[HN Gopher] The Meddling Middlemen of Academia
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The Meddling Middlemen of Academia
Author : Topolomancer
Score : 46 points
Date : 2020-07-13 10:16 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (bastian.rieck.me)
(TXT) w3m dump (bastian.rieck.me)
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Journals aren't charging for the publication - either for the
| editing, or the reviews.
|
| They're charging huge tolls for their work as peer-review
| gatekeepers, and for the career benefits - and potential improved
| access to funding for departments and universities - that can
| result from having work published in a prestigious journal.
|
| Essentially it's like a more complicated form of buying likes
| (i.e. prestige and marketable crediblity) on social media, for an
| older and much richer market - with a monopolistic twist.
|
| Opening access to content and paying editors more won't
| necessarily help. This market won't go away until the tacit
| benefits become equivalent. This means breaking their ability to
| operate together as a cartel.
|
| Besides - in reality they only the highest profile journals
| provide any benefits at all. Most journals are low-profile throw-
| aways with limited influence and prestige. But the publishers
| have contrived a situation where universities have to buy an all-
| or-nothing access package.
|
| If citation prestige is opened up, the cartel will collapse
| almost overnight.
| impendia wrote:
| I mostly agree with what you say, but I disagree with this:
|
| > Besides - in reality they only the highest profile journals
| provide any benefits at all.
|
| In my discipline (mathematics) there is a large middle tier of
| "respectable" journals, that regularly publish good work,
| including work by well known people. A typical tenure dossier
| at a middling research department might list say, 15 papers,
| most of which were in this middle tier, and a couple of which
| were published somewhere really good.
|
| I agree that the system is a cartel and would love to see it
| collapse. In my opinion, whatever replaced it would need to
| duplicate the signaling mechanism to succeed.
| Topolomancer wrote:
| Author here; what you describe is unfortunately very much true.
| And I also have to admit that I am a hypocrite by playing along
| with this game.
| qmmmur wrote:
| For a gold standard of publishing see http://distill.pub/
|
| Open access and not stuck in the dark ages with dissemination.
| 0d9eooo wrote:
| Peer review is a cornerstone of academics, and there continues to
| be a prestige associated with it as well as with certain
| journals. This is especially true in certain circles.
|
| As far as I can tell though, functionally this is breaking down.
| People can find preprints and archived papers, and do, if they're
| searching by topic.
|
| So journals at this point are providing a peer review portal, and
| formatting. I happen to think the formatting does provide value.
| My sense is that at a good journal, there's a kind of stochastic
| improvement in errors and formatting, so that the numbers of
| errors go down on average, and the formatting improved, on
| average, over iterations back and forth with the copyeditor.
|
| As for peer review, I'm not so sure anymore. My sense is that it
| does provide some kind of stamp of approval from experts in the
| area, so if you don't know much about an area, it provides some
| sense that at least some small group of people in the area
| believe it meets some kind of basic standards. But that says very
| little, and the amount of noise in the review process is large.
|
| I think the core of the academic communication system is slowly
| being hollowed out, and being replaced by blogs, things like
| twitter and mastodon, and archives. At this point the peer review
| journal process provides some value, but it's being propped up by
| tradition. Already, with COVID, we're increasingly seeing the
| focus on preprints. Journalists and others are careful to note
| something hasn't been peer-reviewed yet, but everyone knows it
| matters little because they can turn to experts to find out what
| they think of it.
|
| If there aren't formal attempts to create an alternative, I think
| we'll just be left with people posting and passing around
| preprints and discussing them on twitter, mastodon, blogs, and
| message groups. If people want the nice formatting, and some
| stamp of approval, I think something else will have to be worked
| out. But the journals are starting to feel like they're getting
| in the way, in general, and represents some kind of power or
| status structure more than quality control system.
|
| Paying reviewers I think creates bad incentives as the author of
| the post points out. So do author-pays systems. What is maybe
| missing from the piece is some recognition that in the past,
| reviewers reviewed and editors edited in part as part of their
| job. That is, you were paid as a faculty member at a university,
| and that was what people understood you did. Pre-internet, this
| was all valuable service. Now that universities and others are
| more focused on faculty bringing in profits rather than paying
| for their services -- and questions are being raised about the
| value of journals in general -- we are seeing these questions
| about what reviewers get paid.
|
| I think in the future there will be value in article hosting and
| searching, and providing website frameworks for discussion and
| peer review, but I'm not sure they will look like journals per
| se. You'll see things like arxiv.org, but with commentary,
| rating, discussion, and approval infrastructure over them. That's
| what large libraries and research centers will be donating money
| to or paying for. I think journals per se will eventually start
| to seem kind of stodgy and old fashioned.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| If not for the issues with paying and incentives ISP
| interchange style balancing upon the net incoming vs outgoing
| reviews would be a tempting way to get some focus upon it with
| "networked" universities. That would of course encourage low
| quality spammed peer reviews to up the volume.
| netcan wrote:
| " _One of the strangest phenomena in academia is_ " is a good
| opening line. Deep well.
| llamaa2 wrote:
| > To me, it is super weird that research that is often funded by
| the taxpayer cannot be accessed by the taxpayer.
|
| This is so completely true, and is something everyone should be
| fighting for. As for the U.S., it doesn't look like our FASTR
| bill has gone much anywhere at all.
| jpeloquin wrote:
| In the US, the NSF and NIH both have public access policies
| requiring that published papers resulting from taxpayer-funded
| research be made available free of charge no more than 12
| months after publication.
|
| It should be available immediately, of course, particularly
| since the official "publication date" can be delayed many
| months after the article is actually available. But taxpayers
| do get what they paid for in a somewhat reasonable time frame.
| The part where academic institutions provide publishers with
| content for free, then buy the same content back, is the insane
| part.
|
| https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2016/nsf16009/nsf16009.jsp#q1
| https://publicaccess.nih.gov/faq.htm#753
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| My biggest pet peeve is the downsampling of my high dpi figures
| to get the image size down for the publisher.
|
| Also, open access journals will eventually dominate, but I think
| the idea is hurt by all the scam open access journals that plague
| our inboxes.
| AndrewGYork wrote:
| Every since I got my own lab, I've been skipping "traditional"
| publication, for these reasons and more. I've had great success
| and satisfaction sharing my research via "DIY" publishing:
|
| https://andrewgyork.github.io
|
| Advancing my field is my life's mission, and disseminating my
| research is too important to outsource.
|
| Believe it or not, Twitter has been crucial to the process. It's
| not great for nuanced discussion, but it's AMAZING for
| advertising the existence of technical information. For example:
|
| https://twitter.com/AndrewGYork/status/1138963271594020864
|
| https://twitter.com/AndrewGYork/status/1222319044755197952
|
| https://twitter.com/AndrewGYork/status/1227747499454021632
| jseliger wrote:
| Sounds like a substantial improvement:
| https://jakeseliger.com/2020/05/24/a-simple-solution-to-peer...
| throwawaygh wrote:
| I hate publishers as much as the next guy, but playing the
| twitter high-school popularity game is the _last_ thing I want
| to do with my time, and IMO it 's leading to the click-
| baitification of research in AI. This year there was even an
| instance of literal ASTs being hailed by deep learning hoards
| as some amazing new idea.
|
| If science gets attention according to its level of twitter
| amplification, then scientific publishing is going to start
| looking a lot like journalism. That's already happening. Ask
| journalists how their search for truth is going.
| AndrewGYork wrote:
| As opposed to the traditional publishing high-school
| popularity game? I'm partially joking, but traditional
| publishing is very much a popularity contest. You're free to
| ignore this, but I don't recommend it.
|
| My personal experience (twelve years of traditional
| publishing followed by five years of DIY publishing) is that
| I spend substantially _less_ of my time on publishing
| /dissemination, have higher impact, and produce higher
| quality work. You should give it a try!
| mcguire wrote:
| " _Peer review status Pre-print published April 7, 2017 (This
| article is not yet peer reviewed)_ "
| AndrewGYork wrote:
| That's a good example! I never bothered soliciting formal
| peer review for that article, but many of the principles we
| simulated there have since been demonstrated:
|
| https://doi.org/10.1364/BOE.391787
| humanistbot wrote:
| This seems to be missing any discussion of non-profit academic
| society publishers, which in many fields are the dominant
| publishers and so much better than the for-profit companies that
| seem more dominant in the life sciences especially. I'm most
| familiar with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in
| computer science. Sure, they have their own bureaucracies and
| added costs, but they run all kinds of other programs and events
| based on the profits from journals and conferences, including the
| kind of student scholarships to conferences they suggest. The
| overall costs are way lower, they're governed by the leading
| professors who are elected from the membership, they've been far
| more willing to negotiate with universities in the big transition
| to open access, and I've found very little meddling of the sort
| this piece describes.
|
| In ACM / CS, the publishing pipeline is now fully based in LaTeX,
| so authors effectively do their own typesetting for their own
| articles. There is now a standardized template for submissions,
| so the version of the draft you send to peer review is typeset in
| the same way it will be published in the final version. In my
| experience, almost always the version that gets published is
| identical to the final "camera ready" version I submit after peer
| review.
|
| Finally, peer reviewing is indeed not paid, but the way my fields
| treat peer review is that you are supposed to review
| proportionally to however much reviewing you obligate on others
| by the papers you / your students / your lab submit to peer
| review. If your paper goes out to three reviewers, you sign up
| for three reviews. Then for the reviewer coordinator / meta-
| reviewer burden, if your group/lab is submitting 6-8 papers a
| year, then you have an obligation to be on the editorial board /
| program committee, which comes with the reviewer coordinator
| burden of what a decent sized group/lab obligates on others. Of
| course, some people are still free riders, and many people submit
| publications who are not qualified to peer review, but it does
| change how you think about the "peer reviewing is free labor"
| issue.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| > In my experience, almost always the version that gets
| published is identical to the final "camera ready" version I
| submit after peer review.
|
| This is actually a bad thing, and a sign of standards slipping.
| Even if one uses a LaTeX template there are all kinds of
| quality-typesetting nuances that many authors are not aware of:
| where non-breaking spaces are necessary, proper hyphenation of
| foreign-language names, en dashes instead of hyphens in ranges,
| etc. I have seen so many publications in maths and sciences
| where the author was expected to provide camera-ready copy and
| the final result was sloppy.
|
| I agree that learned societies can do a great job of publishing
| journals and Festschriften, and it is the norm in my own field
| where our learned societies never handed over their journals to
| a for-profit publisher. But I am happy that in my own field
| one's submissions still get hands-on work by trained
| copyeditors and typesetters so that the final result is perfect
| regardless of the author's own typesetting competence.
| catalogia wrote:
| Except for getting people's names right.. if people don't
| notice something wrong with the typesetting, is it truly
| wrong? If the people writing and reading documents don't
| notice the difference between en dashes and hyphens, then in
| what sense is the difference important?
| Topolomancer wrote:
| Author here; that very much sounds like the utopia I am
| dreaming about :-) What kind of field are you in?
| Topolomancer wrote:
| Author here; you make a lot of good points! I should have
| phrased the context of this article more clearly: I am aware of
| the existence of these 'good' publishers, and in machine
| learning (my main field), the publishing is mostly done via
| conferences anyway.
|
| My bad experiences stem mostly from established publishers such
| as Springer or Oxford University Press, who are often very
| important for certain application areas, such as as
| bioinformatics. The point about equations is very much true,
| though: _despite_ the fact of existing LaTeX templates, they
| take your paper and typeset it once again---often with
| detrimental results :-/
|
| Concerning the peer reviewing: I fully agree! I myself am
| seeing reviewing as an honour and a duty to support my field. I
| am objecting to the reviewers/editors doing all this work and
| the publisher charging ludicrous prices to access a paper.
| Wiley still charges 42 USD for a PDF download and online only
| access of a paper I wrote 6 years ago! This is absolutely
| bonkers and not useful for people in countries/universities
| that are less well-off...
| impendia wrote:
| I once had to explain, to a copyeditor at one of the leading
| mathematics journals, that the meaning of a fraction changes if
| you move stuff between the top and the bottom.
|
| The annual subscription cost for this journal is $3,250.
|
| I am bewildered that we continue to tolerate this state of
| affairs.
| the_svd_doctor wrote:
| Interesting. I have multiple paper published in SIAM journals
| (Applied math) and I have consistently be blown away (in a good
| way!) by the quality of their copy editing.
| iNerdier wrote:
| I mean as a broke masters student with a graphic design degree
| this sounds like the kind of job I would actually enjoy doing,
| only I have no idea how one goes about finding such things. Is
| the real problem here the hiring process and where these things
| are looking for people?
| jahewson wrote:
| The journals I'm familiar with outsource this kind of work to
| India.
| impendia wrote:
| As jehewson said, among large commercial publishers it's
| common to outsource abroad. For journals run by professional
| societies, it might be more common to do things in-house.
|
| That said -- and keep in mind that this might be different in
| different academic disciplines -- I'm not sure that this
| would be appealing work for a graphic designer. There just
| isn't room for creativity of any sort. Mathematics papers
| have an extremely homogeneous look and feel, and everyone in
| the discipline is perfectly okay with that.
|
| Maybe textbook companies would be a better bet -- although
| with its $200+ textbooks that industry has its own set of
| problems. That said, if I were writing a student-oriented
| book (as opposed to a research paper), I would welcome the
| chance to work with someone with creative ideas for the
| visual presentation.
|
| Good luck!
| tom_ wrote:
| Was that actually their explanation, when asked? That it
| doesn't matter which way round the values go?
| impendia wrote:
| I didn't ask for an explanation. As this was one of a huge
| number of errors, much more than is typical, I skipped
| straight to making demands.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > meaning of a fraction changes if you move stuff between the
| top and the bottom
|
| Sure it was not his 8 year old child?
| pantaloony wrote:
| I wouldn't be a bit surprised if half the adult population of
| the US has an understanding of fractions that falls apart if
| you move past what you need to read cooking recipes (which
| nb. is basically none whatsoever, unless scaling recipes up
| or down). Maybe a lot more than that. Many with bachelor's
| degrees or higher. I think both the level of numeracy in and
| the degree to which it is perceived to actually matter for
| the general population is greatly overestimated on sites like
| HN.
|
| [edit] in this particular case the person had likely gotten
| by pattern-matching 1, a slash, and a 3, as one-third, and
| simply never cared why one might write 3/1 to mean 3, for
| example. Why do that, after all? I see a one, I see a slash,
| and I see a 3. One-third. It's worked every single time
| before so why would your thing be a special case?
| core-questions wrote:
| It's actually terrifying to think about. I don't want to
| denigrate people or be mean, but when you realize that your
| own standard of literacy is something many people truly
| struggle to obtain, it helps make a lot of things make
| sense.
|
| For example, I saw a thread on Reddit the other day where
| someone mentioned "taking the 30 seconds to read
| something"; the discussion went on a tangent where someone
| called themselves a slow reader because it took them a
| whole minute, and then others chimed in that it was taking
| them longer still. So, I timed myself and it took me 14
| seconds to read it.
|
| What that made abundantly clear to me was that my own
| experience in the world - seeing _words_ as first class
| entities everywhere, immediately tagged and understood as
| whole components, instantly, without ever "reading" them...
| is not everyone else's experience. Some adults who
| nominally believe themselves to be literate must actually
| have to sit there and spend some effort to recognize each
| letter and sound out a word, the way my children did when
| they were ~4 (and some children get even younger). What is
| the world like for these people? I can often speed-read a
| paragraph and come away with an understanding within
| seconds, skimming over it for key words and familiar
| grammatical constructs; my assumption is that most people
| posting here can do the same. Maybe that's not the case?
|
| There's also a lot of talk on the Internet in the last year
| or two about inner monologue, with the growing realization
| that it is likely that a large part of the population
| simply does not experience the ability to talk to
| themselves within their own head. This makes me wonder if
| they can read silently without having to mouth the words;
| perhaps this is the tip of the iceberg for a
| differentiation in intelligence that hasn't really been
| extensively studied yet (unsurprisingly, since
| psychometrics are not in vogue right now).
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Speaking of lack of internal dialog I noticed a quieting
| of it as a side effect of a medication I was on -
| normally volume didn't exactly apply but it was difficult
| to head myself think - not like it getting drowned out
| but that the thoughts themselves were harder to hear.
| Speaking of mouthing the words when reading -
| subvocalization occurs when reading with most people in
| their larynx. Most people who don't mouth the words
| silently say them instead as a "good enough" measure.
| Obviously not the case in deaf-mutes who never learned to
| speak of course.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >I saw a thread on Reddit the other day where someone
| mentioned "taking the 30 seconds to read something"; the
| discussion went on a tangent where someone called
| themselves a slow reader because it took them a whole
| minute, and then others chimed in that it was taking them
| longer still. So, I timed myself and it took me 14
| seconds to read it.
|
| Not that I don't agree with your overall message but
| petty one-upsmanship at things one should never strive to
| one-up someone else on is kind of a staple of Reddit and
| that's probably what you were reading.
| HarryHirsch wrote:
| It's not some kid with a low-voltage humanities degree using
| Grammarly who got the gig though Upwork, reality is worse
| than that.
|
| Journals employ language editors to smooth out papers written
| by non-native speakers with a poor command of the language.
| If you want to edit for language you have to comprehend
| somewhat the content. People who know mathematics and are
| willing to put up with poor language skills are rare.
| pmiller2 wrote:
| That's interesting. I wonder what such a job pays. I happen
| to be one who knows some mathematics and might be able to
| do this as a side gig.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > People who know mathematics and are willing to put up
| with poor language skills are rare.
|
| Is that because writing usually pays terribly?
| redis_mlc wrote:
| Mainly that lack of precision is irritating and
| suspicious in a proof.
| brzozowski wrote:
| Related article by Russell O'Connor about copyright assignment I
| recently stumbled onto: http://r6.ca/blog/20110930T012533Z.html
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