To mention the obvious, it’s the same network effect that keeps people on X and Reddit.
To stay obvious, what’s fascinating is that those networks are small, its members the most intelligent people available and they meet each other regularly in person at conferences.
Why do they accept the lock-in?
Not every community does it this way. For example, computational linguistics put most of their conference proceedings online for free: https://aclanthology.org/. Deep learning researchers just publish a lot of stuff to arxiv.
Academic publishers like Elsevier are predatory scammers.
Yep if something in CS and adjacent fields isn’t open access (or there’s a pre-print floating around somewhere) chances are it’s a textbook, not worth reading, or is obscure/arcane and was written with a typewriter. Heck some of the best stuff is blogposts by people who don’t happen to be in a publish or perish situation so why bother with journals. (Trouble with that, of course, is a lack of doi but what’s archive.org for).
Meanwhile there’s fields which can’t even figure out TeX.
They may be intelligent in their fields but that doesn’t mean they think thing through in every aspect of their lives. The status quo is the easiest thing to deal with they can devote more time to their careers/research
Unless their field is in social engineering, then yeah why are they going along with it?
Like the other response to this said, it’s a little more complicated than “the status quo is easier” or “intelligent doesn’t mean smart.” This is a deeply ingrained system that’s existed for a long time, and if you don’t operate within it, you don’t get to work in academia. You won’t get to conduct your research to begin with, much less will you get to the point of publishing it without cooperating with these institutions. There are also powerful regulatory bodies like the APA and AMA who control just about everything in their field. You pretty much have to work for a university, and US universities are of course greedy and corrupt in their own right.
It would be like unseating the DNC, ending the electoral college, and expanding the two party system in America, but on a smaller scale. Plenty of Americans know that these things need to happen, but it’s not something where you can just wake up one day and make the decision to overthrow the system as long as you just try real hard.
Why do they accept the lock-in?
Looks like there is no good answer if we view them as one entity which could simply make up it’s mind. But it’s a bunch of individuals, who probably disagree at least over details. Some probably have individual ambitions or pressures, some may struggle to pay their bills or satisfy their family or even themselves.
And for each individual on the fence, it’s always an advantage to still publish to the network while hoping the rest of the group abstains and establishes a better platform in the meantime. Would you risk publishing your finally successful hard work to an immature platform, where it might not receive the attention it deserves?
And because they’re smart, they know everyone else is thinking the same. Now we have reasonable doubts in something which relies on trust.
Basically, game theory. The system will find it’s Nash equilibrium at a point where every individual move will worsen that individual’s standing.
To break this spell, you need agreements and contracts. Someone needs to work on that, negotiate and lobby for it. But who? Would anyone who would benefit from that step away from their actual work and work on that meta-system instead? Would anyone who would not benefit from that system work on it? Maybe this could be a research project for scientists who already study these topics. Otherwise, I don’t know.
It’s human nature to defend a walled garden that you are already inside of. Change is scary and might not end up better for you.
In my discipline we only pay if we want the article to be open access. Are there journals that charge $1000 and still put articles behind a paywall?
Well except a lot of the time it’s LaTeX, and the journal already makes the authors check their tex files work with the journal’s article class.
I think in computer science it’s normal to have to attend a conference to present your paper if it’s accepted. And they charge a higher fee to presenters than to regular attendees.
So the people providing the content that everyone shows up for get charged more, man that’s a weird business model. Like running a cable network that charges channels to be on it.
Yup, I’ve got a paper that’s just about ready for submission, and if the journal accepts it for publication, we pay ~3k USD, so about $4k CAD.
i wonder if that keeps researchers from developing economies from becoming impactful, because $3k is like 15 months of a minimum wage in brazilian reais, and more than entire month’s wages for 99.9% of our professors
edit: for the humanities this seems especially bad, it kind of makes it sure that western social thought remains dominant since only you guys can actually pay for it
Don’t forget that sometimes you also do work for that journal, telling them if a paper is good enough or not for them, and also basically don’t get payed.
Publish or perish.
Academic publishing is in a very weird place and is very, very political. Its true that authors have to pay to have their papers published in most journals or conferences after they’ve been accepted, but like all things academic, this is highly dependent on the field. Some universities will reimburse professors publishing costs, others need to pay out of pocket or with grant/public funding.
While its true that there are open-access journals and conferences without such costs, I would wager that most well known researchers would avoid such avenues of publication due to prestige. The larger journals and conferences have review boards where the top scientists in the world sit on them. As a potential published author with such an outlet, its a great honor to even be considered. Most researchers don’t want to take the risk of going with a less prestigious outlet if it will run the risk of smearing their image or damaging their ability to publish in better outlets in the future.
Source: Was a Doctoral candidate that ran the whole ringer besides the dissertation.
While its true that there are open-access journals and conferences without such costs
To publish open access normally costs upwards of $3k USD as well. There’s practically no point in the publishing chain where academics aren’t getting screwed.
Let’s also not forget that you have to review other people’s papers for the journal for free.
And all those reasons are why I don’t want to go into academia. It really feels like a the competition/politics/pissing contest of who you know is more valued than people coming together to push the boundaries of what we know and how we understand things. What are the upsides?
Besides myself, I have two other friends that also stopped at a Masters or dropped down to a Masters for similar reasons.
So here is the funny thing, with most research you’re expected to get the funding, which includes wages, before you even begin the research.
Meaning you’re not paying to let other people make money off your research, you’re just paying for services needed for fulfilling your end of the bargain which you had previously agreed upon from the very beginning.
The cool part of all of this is that in many places when you get public funding the research can be made available to others for free after it’s peer reviewed.
Honestly, if you could trust individuals in every industry with this much credit, then it is how the entire world would work. But you can’t trust everyone that much.
That’s all correct, of course, but it represents somewhat of an ideal case.
First, yes, you have to secure funding. Your best chance is to be someone who has already successfully completed grant-supported research with a solid history in your field, and to be looking at something considered sexy at the time. I’m not in the business anymore, but I shudder to think about how many grant proposals are offering to use LLMs. The rub is that grants can be tough to get - there’s orgs within the NIH that have a less than 5% acceptance rate. Let’s say you’re lucky and you get your grant. Depending on your institution, a big chunk of that goes into administration. The rest is for you and your colleagues and students and lab workers and so on, as well as equipment and other expenses.
You also will probably want to hold back about $10k or more for publication fees. Many journals do not require a fee to publish, but do require one to make the paper open access so that others can read it without paying a $30 fee for a single paper. When I was doing it the fees were usually between $2-3k per paper. It’s not that big of a deal if your grant is $500k, but it can be quite a chunk of money for smaller grants. In any case, you’re paying someone to print your paper, which you wrote and edited and which was reviewed and recommended for publication by other unpaid academics. If you cannot pay the fees, your work will not be accepted by most open access journals, and will not be open access if accepted by a paywalled journal.
It is not true (at least in the US at the time I was doing it) that government sponsored research will be open access by law after peer review. We fought hard for it, but the publishing lobby is pretty strong. I think the law is currently that government financed research must be made open access within a year or so of publication.
The problem comes with smaller institutions and less well known researchers. I had a friend who was a professor of finance at a smaller university, and he had to pay out of pocket for his publications as well as some of his conferences. And their salaries aren’t that high in any case. He had hard money - his salary for teaching classes - but also had to keep publishing to keep his job and advance. I had another situation where I was publishing a paper in a very small but within its subject prestigious journal, where I was more than happy to pay the pub fee. The editor told me quite frankly that he was working with a researcher from another country who was trying to figure out how he could afford to pay the pub fee because he said our paper would essentially be paying for his as well.
So, after all of that, I do consider the academic publishing business predatory and parasitic. Here’s how to get papers for free - legally. I’m not touching on any other means.
- Search for the title - in quotes - that you’re looking for. You can find individual papers by their abstracts, which generally are made publicly available. There are preprint services like ArXiv where researchers upload their papers before they’re published. If it exists, most of the time a published paper will have its final form available as a preprint with the layout being the only thing that changes. It makes sense to check though.
- Go to the author’s website. Researchers will often have links to their publications on their professional page.
- Write to the researcher and request a copy. We love that. You might need to ping them a couple of times because people get busy and forget things, but overall you’ll probably find someone who would be very happy to send you a copy.
What is the benefit of publishing in the first place? Why not upload to arXiv and not bother with the journals? Wait. It has to do with grants, doesn’t it?
Yes, a preprint will never look as good to grant panels as a paper in Nature. But also, a preprint hasn’t been peer reviewed, and that is an important step in the process. Both could be overcome to produce a less predatory system, but it would need a radical overhaul of process and, quite frankly, scientists’ sentiment.
Arxiv isn’t peer-reviewed and doesn’t count as a publication. If all you want to do is get your work out there, you’re free to do it, but it’s highly unlikely anyone will see it.
As a researcher, your greatest hope is to learn something, tell other people about it, and have them build on it. That’s not going to happen if your paper hasn’t gone through peer review. It’s also not going to count as a publication as far as your career is concerned, and that bit does have to do with your professional standing, which counts from everything from career advancement to, yes, grants.
I’m surprised that some of the large research universities don’t just band together and create their own journal.
