The origin of the web was to disseminate scientific knowledge. The guardians of that knowledge- the journal publishers- have absolutely failed to make a viable business model out of this, while many companies who adopted the web made billions.
While I do not use Sci-Hub, I think that users who use it are doing so morally and ethically (in the sense of conscientious objection). i hope they are also willing to pay penalties if they are found to be violating copyright (this is generally considered a requirement for intential protest).
SciHub shows the way papers should work on the Internet.
The other day in a HN discussion, someone cited a paper in response to my comment. I was able, in 30 seconds, get to the full text of that paper, which allowed me to reevaluate my opinion in context of what I read.
This is how science can, and should be useful for individuals. And beyond arXiv and SciHub, it generally isn't.
I'm an academic and fully making research open access. But when I read discussions like this I always wonder about the people who work at journals. The process of peer-review, copy-editing, and online publication is not something that can be done for free.
Granted, the current journal publishers spend too much money on overhead, and I certainly don't support the for-profit ones like Elsevier that rake in huge profits. But I also don't see much allowance made for the fact that publishing research in a peer-reviewed format involves labor which should continue to be compensated in some way (incidentally, it's not entirely true that researchers themselves aren't compensated - publishing offers an indirect benefit but a real one in the sense that publications are directly linked to salary increases down the line).
> But when I read discussions like this I always wonder about the people who work at journals. The process of peer-review, copy-editing, and online publication is not something that can be done for free.
Peer review is done by others in the field (peers), typically for free. Online publication is "where do I stick this PDF", and does not require per-paper work (or if it does that can be done by the author). That leaves us with copyediting, and in many cases, copyediting issues are caught by peer review rather than any paid editor.
I do peer review myself and am familiar with the model. IMO, when I'm contacted to review someone's work, the journal employee contacting me is performing a legitimate service. They did research to find my name and email and determine that I'm competent to assess the paper. They or another editor have also reviewed the paper in the first place to determine if it's worthy of being peer-reviewed at all, which requires some domain-specific knowledge. And if I pass on peer reviewing, they have to find another person to ask, and so on. Multiplied by dozens of papers, that can be a substantial amount of work.
I also think that you underestimate the importance of copy-editors. It's not the job of a peer reviewer to make sure that the author uses an apostrophe properly, etc. There needs to be a specialist who is dedicated to catching those errors, particularly since, as you note, peer-reviewers aren't directly compensated so it's unfair to burden them with a whole other set of responsibilities.
> I also think that you underestimate the importance of copy-editors
Many Elsevier and Springer journals no longer perform copy-editing. Authors are expected to have their paper checked by a native English speaker and copy-edited at their own expense, and then provide the journal with a camera-ready PDF. In my own field, it is the open-access journals published by non-profits that actually have the best language quality and typesetting.
This is a problem that goes beyond journals into for-profit scholarly publishing more generally. In my field, Brill is an infamous publisher for this: it demands camera-ready PDFs for most of the monographs it puts out. So, your library ends up having to spend 400€ on a book where about all the publisher contributed – besides unpaid peer review – is printing, binding, and mailing it out.
> There needs to be a specialist who is dedicated to catching those errors,
I think "needs" might be too strong here. We (the field of CS) get by without it just fine -- the standard practice is to include copy-editing "nits" at the end of one's review. A shepherd, assigned during the final phase, does a final pass on the paper before approving it.
Yup. Typos slip through. There are papers with poor English.
Oh well. For the most part, it works out pretty well.
(And as a reviewer, I have little objection to also noting writing fixes while I'm reading your paper. I'm going to spend anywhere from 30 minutes to 5 hours reading the thing -- the writing fixes are a small additional cost. If you've done a decent job on the writing in the first place. If it's totally botched, I'll reject your paper and tell you to fix it before submitting it again. :-)
Now, would I prefer that the authors of submitted papers had to pay $50 for someone to do a copy-editing pass before I reviewed it? Heck yes. But perhaps we'll get DNNs to fix this for us one of these days. :)
That's a fair point. One thing I'm getting from this discussion is that it's difficult to generalize when it comes to academic publishing, because norms vary substantially between fields. I've seen the copy editing "nits" you mention at the end of reviewers' letters in my field (history) but I suspect that historians would rebel if the copy editor's job was entirely foisted off on us.
Likewise, it's normal for editors in my field to make meta-level suggestions about writing style. I'd wager that history journals place a greater emphasis on prose style than CS journals do, since making an historical argument often depends on telling a compelling narrative. Hence a publishing model that works for a CS journal might not work for humanities journals and vice versa.
Absolutely. And our papers are a fair bit shorter than yours, for the most part. :). 14 pages, 2 column, 10 or 11pt type is the norm for us, with figures and references included.
Even if we don't put all the copy-editing burden on the author (it's their reputation that is affected by the mistakes), the costs for organizing peer review and copy-editing could be covered by a fairly small submission fee, or alternatively donations or the sale of hard-copies. You could even offer freemium models where anyone can read the papers for free, but value-add options are sold to libraries and universities (integration into library catalog, better search, etc).
I think something like the freemium model you mention is the way to go. As others have mentioned in this discussion, the alternatives simply rely on pushing the costs to different sectors (like funding agencies or even, in the worst case scenarios, researchers themselves). I keep waiting for this sort of thing to happen. Perhaps it could even be bundled into some kind of social network that would offer an alternative to academia.edu. It seems that there is a lot of inertia when it comes to scholarly publishing though.
Let me rephrase that a little. In your first paragraph you argue that the work journals actually do is finding others to do the real work. And in the second paragraph you say that the copy editor is there to catch missing apostrophes. It's true that that is not "zero" work, but it's not a very strong case. And it certainly does not justify the absurd cost model we are currently stuck with.
We agree, it absolutely doesn't justify the current cost model. I hate having to donate my time to Elsevier as much as the next academic.
Maybe I gave the wrong impression by mentioning apostrophes, however. Professional copy editing is, in my view, super important in terms of differentiating a good journal from a bad or mediocre journal. As is the vetting procedure of finding appropriate peer reviewers and coordination between them. Whether or not you think of that as "real" work compared to producing actual research, it is still work that should be compensated in some way, in my view.
An analogy might be the professor teaching a class vs the maintenance guys who makes sure the projectors are working and the lights turn on. One might be more important than the other, but I don't think either should be working for free.
> The process of peer-review, copy-editing, and online publication
I'm confused that you aren't aware of this but, peer review and copy-editing is by-and-large done by other academics, not journal publishers, and, at most, for what amounts to an honorarium.
And online publication is not a job, per se. We automated it a long time ago. Teenages have tumblr blogs now. There is no reason why the practical aspects of online journal curation could not be handled by a very small team of people working in the IT departments of a few universities.
Journal article publication may contribute to academic careers, but that has nothing to do with the publishers' involvement: it has to do with the quality of the journal, which is driven by the academics in writing and reviewing for it.
Simply put, journal publishers are >entirely< overhead.
See my comment below. Copy-editing isn't performed by other academics (or at least it shouldn't be given their other responsibilities, in my view).
And although peer review relies on specialists volunteering their time, finding and vetting those specialists still requires work.
I'm not trying to say that the current publishing model is defensible, but I am pointing out that running a high quality peer reviewed journal still requires at least one or two dedicated workers. Whether you think they should be paid for their time or expected to volunteer is a different issue, but we shouldn't pretend that the whole apparatus is an illusion created by greedy publishers.
This must be highly field-specific then. I published a peer-reviewed paper a couple months ago that came back with around 50 suggested copy edits, as well as a few paragraphs of suggested changes from the journal editor. And then it went through the process again in a lesser form at the page proofs stage. Granted, a lot of those suggested edits were to make it conform to a somewhat arbitrary and tedious house style, but it also caught things that I or the other people I shared the paper with didn't see.
Oh, I didn't include edits to stay within house style, but then, I wouldn't submit a paper that wasn't already in house style.
If the editor sent some copy edits to the text, I'd just send it back to them unedited and ask them to publish it. In fact, I love pushing back against unreasonable editorial requests.
The companies do not recompense the reviewers or editors meaningfully. They ride only on the coattails of prestigious venues, with all the work done by volunteers.
Would it make sense for the peer review to be uncoupled from the distribution? I don't know about if this were physical, but, digitally, if e.g. ACMEcorp serves the paper, and if review team 1, team 2, etc.. can all attach their signatures of peer review in e.g. PeerDB, doesn't that make the review more transparent and detangle incentives?
> While I do not use Sci-Hub, I think that users who use it are doing so morally and ethically (in the sense of conscientious objection). i hope they are also willing to pay penalties if they are found to be violating copyright (this is generally considered a requirement for intential protest).
I'm having trouble expanding this into a sensible-sounding general moral principle. Does this hold regardless of how large the penalties are? (Relevant considering the often very high punitive damages for copyright infringement at least in the case of entertainment media.) Is it specific to some kinds of laws or government system or fully universal in the sense that somebody protesting the policies of a stereotypical dictatorship is also morally obliged to be willing to be shot/flogged/whatever the corresponding punishment under that system is?
I agree with your comments. It's something a social studies teacher mentioned when I was in high school, and it never completely made sense to me, but it is the established principle. You can see more about the reasoning here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/civil-disobedience/
Also if you're motivated and dig well enough, you'll find plenty of copies on college classes lectures websites. Albeit nowhere near scihub but still..
While I do not use Sci-Hub, I think that users who use it are doing so morally and ethically (in the sense of conscientious objection). i hope they are also willing to pay penalties if they are found to be violating copyright (this is generally considered a requirement for intential protest).