> the business of publishing tax-funded research and then selling it to tax-funded institutions has produced the most profitable industry in the world

How is this not illegal?

(Lowly soon-to-be-postdoc here; a professor would be able to say more.)

As one of those academics...I keep getting requests to peer review, I respectfully make clear I don't review for non open source journals anymore. Same with publishing. I'm not tenure-track so am not primarily evaluated based on output.

Publishing is broken, but it is really just part of the broader and even more broken nature of academic research.

When a paper is seemingly not available online, I've always gotten a free copy via an email to the author... And then there's sci-hub. It's not the way it should be (i.e. you shouldn't have to hunt around for publicly-funded research), but at least it's something.

I don't see why that should be a requirement. So long as papers are made available for free, why should it matter if they are also available in a paid journal?

If you know of one for CS, do comment.

First step is to put the pdf into the zip and have existing tools be able to navigate the hierarchy. Could include notebooks, bibtex, tex, data, images, etc.

And semantic scholar is in exactly the right place to institute this evolution.

I'm a shareholder and board member of a large privately-held, family-owned academic publishing company. If anyone is interested in trying to understand what makes the industry work, why it's so hard to disrupt it, etc. I'd love to engage or put you in touch with people within the industry smarter than me - my email is in my profile.

I know the industry is particularly frustrating to the HN crowd. We want to think it's a technology problem - that distributing PDFs is a solved problem (which it obviously is). But the root of the problems (of which there are many) are all cultural and much harder to change. If you're going to jump in and try to "fix" the industry or put publishers out of business, I highly encourage you to engage with folks in the industry with an open mind and really try to understand why things work the way they work. You're not going to have any success unless you truly understand the incentive structure of academia and the social and cultural aspects of inertia that are at play. If you go in thinking you can build a better "publishing" mousetrap you will fail. You have to realize publishers are in the reputation business. And when you start peeling back the onion of how academics are assessed, given jobs, given tenure, etc you start seeing how hard changing behavior can be.

40% are very normal and consider healthy margins for many businesses. The business with largest possible profit margins I know of is political donations. For mere $100K, one can own vast public land for mining and selling resources worth billions for many generations. That's 1000000% margin for you.

(The good stuff starts where Robert Maxwell appears)

We publish here, and the stuff that is good rises to the top with upvotes from our peers, and it is all subject to review in the comments where many an interesting discussion is had.

We all gain by sharing ideas as widely as possible. We just need a way for that to happen.

It's so obvious you're being ripped off. What the heck scientists?

No wonder people believe in conspiracy theories, with a bunch of scientists denying them the knowledge while a bunch of business suits hoard the cash.

That statement is misleading. Pblishers sell participation badges to the article authors, the authors put these badges in their CV, and when the time comes to ask for money from the governmnet, the gal with the most badges on her chest wins it.

In addition, the authors have the right to upload a preprint (i.e. a copy identical in content) to a preprint server - virtually all journals allow it nowadays - although it doesn't happen.

So, there is in theory no reason why anyone should go to these websites to download a copy. In practice, it is convenient for the parties involved (researchers & funding agencies).

I wouldn't see any incentive for any work to be peer-reviewed, ever, then.

Either way, I don't think he's helping the image issue.

Alexandra Elbakyan has done and will do more for science than this rent-seeking asshole will ever do.

    Shiran Pasternak

    What is a reasonable profit margin for a platform for communicating publicly
    funded research? Non-rhetorical question.

    mrgunn

    For a publicly traded company, the answer is "what the market will bear".

Krista Jamieson offers a great perspective.

If there was a way to open source curation and not lose quality, I can't imagine anyone would disagree with that - even the people who work at these organisations.

Unfortunately, what you end up with is arxiv, while very useful for sure, has no curation.

Everyone just keeps bleeting - we want free! But they don't bother to think about how to do actually do it. How to ensure quality curation remains which is absolutely so critical to the advancement of science.

I've been fantasizing about free everything since forever. Who hasn't? But at some point we have to stop trying to fantasize our way to results.

This is like underpants gnomes logic - steal underpants .. .. .. .. quality curation!

Also, MrGunn is a moron commenting on that thread. Why not just hand out free subscriptions to rare disease patients? What a trivially cost less PR move.

The same goes for everyone who works there. They have either found a way to justify that what they do is ethical and okay, or would quit. That's just human nature.

That's right, and that's also why the prestigious researchers and universities, those with an already established reputation, have a responsibility: collectively leave the editorial boards of for-profit publishers, set up alternative venues with the help of university libraries. Share the archival, indexing and discovery effort among universities via peer-to-peer digital library federation.

All the tools are there. The same way that places like Stanford, Berkeley and MIT made MOOCs a thing, they can revolutionize scientific publishing.

There's already such venues such as JAIR for AI research (and that was set up looong ago without all the tech we have today), so it's certainly possible. It just needs to become the norm rather than the exception.

Everyone realizes this. The problem is that you're abusing your position in this reputation system for profit. Do you think $40 is a fair price to read a paper from 1987? https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/109434208700100...

This will come as a surprise to both my PhD advisor and my current advisee

ArXiv is not peer reviewed.

there is no doubt about that. but maybe it's time to question how science is done in general.

in the end the goal is to advance our knowledge and bring humanity forward.

but instead of everyone cooperating to do just that, they are competing with each other, and try to outdo each other. a lot of energy is wasted in preventing others from stealing your research ideas and being the first to publish on a particular topic. instead of looking at the benefits of the research published in a paper, and whether the results can be reproduced, instead what matters more is how many citations the paper can get.

reputation has become more important than producing actual results. academics and academic institutions are measured not in the quality of their research, but in the amount of papers and citations they can produce, to the point that researchers who can't dedicate their life to their work, because they have family, or worse, are a single parent, can't get a job, let alone tenure, because they can't put in the time required even though they may well put in more effort than others into the time they do have.

so yes, i acknowledge that changing this is going to be extremely hard. but it looks to me like changing the way papers are published will be the easiest step, because the components that actually matter are distribution, which is technology, and reviewers, which are academics.

the only thing that i see publishers doing is to edit the journals and decide what to publish. but shouldn't exactly that, also be done by academics?

how about a model like stackoverflow? papers are published like questions, and reviews are the answers. readers upvote good papers and good reviews, so that the most upvoted and most reviewed papers float to the top. the citation count can be included in the score too.

greetings, eMBee.

- why don’t publishers pay reviewers for the extensive time they spend reviewing the paper?

- why don’t publishers pay academics who edit journals, another time consuming task?

- why don’t publishers pay academics or institutions for a product they sell?

I can’t comment on your company, but the above is the status quo for most of academia.

Do you think this business model is ethical?

An academic article is not a blog post. Also, only the most popular posts get discussed here -- tons of stuff is lost if it's not initially popular. Timing your submission allows for gaming the system.

All scholarly articles need to go through peer review and receive honest, constructive feedback -- especially the bad ones, and Hacker News (and Reddit and Slashdot and any system like that which doesn't assign reviewers to articles) isn't very good at that.