, or only when the decision
| maker wants them to apply.
| enriquto wrote:
| this guy manages!
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > they are perfectly capable of managing a set of self-
| contradictory rules
|
| This is caused by managers' and middle-managers' performance
| metrics being tied to the wrong outcomes.
|
| The top layer of management's target is the desired outcome.
| The bottom layer's (the worker) target is also clear, it's to
| do whatever _their_ manager says to do.
|
| In the middle is where it often breaks down; their objectives
| are short-sighted and while it works out for their _own_
| career, it rarely benefits the top level target. At best, it
| introduces a large inefficiency, waste of resources and
| unnecessary busywork ( "bullshit jobs" becomes relevant here)
| and at worst it goes completely _against_ the target set at
| the top level.
|
| Imagine it as an eventually-consistent system. If you don't
| change anything and give the system enough time it will
| eventually achieve its goal. The problem is that the "time"
| we're talking about is measured in years if not decades and
| during that period the system is stuck in a contradictory
| state. Endless restructurings and other external factors
| often reset this "timer" so the system is even more likely to
| stay in the contradictory state forever (some other "systems"
| _depend_ on _this_ system staying in the contradictory
| state), despite theoretically advancing towards the end-goal.
| JackFr wrote:
| > At best, it introduces a large inefficiency, waste of
| resources and unnecessary busywork ("bullshit jobs" becomes
| relevant here)
|
| If the COVID-19 lockdown has taught us anything, it's that
| probably a full third of our economy is bullshit jobs.
| We're at best self-perpetuating economic 'nice-to-haves',
| at worst parasitic rent seekers, probably somewhere in
| between, whose real role is simply to distribute GDP more
| widely, while pretending to add value to society.
| majormajor wrote:
| I don't really understand what COVID would tell us about
| "bullshit jobs." It tells us that restaurants and bars
| and concerts, etc, aren't "necessary." Duh? Leisure
| activity has never been necessary, but it's still
| something we enjoy and value.
|
| The existence of those leisure jobs and the venues they
| operates certainly adds value to my life.
| saalweachter wrote:
| I suppose that is a third way to deal with automation.
|
| I usually say, there are two ways to deal with
| productivity increases (from automation and
| industrialization): you can either attempt to do more as
| a civilization (build moon bases, increased consumer
| goods, etc) or you can have everyone work less (3 or 4
| day work weeks, 5 hour work days, etc).
|
| I guess you can also just create lots of bullshit jobs so
| everyone is still "working" 40+ hours a week without
| actually doing anything.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| I believe your third answer is indeed the reason that
| despite so many things being automated, we're not seeing
| benefits of that in terms of reduced workloads on people.
| The way I see it, as long as creating bullshit jobs is
| easy, the market will force everyone to work 40+ hour a
| week to survive. And as long as creating bullshit jobs
| that just shuffle money around is easier than creating
| socially valuable jobs, we won't see any Moon bases
| either.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| It's not just a matter of, is creating bullshit jobs
| easy?
|
| On the one side we have supply constraints on
| necessities. If there isn't enough good housing for
| everyone and we're not allowed to build more then people
| will have to work 40 hours so they can outbid other
| people on the good housing and not get stuck in the bad
| housing. We could solve this by building more good
| housing, but only if we actually do that.
|
| On the other side it's a question of where the surplus
| goes. You have a company that makes billions of dollars
| -- far more than it needs to operate. What happens to the
| rest of the money? If the managers get to use it for
| empire building, you get bullshit jobs. That happens a
| lot.
|
| Ideally we'd solve both, but even just one would be
| progress.
|
| If you don't have to work 40 hours to afford necessities
| then you're not going to choose a 40 hour bullshit job.
| You're either going to choose a real job or a job with
| lower hours so that you can spend more of your time doing
| something you want to do, which might very well itself be
| a real job (i.e. starting your own business).
|
| Whereas if we can figure out how to transfer more wealth
| away from organizations and into the hands of real
| people, that gets rid of bullshit jobs too, because most
| of them come from the principal-agent problem and the
| misalignment between managers and owners/taxpayers.
| Transferring the money to any person or entity without
| middle management would be a net improvement.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Look at it from another angle: would people work bullshit
| jobs if they didn't have to? Fix the incentives, pay
| people a minimum income where they don't have to work,
| and if you absolutely need labor you're going to have to
| pay someone who doesn't have to be there if they don't
| want to.
|
| If people's basic needs were met, I think you'd see a lot
| of labor shift to work that is valuable, but currently
| not compensated for.
|
| Also, you have to adjust constraints to deal with legacy
| systems: the Federal Reserve works to maximize employment
| through monetary policy. This is suboptimal, when work
| will expand to consume the time allowed for it [1]. You
| need to use a one way policy ratchet to ratchet down the
| hours per week worked as productivity has increased,
| otherwise workers will never see productivity gains and
| society will be stuck on the 40 hour labor work week
| forever.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson%27s_law
| webmaven wrote:
| > You need to use a one way policy ratchet to ratchet
| down the hours per week worked as productivity has
| increased, otherwise workers will never see productivity
| gains and society will be stuck on the 40 hour labor work
| week forever.
|
| The feasibility of this (in the US) is strongly dependent
| on health insurance not being tied to having a full-time
| job (often defined as just under 40 hours a week).
|
| Plenty of employers have demonstrated that they can be
| organized to use mostly part-time labor, but their
| incentive to do this has been avoiding the obligation and
| expense of contributing to health insurance and other
| benefits, rather than giving employees a productivity
| dividend.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| I agree. Healthcare must no longer be tied to employment.
| WJW wrote:
| There's a ton of nice-to-have professions that are not
| strictly necessary, like musicians and decorative
| fountain builders. That is _a good thing_! It 's clearly
| possible to live in a giant grey barrack and eat nothing
| but soylent but it's not what 99% of the population would
| prefer. If anything, it would be good for society to make
| the percentage of not-essential-but-nice-to-have as high
| as possible.
| burtness wrote:
| I dont think the parent comment's bullshit jobs are the
| same as your definition of nice-to-have jobs, at least
| assuming parent is talking about David Graeber's use of
| the term.
|
| Bullshit jobs are ones that could disappear and the
| impact would unnoticeable or minimal for an
| organisation's output. Nice-to-have (for society?)
| professions still have value, otherwise they wouldn't be
| nice - if all the musicians disappeared people would
| definitely notice.
|
| I'd also contest the idea that cultural labour is
| unnecessary. Lots of people in lockdown have depended on
| all kinds of music, TV, film, etc to maintain their
| mental health. This seems to go beyond preference, even
| if not everyone needs the same or as much cultural
| produce to survive healthily.
| ironmagma wrote:
| It's roughly the same concept. Those people were hired
| for a reason, even if it wasn't a fully rational one.
| Just as musicians are the quality of life improvers of
| society at large, so too are code janitors to an IT team.
| toshk wrote:
| The idea of bullshit jobs started a few years ago mostly
| based upon the idea that the people doing themselves felt
| like they were doing bullshit jobs, and therefore not
| feeling fullfilled.
| fnord77 wrote:
| if anything, I'd wager the bullshit jobs make an
| organization less efficient.
| Paddywack wrote:
| "There is nothing as necessary as the unnecessary" - from
| the movie Life is Beautiful.
| mlyle wrote:
| There's various kinds of "unnecessary work" jobs. Some do
| really contribute directly to the common welfare:
| artisans and producers of culture; providers of small
| conveniences, etc.
|
| There's also a whole lot of administrative, artificial,
| make-busy-work jobs, where we build complicated systems
| of bureaucracy to prevent losses that cost orders of
| magnitude more than the losses they prevent, and that in
| turn impose layers of bureaucracy on others.
| roenxi wrote:
| To be fair, nobody knows which parts of a complex
| bureaucracy are useless and which are important. There is
| a pretty decent chance that the truly useless parts of an
| organisation are linked in to complying with regulations.
|
| Most of the parts of the bureaucracy that I think are
| useless are the parts that are non-negotiable from a
| legal perspective.
| wolfd wrote:
| The current losses in public education will be felt on
| the decades timescale. I think the perspective here on HN
| is probably shifted due to the tech demographic, where VC
| and ads have provided a buffer.
|
| Systems have inertia, stuff continues working until it
| hits a wall. The unemployment systems written in COBOL
| kept churning until now, for example.
|
| I think the cuts in jobs might give the impression that
| "we never needed them in the first place," and maybe
| that's true in some cases, but it's hard to distinguish
| right now from the effects that take years to surface.
| jl6 wrote:
| I still have never seen a concrete example of a job which
| is clearly a bullshit job. Any suggestions?
| aspaceman wrote:
| Has always seemed like a rhetorical device to me. In
| effect no job is actually bullshit since if it was it
| would be eliminated. The truest "bullshit" job is one
| where you are absolutely irreplacable for a single,
| trivial piece of knowledge. I.E. I'm the only one who can
| print the records at the end of the year, and otherwise I
| do (practically) nothing. That's how I've always thought
| of it, but others may disagree.
|
| Often times it feels like a way for creatives and
| engineers who make the product to express some (rightful)
| resentment towards the folks who manage people and
| business.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > The top layer of management's target is the desired
| outcome.
|
| Kinda. Top managers tend to have a much shorter time
| preference than shareholders. The incentives are aligned
| only when all shareholders are of the active trading kind
| (if that ever happens on any company).
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Isn't there also an additional misalignment caused by
| shareholders who hold shares only to speculate on the
| stock market? Those shareholders don't care about long-
| term goals of the company, but only about short-term
| stock performance they can use to jump sell their shares
| high, and then buy some other shares low.
| PeterisP wrote:
| Short term speculators have no direct influence on the
| management (other than through share price i.e. the money
| they promise to give to the long-term shareholders to
| sell their shares) because they don't hold the shares
| long enough to vote on the shareholder's meetings - the
| long- and mid-term shareholders can order the board on
| what the priority should be or replace the board if it's
| not aligned with these goals; and there's a class of
| activist investors who buy shares in order to do just
| that, to steer the company somewhere else - but in order
| to do that, you can't be a short-term speculator, you
| have to buy, vote and wait before selling.
| mmsimanga wrote:
| > The top layer of management's target is the desired
| outcome.
|
| In my working life my experience has been the opposite. I
| have spent my career in large corporate environments. Often
| the top management are removed from reality as an example I
| once had a CIO who thought he could replace a 20 year old
| database that had several thousand tables and countless
| stored procedures. First step of such a plan is a POC and
| guess who gets to implement the POC whilst making sure the
| application actually bringing in the money keeps working,
| it is the middle manager. Consultants are brought in but
| they end up taking up the middle manager's time because
| middle manager has to explain current application to
| consultants. Millions later the project is scrapped.
| [deleted]
| setgree wrote:
| > 2. No author will be required to relinquish copyright, but
| instead will be provided with options that enable publication
| while also providing authors with generous reuse rights.
|
| I've published a few papers (and have worked closely with
| Elsevier in a business context). When we published in a
| paywalled journal, we had the option of paying an APC [0] to
| make the particular article open access. So in that sense, we
| were not 'required' to relinquish copyright. It was just costly
| to retain it.
|
| I suspect this is how some publishers argue that their
| contracts do not violate these maxims, because an APC option is
| fairly common, even at Elsevier, I think. Many journals also
| permit authors to post pre-edited versions of their papers on
| their personal websites.
|
| I also think that, in line with what a commenter below, a large
| organization like MIT is not a coherent actor. There are
| political battles and compromises we don't see. So publishing
| this list could be someone's tactic for winning the internal
| struggle against negotiating with Elsevier.
|
| Chris Bourg, who is a prominent advocate for open access at
| MIT, is my best bet for the driving force behind this:
|
| https://twitter.com/mchris4duke/status/1271094535297339399
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Article_processing_charge
| Nemo_bis wrote:
| That's like saying that getting a prison sentence doesn't
| really remove your liberty, because it's just costly to
| regain it (with a period in prison).
|
| The point is whether the publisher respects the authors right
| of republication of its own work, which is enshrined as
| inalienable right in [several
| jurisdictions](https://aisa.sp.unipi.it/attivita/diritto-di-
| ripubblicazione...) like the Netherlands. Even better, the
| publisher can avoid asking for exclusive rights, which are
| wholly superfluous for the operation of a journal.
| amjaeger wrote:
| Chris Bourg sent the email announcing it.
| btrettel wrote:
| > When we published in a paywalled journal, we had the option
| of paying an APC [0] to make the particular article open
| access. So in that sense, we were not 'required' to
| relinquish copyright. It was just costly to retain it.
|
| It's worth noting that some (maybe even many) journal open
| access options do not allow the authors to keep copyright,
| even if they pay money! Open access [?] keeping copyright.
| setgree wrote:
| good point. I just double-checked and ours says:
|
| > Copyright: (c) Cambridge University Press 2018
|
| > This is an Open Access article, distributed under the
| terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence
| (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which
| permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction
| in any medium, provided the original work is properly
| cited.
|
| So I guess Cambridge is the copyright holder but it's
| available under CC, which I think qualifies as "generous
| reuse rights," as originally stipulated.
| dathinab wrote:
| As far as I understood it 2. isn't about open access per see.
| It's just completely absurd that e.g. if I publish an paper
| and than want to re read it in a year I have to buy my own
| paper. Same when I want to give it to an intern to read and
| similar.
|
| So it's about the author being able to reuse it for himself,
| not about open access.
| garmaine wrote:
| But in practice "reuse it for himself" means "upload to
| arXiv."
| tams wrote:
| Snapshot for those who get a blocked message:
|
| https://archive.is/jISGG
| samizdis wrote:
| Thanks for that.
| snambi wrote:
| Why can't techincal papers use something similar to github/git
| Pull-request model?
| dguest wrote:
| Can you elaborate? Do you mean curating papers via pull
| request?
|
| If that's your question, the answer is that there's absolutely
| nothing in the way technologically: academics could easily form
| shoestring "journals" around a github README files with links
| to arXiv.
|
| As others have said, the real issue is historical: for better
| or worse the currency of science is still peer-reviewed
| publications in prestigious journals, and a lot of those
| journals are still owned by Elsevier.
|
| Obviously this is starting to change, but old traditions die
| hard.
| jupp0r wrote:
| While this is really good news, it's still mind boggling to me
| why giving taxpayers free access to the research they paid for is
| still a controversial thing at all in 2020. Not to mention the
| benefit to science of giving everybody free access to everything.
| whatshisface wrote:
| An interesting side-effect of the shift to open access will be
| that anyone who's still publishing in closed-access journals will
| be at a severe disadvantage in getting cited compared to people
| who publish open access and make preprints available.
| cesarb wrote:
| I believe this is called "FUTON bias"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FUTON_bias).
| phkahler wrote:
| Some software I wrote got cited in a paper once. They had
| used it because it was readily available on the net. I didnt
| think anyone actually noticed.
| _Microft wrote:
| This seems to be the mentioned paper (program name was in
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23489882):
|
| "Robust invisible watermarking of volume data using 3D
| DCT", doi:10.1109/CGI.2001.934699 , https://www.researchgat
| e.net/publication/3904386_Robust_invi...
| phkahler wrote:
| Well crap there are pictures of it in a book too now.
| navanchauhan wrote:
| What is the name of the software?
| phkahler wrote:
| It was a simple voxel data viewer I wrote circa 1997?
| Called pkvox.
|
| It could load, slice, and iso-surface up to about a gig
| of data with only 128meg of ram. I provided C++ source to
| write the file format.
| Nemo_bis wrote:
| Thanks for your contribution! I can't find it in the
| usual open archives. You might want to deposit the code
| on Zenodo, so it gets long-term preservation and a
| citable DOI. https://zenodo.org/
| calvinmorrison wrote:
| probably not as 1) most academics are just as familiar with
| extra-legal ways to access papers and 2) there's likely a few
| specific papers you need to cite, maybe from your PI, or a
| partner lab, or other person pretty close to your network who
| is working on the same type of stuff and you're building on it
| bnegreve wrote:
| Also:
|
| It's difficult to know whether a publication is open or
| closed when you download it from a research institute or a
| university (access is automatically granted based on the ip
| address).
|
| You only realize how much it cost when you try to download it
| from home.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I have seen a recent trend in my field of people citing
| recent papers for things that were literally known in the
| 1800s. However this is probably due to fraudulent citation
| rings and relationships, so I'm not sure if it contributes to
| my point.
| duskwuff wrote:
| In one particularly embarrassing example, in 1994, a
| diabetes care journal published an article which described
| a novel method for estimating the total area under a
| metabolic curve:
|
| https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/2/152
|
| (PDF:
| https://math.berkeley.edu/~ehallman/math1B/TaisMethod.pdf)
|
| It wasn't until some months later that a response pointed
| out that the author had rediscovered the trapezoidal
| method, which was known to Newton and is typically covered
| in precalculus courses.
|
| https://care.diabetesjournals.org/content/17/10/1224
| enriquto wrote:
| This is google scholar optimization 101. I doubt it can be
| considered "fraudulent" at this point.
| wegs wrote:
| That's what I do. If I want to say something obvious, I
| Google for the first citation which says that thing in a
| way which is readable, understandable, and correct.
|
| Honestly, the problem isn't with whom I cite, so much as:
|
| 1) Academia deciding to use metrics inappropriately (as
| well as expecting citations on well-known obvious
| things). I'm not going to adjust my work style because
| academics decided to adopt dumb metrics and build
| massive, dumb incentive structures around those metrics.
|
| 2) Reviewers expecting citations for everything, and not
| caring about quality of those citations. "The sky is
| blue" doesn't work. "The sky is blue (Blitzerman,
| Tinkledorf 2012)" works fine, even if Blitzerman,
| Tinkledorf 2012 is complete nonsense.
| Tainnor wrote:
| No, you got that wrong. The way you do it is:
|
| "As previous research indicates, the sky is blue ([1],
| [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7], [8], [9])."
|
| Of course you haven't actually looked at all those 9
| sources, except maybe the abstract of the first three.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Actually, it's not the academics who have adopted (or
| pushed) these metrics. They essentially came with the
| general trend of trying to make everything measurable
| (usually pushed by MBAs).
| mattkrause wrote:
| This....doesn't seem crazy to me? _Somebody_ might have
| known it in the 1800s, but any given modern reader may not.
|
| You could cite the original source, but it might be
| inaccessible (and possibly not very complete). A modern
| article could be easier for the reader, especially if it's
| a review. Sometimes you might just want a few examples of a
| phenomenon too, so the choice doesn't matter much.
| meej wrote:
| This is already happening! Not quite "severe" disadvantage, but
| OA papers are getting cited more often.
|
| https://www.timeshighereducation.com/home/open-access-papers...
| auggierose wrote:
| I don't know, does it matter at this point? All papers are
| available for free now anyway thanks to a Russian based
| operation...
| ghoshbishakh wrote:
| Yes but not legally available for free for everyone.
| jroseman93 wrote:
| Publishing industry is ripe for disruption. Publicly funded
| research should be publicly available. Any 'fees' charged by
| publishers should be proportional to the value-add those
| publishers provide. They can't claim the 'review process' is part
| of that monetary value-add when reviewers are almost never paid.
| MrGunn wrote:
| As a researcher, I understand the frustrations with the
| publishing process. I spent years complaining about it, then I
| decided to do something. A few years later, my company was
| acquired by Elsevier & everyone was calling me a sellout. What
| changed? The same thing that changes every time you get your
| hands dirty trying to fix something - you see all the hidden
| complexity that wasn't apparent before.
|
| Are there legacy components to academic publishing? Sure there
| are. Is research assessment & funding messed up? Yep. Will
| posting preprints or research blogging fix everything? Nope.
|
| If you take a step back and look at research as an enterprise,
| the scale is absolutely staggering. Tens of billions of public &
| private money needs to be allocated to researchers every year &
| it needs to be done in a way that is insulated from political &
| social tides, so that big problems like cancer, aging, antibiotic
| resistance & pandemics can be worked on consistently over the
| decades it takes to make real progress. You don't want a system
| like this to change quickly. That said, it is changing.
|
| Information and analytical services that support researchers and
| clinicians is the biggest growing part of Elsevier's business for
| many years now, and these businesses only get even more valuable
| as more and more content is available openly.
|
| At the same time, Elsevier continues to provide all the back-end
| services that scientific societies, funders, researchers, and
| their institutions need to keep the system running so they can
| focus on their research.
|
| What are these systems?
|
| Starting with societies, many of them get the funding they use to
| support the mission of the society - advocating on policy issues
| important to their research community - through the society
| journal. Elsevier makes running the journal financially
| sustainable by hosting it, recruiting peer reviewers, attracting
| and maintaining a good editorial board, handling ethics
| complaints, and providing a cheap platform.
|
| Elsevier helps funders understand how to allocate their funds in
| alignment with the funders mission, not just by conferring
| status, but with more advanced ways of understand the broader
| impact of a work. Elsevier (including me personally) has worked
| to undo the negative effects of over-reliance on the impact
| factor: https://www.elsevier.com/authors-update/story/impact-
| metrics...
|
| Researchers and their institutions use all this stuff to showcase
| their work, recruit faculty, attract funding, make their case for
| tenure & decide who should get it.
|
| After spending years working on projects with these different
| groups, I developed a much more nuanced understanding of how
| everything works & what the levers of change actually are. Happy
| to discuss with anyone!
| xpe wrote:
| Thanks for your thoughtful and nuanced comment.
|
| > If you take a step back and look at research as an
| enterprise, the scale is absolutely staggering. Tens of
| billions of public & private money needs to be allocated to
| researchers every year & it needs to be done in a way that is
| insulated from political & social tides, so that big problems
| like cancer, aging, antibiotic resistance & pandemics can be
| worked on consistently over the decades it takes to make real
| progress. You don't want a system like this to change quickly.
| That said, it is changing.
|
| First off, in reply to this part: "You don't want a system like
| this to change quickly." ... I don't accept this as a first
| principle.
|
| It is useful to think about how research and funding
| interrelates with publishing and peer-review mechanisms.
| However, I would _not_ advocate a "go slow" approach with
| regards to modernizing publishing, e.g. out of some concern for
| the ability of research and funding aspects to "keep up".
|
| Generally speaking, I advocate for finding leverage points in
| systems to drive change. Right now, there is considerable
| leverage to apply to the big academic publishers. So, now, we
| should push. The big publishers will respond; there will be
| friction and academic and political fighting. If we're
| successful, there will be change.
|
| I don't worry much about how such changes will hurt the
| research and funding system. The system will adapt.
|
| I am mindful that people have jobs in these industries, and
| that change may threaten them. But it would be a fallacy to
| only blame promoters of change for risking the status-quo jobs.
| I think a big responsibility falls on the companies, too. They
| are (presumably) intelligent actors. So what is stopping the
| companies from reforming themselves internally? Doing so could
| provide continuity to their employees, preserving tacit
| knowledge.
|
| When a company can fight change with PR and lobbying more
| affordably than adapting, I am rarely surprised at what
| happens.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| That's great. It's good to see MIT standing up for open access
| principles.
| OliverJones wrote:
| Question: is there a consequence to MIT's library system? Do they
| lose access to that publisher's journals for the patrons of their
| libraries? Or are their subscriptions to the journals a separate
| business deal? How does this all work?
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