I do not understand how this system has existed this long.
this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2025
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Well for the first several hundred years they actually produced a product that they mailed to people and that took employees and infra that the various unis didn't care to have (with some exceptions for university presses like Oxford and Cambridge). Now it's 100% momentum and branding. You publish in Science because that's the impressive one for Science.
Hmm. How prevalent are actual paper journals now? It wouldn't surprise me if certain researchers were slow to adopt the digital version.
I figured there must be something keeping it going. There is no free lunch.
American copyright law? Basically every research institution in America pays them lots of money for electronic subscriptions in order to not get sued. Like academics don't give a fuck and will use scihub or email a friend or whatever but their institution will just subscribe to a plausible number of things to avoid drawing the attention of the publishers. For profit research like pharma or industrial chem are even more buttoned up because they are much juicier targets for potential IP suits.
The manuscripts belong to the creators to start with, and continue to to some degree in some cases, I'm pretty sure. That's still a free lunch for the journal.
Also, copyrights are not an exclusively American thing, as a non-American. No need to put that on yourself.
Network effect with a hint of extortion.
Found this https://arxiv.org/
arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for nearly 2.4 million scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.
There’s also Sci Hub
But yea time for shit to change and drop the parasites
arXiv is standard in cs. We use this on conjunction with peer reviewed venues (also all free and volunteer run) and it's been working out decently well for us. Other fields need to follow suit.
I think it’s wild how much job security professors often have and yet they let themselves get dicked around like this constantly
How is this a thing? How has nobody just started hosting their own papers? What does it need except a fairly basic website and some storage for the papers themselves? Forgive the ignorance, I’m an IT guy not a scientist…
It's a bit of a circular problem. Certain journals have a reputation of publishing higher quality work, so if you see where it's published, you're more likely to read it. Since it draws in readers, it leads to more citations. More citations means more people want to publish there, meaning that the journal gets to be more selective and gets to choose the cream of the crop. Thus maintaining their reputation of publishing higher quality work.
Because the journals provide a quality gate. To be published in, say, Nature is a career peak for most scientists. While counting references to a paper can tell you some things about its relative merit, it’s not as clear an indicator as having a PNAS, Cell or similar on your resume.
They have created a market for their name so it self-perpetuates.
That quality gate hasn't been doing it's job for a long time.
That may be the case but a Science article on the resume is still something every working scientist covets.
In certain fields, at least, there are important steps these papers provide such as screening and review that are simply not feasible through as self-hosted. People who understand what the paper is about and can sniff out bullshit - be it cooked numbers, incorrect figures, improper citations, etc. are an important part of the process. Heck, even among academic papers out there, some are much lower 'quality' than others in that they are frequently bought off or have poor review processes allowing fluff and bad science to get through.
With all that being said, scihub is a thing and even paid journals are often easily pirated.
Peer review is false security, so much bad and fraudulent science gets through, but due to the stamp of authority people are less skeptical. Additionally it's harder to publish good science.
There's a lot of people who understand this better than me who can explain it. Here's one starting point. https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review
Don't get me wrong, it's not a way to solve everything. But an authoritative body can build credibility and hold onto it. People should still be skeptical and still review, but that's a normal part of the scientific process. Knowing what's more and less credible is a normal process of research, and learning to assess credibility is important too. Peer review doesn't need to be torn down as a concept, it just needs to be taken with a healthy grain of salt, like all processes. This is part of why I mentioned how some journals are more reputable than others - it's a reflection of how often their peer review misses important things, not a reflection of how bullet-proof their science is. Everyone makes mistakes, the goal should always be to make less.
Also, to be clear, I'm talking about the post-research and pre-publish step, not the pre-research proposal step - that form of peer review can fuck right off.
Also of great importance which I should have probably highlighted in my initial post - this is really dependent on the field itself. In medicine people put in effort for that kind of review. I've peer reviewed quite a few papers and I've received really good advice from peer reviewers on some of the papers I'm on. Certainly this can happen in environments where this kind of review isn't necessary, but the institutions that exist do make it a lot easier. An open source self-hosted model would make it really hard to get an idea of how many eyes were on a particular paper, and would make keeping up with continuing education difficult.... of course unless groups of people made their career reviewing everything that emerges and putting together summaries or otherwise helping to sift through the noise.
So I actually spent a few seconds thinking about it and I think the main problem would come down to moderation? Ultimately if someone who wrote a paper wanted to distribute it they could do so using existing sites like pastebin or GitHub. The concern with running one myself would be “how do I know this doesn’t contain child abuse images or something”.
I'm so happy that in my field, most of the papers I read are open access and some of the most important journals are not from large publishers.
It's even worse than the music distribution industry.