How Prestige Journals Remain Elite, Exclusive And Exclusionary (forbes.com) 82
An anonymous reader shares a report: Last week, Nature journals unveiled their "landmark" open-access option. Nature journals will charge authors, starting in January 2021, up to $11,400 to make research papers free to read, as an alternative to subscription-only publishing. Scientists from around the world received this news with outrage and disappointment on social media. Nature's announcement comes on the heels of their recent "diversity commitment" which pledged "greater representation of currently under-represented groups" in their published content and events, and "faster movement in the direction of equity." How does Nature's diversity commitment square with their own fee options? Do elite, prestige journals actually care about equity and diversity? Is Nature, one of the largest and most profitable publishers, leading in addressing inequities and setting an example to other publishers? And what do scientists in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), people who are rarely consulted, think about Nature's new policy? To address these questions, I consulted 20+ scientists from around the world. Their voices matter, as scientists are the most important stakeholder in the publishing industry. I also sought input from Springer Nature, the publisher, to better understand their fee structure which is thought to be the highest of any journal. The Lancet, another high-impact journal (by Elsevier, the publisher), in comparison, charges $5000 for the open-access option. "The fees are outrageous, an impediment to open access, and a huge hurdle for LMIC researchers," said Mwele Malecela, Director, Neglected Tropical Diseases, World Health Organization.
Scientific Journals are obsolete (Score:2)
There are better ways to publish today. They are only making this "open-access" option available because even THEY know they are obsolete and are trying desperately to hold onto their relevance.
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Funny, we in the InfoSec community have been trying to warn people about voting machines (which should have proper, printed, auditable paper trails; no internet connectivity; no last-minute "updates"; etc.) for years, and it all falls on deaf ears... until it's your candidate that gets ousted.
I don't care who wins elections. I care only that they're secure, that every vote is properly accounted for and counted.
You made your bed, and now you get to lie in it. I'm glad Trump lost (and regardless of how you me
Re:Scientific Journals are obsolete (Score:5, Insightful)
They are better ways to publish and get your information out there. However Professional Academic Scientists, Colleges and Universities, really deal in prestige. This is both practical behavior, and elitist behavior.
As anyone who has used the Internet for any research on a topic knows, any person can post what seems a convincing article on a topic, they really didn't know much about. Some random dude in his basement still trying to make a perpetual motion machine, A guy who wired up his radio so he can detect ghosts. Some guy with a high school education thinks he can disprove that the speed of light is a constant. There is a heck of a lot of crap research out there, that doesn't require additional attention. So we have trusted sources who help weed out and make sure such information comes from reliable sources.
But this is also very elitist, because there have been times where the guy who in their basement or garage had invented something novel wouldn't get the light of day. Or some average Joe because of his lack of education allowed him to look at a problem in a new way, and made a major discovery. These journals will also block the sharing of new discoveries. Because of its own hubris.
I expect much of academia figures the benefit outweighs the cost. As well if they can get their institution name or a professor/students name published it is just a point of pride. And for the individual it creates a nice thing to put on their resume.
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It depends on the field. The top machine learning journals are free (both for authors and readers) and have always been that way. They also publish their financials. It costs them a dollar and change to publish a paper, which is covered by grants.
Physics has lots of traditional journals, but their publishing policy is a bit irrelevant since everything gets uploaded to arXiv.
Nature has journals for all topics but really specializes in biology and medicine. Medical research is exactly as you describe.
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But even for medical research, it's only a matter of time before the academic field starts putting less and less priority on high profile publishing. Sure, there will always be a place for a highly prestigious journal like Nature, but for the other 99.9% of research that is published, I can easily imagine an academic world where websites like arXiv are the go-to place for publishing, and they already are.
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Sure. The hardest sciences looked at the Internet, realized it was a way to pretty much eliminate friction in knowledge dissemination, and immediately took advantage of it. That's why the web was invented. The softer sciences are now deciding it's an amazing revolutionary idea, thirty years later. The softest "sciences" will be dragged kicking and screaming along last. These last are the fields where the journals print your methods section (if you have one) last, in a tiny font. It may well require another
And they will remain exlusive (Score:5, Insightful)
as long as scientists continue to give them credit. It's the scientists themselves that decide which journals are exclusive, they should all get together and come up with a new system, but that takes work and energy.
Back in the day, publishing had costs of printing and distributing the documents once they were approved. It does cost some to review papers but next to nothing to host them once they are published in todays digital world. I suspect that eventually the current pricing models will become outdated.
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Don't blame the scientists.
Scientists are employed by universities. Universities want employees who raise the profile of the university (citations) and bring in money. Fail to to either of them and you're fired. And grant bodies award on the basis largely of whether they think someone can do the work (prestige) which is aquired through citations. So how do you get citations. Well to cite you people must know of your work, and the best way to achieve that is to publish in places they're more likely to read (
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I'm not blaming anyone, but pointing out that the people who decide where the papers get published have the power to take them elsewhere, or look away from prestigious journals in the first place.
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I'm not blaming anyone, but pointing out that the people who decide where the papers get published have the power to take them elsewhere, or look away from prestigious journals in the first place.
No they don't. It's really east to tell someone to torpedo their own career on principle. But here's the thing, lets say a bunch of scientists do that, sacrifice their career on your alter. Who do you think will replace them? Well some fraction will not be prepared to do that. Repeat the process and eventually you'
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With an attitude like that, sure it would never happen.
There are plenty of scientists that have never published in nature, it doesn't sound career ending if everyone didn't, and there are also other journals to publish in.
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With an attitude like that, sure it would never happen.
An attitude like what? Where's the gap in my reasoning or description? I know what I'm talking about, I used to be an academic. Actually I used to champion use of arXiv in my area something that fell utterly on deaf ears. Then suddenly every started submitting to it. I don't know why, but I'm glad for it since it's what I wanted for years.
There are plenty of scientists that have never published in nature, it doesn't sound career ending if everyone didn
Whats the point of Elsevier? (Score:2)
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Researchgate is also very useful.
Re: Whats the point of Elsevier? (Score:2)
How does PLOS stack up against ArXiv?
I do think that the big journals are right to charge whatever they want because they are serving as an editorial board and PR for authors. The journals would be smart to tie cost of living of the authors to the cost of submission but if the authors don't want to pay anything, then there's always the free websites. Even storing a pdf in a Google drive and sharing the link counts as publication even though no one will see it...
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PLOS: $2000 - $4000 per paper, author pays.
ArXiv: ~$6 per paper, mostly for software development. Grant supported, free for author and reader.
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PLOS is expensive. They charge as much as Elsevier does, just with fewer options about who pays.
Value (Score:5, Insightful)
Either the cost of a journal subscription is high, or the cost to publish "for free" is going to be high. Which should it be? You can't have both. In the grand scheme of things, the $200 yearly fee for Nature is pretty cheap given the value of it's content, especially as an institution can buy a subscription and share it among it's staff. Heck most journals are several times more expensive. The ACM journals are something like $1200 a year for 12 issues. I've seen some specialist journals run $2000 a year.
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Unlike 'lesser' journals Nature needs huge amounts of money, because while their fixed costs are identical, Nature gets the most prestigious authors and reviewers. These workers of course command extremely high pay, justifying the markup, right?
See Saw (Score:2)
Unlike 'lesser' journals Nature needs huge amounts of money
Not sure what you mean by that. As I pointed out, a single copy of Nature, amortized out, costs roughly $2. A single copy of most journals runs around $100. Those journals require "huge amounts" of money as well, they are charging the ultimate consumer more.
These workers of course command extremely high pay, justifying the markup, right?
I'm not making an operating costs argument. Either the price to the end user is going to be high, or the price to the authors for making their articles "free" is going to be high. You can't make it inexpensive for everyone. As I pointed out, the price fo
Re: See Saw (Score:2)
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Bull. ArXiv costs about $6 per paper, mostly to support software development of the platform. The two big machine learning journals need a bit more than a dollar to publish a paper. All three are grant supported and free to both the author and the reader.
I don't want DIVERSITY in my science (Score:5, Insightful)
I want accuracy and rigor in the studies - regardless of the color, sex, sexual preference or what gender they think they are this week of the person doing the study
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If you think there is a trade-off or tension between diversity and accuracy/rigor, I don't know what to tell you man. I'd suggest learning and reading more, and introspecting a bit.
Re:I don't want DIVERSITY in my science (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't have a problem with diversity, although I'm not in any way supportive of it.
But I have a real problem with people who want to "increase diversity". Don't want to work with them, don't want to be friends with them, don't want them in my neighborhood.
Saying "There aren't enough black people around here" and saying "There are too many black people around here" are both equally bigoted.
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You literally don't know what the word bigoted means.
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> Anyone who is counting the races/genders/ethnic groups around them is bigoted.
That is not what the word bigoted means, so no, you and GP are wrong. Go find a dictionary and look up the word. "Counting groups" is not in its definition.
Re:I don't want DIVERSITY in my science (Score:5, Insightful)
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You've completely missed the point.
We know there are less African physicists. We know that there would naturally be less African-physicist-papers. That is why we are asking for more diversity. To increase the numbers of African physicists.
Say we wanted more gamers to win marathons. So we start asking for more gamers to win marathons.
What you are doing is standing on the sidelines going "but they're fat! you are ignoring the facts that they are clearly fat. they are not going to win more marathons."
We know t
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Maybe but there is definitely a trade-off between accuracy/rigor and equity. At least the commies aren't trying to hide it anymore. Makes it easier to identify them. Forcing equity is antithetical to a free society. It's also demonstrably impossible. But communists will just tell you that all failed communist systems weren't actually communist.
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There's always a tradeoff between irrelevant properties. Diversity and accuracy are irrelevant properties.
Citation needed
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Accuracy and rigor are worse in less-diverse groups. You're asking for poorer outcomes.
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Accuracy and rigor are worse in less-diverse groups. You're asking for poorer outcomes.
Is that a problem that can be solved at the output? Surely all a publisher can do is to publish the best papers. Who gets to write the papers isn't their remit (or power), is it?
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I mean, first of all, do they even publish the best papers? I think that's up for debate.
Second, it's their journal, so they get to decide who publishes and who doesn't and what the criteria is. They could easily refuse publication for lack of diversity. But they won't do anything which will put them in legal trouble, so whether that would actually happen or not will vary. But my guess would be that if they could, they would, because increasing diversity is one of their big things now.
Grant donors get to de
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I mean, first of all, do they even publish the best papers? I think that's up for debate.
The question is whether they are trying to publish the best papers, really. No one knows all the papers being published, so no selection can ever objectively be the best.
Second, it's their journal, so they get to decide who publishes and who doesn't and what the criteria is. They could easily refuse publication for lack of diversity.
Assuming they knew the information for that, how does that improve the quality of what they publish? You can't turn down a world-changing paper because all the authors are Chinese men or because you haven't had enough papers this month by Chinese men; it just doesn't make sense. The end result would be worthless.
Grant donors get to decide who they give money to, so those peeps could require teams be diverse to get money.
That seems to me to be where
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> You can't turn down a world-changing paper because all the authors are Chinese men
How do you know it's world-changing? You only know after the fact. So your question is, why shouldn't they publish something when they can see the future? They can't see the future, so this isn't a valid argument.
Studies have found that more diverse groups can produce better work. Thus you could surmise that the same work done by a less-diverse group may be poorer in quality. So if there are two papers submitted of essent
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> You can't turn down a world-changing paper because all the authors are Chinese men
How do you know it's world-changing? You only know after the fact.
Errr. No. That's sort of the point of publishing results and not, say, just some ideas for experiments.
So your question is, why shouldn't they publish something when they can see the future?
No it isn't.
They can't see the future, so this isn't a valid argument.
That's true but it's not an argument I'm making.
Studies have found that more diverse groups can produce better work.
That's a statistical result which has no bearing on the quality of an individual paper. If you were picking papers more or less at random, it would be a good way to bias the results. No one should be doing that.
Thus you could surmise that the same work done by a less-diverse group may be poorer in quality.
Or you could, you know, read the paper.
So if there are two papers submitted of essentially the same apparent merit or whatever, and one paper comes from a more diverse group, it makes sense to select that one.
I suppose. If that ever happens I think what generally is done is that both papers get published or
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On the other hand you don't want arbitrary barriers to quality research either. There are, in fact a number of landmark papers Nature rejected for publication because of the source, such as Pavel Cherenkov's discovery of Cherenkov radiation.
Nature may be unique among scientific journals in that it is a journal of *general* science, presenting a cross-section of scientific topics spanning physical, Earth, biological, medical, and social sciences, technology, and mathematics. Because it's supposed to be a c
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If you'd read the summary, you'd know that's not the diversity they're talking about. It's about income differences leading to e.g. not having the world's leading experts on malaria being able to publish their findings in this journal because they all live in 3rd world countries.
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Having more diversity is a nice goal to have, however achieving it is not easy. Especially for a scientific publisher.
The "downstream" need to be improved first. I don't remember seeing a very diverse group during PhD. I am saying this to state an observation, without judgement. However without having more qualified people with different backgrounds applying to PhD positions, we cannot have more diverse people writing the actual research papers.
And that goes all they way down to public education, starting f
Government funding partially to blame (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with a lot of government-funded R&D is that even those with an open-access requirement (like most of the EC's funded research) make the publishing costs eligible expenses, so participating organizations simply figure out how many papers they're on the hook for from a KPI point of view and reserve budget in the grant application explicitly for this. Bodies like the EC are certainly capable of curating their own journals, and the wider scientific community can certainly be more inclined to find a workaround if the publishing expenses become ineligible and start coming out of their overhead instead. It's time to stop propping up this small handful of predatory publishers with what amounts to an indirect subsidy at taxpayer expense.
One thing we can take for granted (Score:2)
Whatever policies that they had which were to their benefit and hurting others will be excused by this sin offering, much like how Apple is getting a fairly free pass for lobbying against the anti-slave labor bill targeting China.
Sorry, you're paper can't be published. (Score:1)
"Sorry, we can't publish your paper."
"Why not, the reviewers thought it was great?"
"We regret to inform you that you do not meet our diversity requirements. Please resubmit the paper when you are of a different race."
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your
Re:Sorry, you're paper can't be published. (Score:4, Funny)
Can someone explain to me (Score:2)
Do researchers think anyone is going to publish their research *for free*?
Why don't they just put it on a random Blog if they want it published for free?
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PLOS also charges authors just like these other open-access publishers. $750-$3000.
So what is really the difference between this and the other open access publishers other than maybe $2K shaved off the price?
If they can already afford $3K for PLOS, they can't afford $5K for another? It's still just coming from a grant anyway?
I still don't get the outrage.
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Holding back science (Score:4, Interesting)
In this case, what i mean was the peer review process was built with a positive intent; remove human bias from data so that the data is pure and stands on it's own, as well as have certain journals have "impact" and exclusivity for the best science to rank and value "Discovery". Later H-Index was added, as a way to recognize the best scientists out there by the "value" of their publications, measured by newness, number of references, and impact value. The unfortunate thing about this system is humans may believe logically in the purity of science, but all humans also have base needs; acceptance by their community and peers, financial security, and a desire for constant self-progress.
As soon as tenure got tied to H-Index and the proposed measured value of science got tied to people's careers, it morphed very quickly. Again, it's nice to talk about the purity of science for it's own value, but in the "publish or perish" mindset, the financial and communal acceptance insecurity that every human feels forces them to find ways to manage the system for security. It's justified by saying that "once i get tenure, I can focus on the science", but we all know that never happens, because once you get tenure then it's grant writing time to bring in money.
Today, Professors are sales people, not scientists. They sell their reputation and science to other scientists who manage government budgets to fund science. That brings in Overhead dollars for universities, pays for labs, and pays the slave wages of grad students and post-docs in volume, because in that volume 8% become Professors to start the cycle again and the remainder drop out and go into Wall Street or sales positions at lab consumables companies. That system is continuously happening; and in all that mess occasionally some good science gets developed, patented, and then... held by the university tech transfer office for exorbitant license fees up front, stalling that science from turning into an application or product that changes the world.
It's not just journals. It's a part of it, and htey contribute to it, but the state of scientific development has triggered the vast scientific community to throw as many people into the system as possible, compete for slim opportunities to publish and die if they fail, making people more desperate to self-optimize for security rather than focus on science for science's sake and realize it's true value, and make good science that can actually be deployed into new applications. Meanwhile savvy university regents have found a way to "non-profitably" profit from this system and enrich themselves.
Science needs to slow down, become more exclusive, find the best talent out there, and provide enough security so we can find the next Turing's, Yu Toutou's, Goddard's, Curie's and Plank's who make real contributions.
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I agree with most of what you said. I have seen groups publish 50+ papers by taking combinations of models and publishing a different paper for each combination of model. If you make a single paper and show how the models are orthogonal and can be used together and all the math needed to allow swapping models in and out you have provided FAR more value to the world but you have lost because you published 1 paper and they published 50.
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All true but you forgot one thing. This perverse cycle also incentivizes cheating and fraud. I've personally seen it a few times. And it's almost never an individual, because individuals can't get away with it. Each time I've seen it the whole team has been in on it and they all went down together. There have been some highly publicized cases every now and then and you hear about it a lot in China. And I'm sure its a big problem in China. But I suspect the problem is a lot more common everywhere than most p
Re: Holding back science (Score:2)
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If you're immersed in academic culture, you're not going to hear about all the big discoveries in journals or at the conferences you're going to. The current generations of scientists are just as good as what we've had in the past, but the old systems of scientific communication isn't used by those folks. Of your list of five, I think only Planck would be out there publishing papers and trying to get grants. The rest would (rightly) see that approach as a waste of time.
The government sees universities and t
What does the journal do? (Score:2)
..behave in such a way which causes them to be thought of as elite and prestigious?
I always assumed the answer to that is that they review and otherwise put effort into making sure whatever they publish is up to some standard. And their high standard is what distinguishes them, right?
If that's true, then it explains why they want to get paid, one way or another: they do work, and people don't work for free. And issues like equity, diversity, low-income countries, etc are most
Does the name "Nature" make such a difference? (Score:2)
Elsevier seems to think they can play the same game as Donald Trump: I.e., putting their brand name on something makes it better than the alternatives.
Any barriers to entry? (Score:2)
Other than name recognition, do these publishers offer anything else of value? It doesn't appear so to me, but I'm not a researcher who is contributing to this ecosystem.
What's to prevent a Wikipedia-style venue for publishing freely available research?
Best,
It's "pay to post" as well (Score:2)
Many (most?) journals also charge the authors a fee to publish the article.
Re: It's "pay to post" as well (Score:2)
Nature and Elsevier journals are junk journals (Score:3)
Let's be completely honest for a moment. The peer review process rarely works. Papers are littered with major errors and most journals have a replicability rate of 30% or lower. Even journal articles on optimization algorithms, machine learning etc rarely work. Often scientists will leave out critical information and will NOT get back to you on the details if you want to use their work. This has been my direct experience. They don't want others competing in their narrow research field.
If you have to bet on if an algorithm on stack overflow or reddit works vs one in nature you are MUCH better off betting on reddit or stack overflow. Those sites have higher standards on making sure something works and marking solutions that don't work as bad.
Scientists are the cause of and the solution to this problem. Most journals won't take a paper unless it is novel. If you do a very good job diagnosing why something doesn't work or verifying that something does work that is valuable information, but you usually can't get published for that. Scientists are the ones that sit on these peer review boards and on the editor boards and reject papers as not being novel enough.
I honestly think we would end up with better research if the USA and EU governments setup something like a curated Wikipedia where you could submit articles and ALL the data that goes with it (code,etc) and the article would exist there but marked as not yet peer reviewed. Then part of a scientist's job would be to peer review a certain number of papers every year and once enough reviewed the article and the feedback integrated the article would be marked as reviewed. This would cost nothing to publish on and nothing to download from and run directly by the governments. I would also make it so that USA and EU funding could not be used to pay journal fees. The journals are predatory and not adding the science, they directly degrade science.
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There are a few journals that specialize in reproducibility. These do need to be encouraged. Other journals should have a badge they can stick on original papers that have been reported to be reproducible.
There should absolutely not be any consequences for original authors, unless there's actual fraud. Journal articles aren't *supposed* to be true. They're supposed to be reports of "hey, I did this and this is what happened." Science already has a real problem that a lot of results are never published; a lo
I guess these scientists care more about money tha (Score:1)
confusion about what we're talking about (Score:2)
I'm a scientist, and I could care less about this. It has no impact on me. However, when we commonly talk about "science," we're really talking about the contract research industry, where the product is a technical report written on behalf of some other organization. The value of that report is reflected by publication metrics, and maximizing those metrics is how you get more contracts.
Publications are marketing documents. We are producing marketing copy when we write an article. The text can be true, it ca
I'm sorry, but it's only $200 a year. (Score:2)
Yes, the fee charged to submitters who want their article to be freely accessible is outrageous, but my point is that