The article I actually quite like, but the headline is misguided. The market for scientific knowledge is called SciHub. That is precisely where the natural economic equilibrium lives.
The scientific publishing industry exists because of either (a) inertia as we move to the new equilibrium or (b) because of government regulations and interference via IP law. And even that isn't enough to stop market forces. The marginal cost to copy knowledge is around 0.
This matches my take. The problem is that these companies are serving two distinct roles:
1. Knowledge dissemination and preservation
2. Community consensus and reputation building
SciHub is the obvious answer to problem number 1. It costs literally nothing to distribute this knowledge to the community, and I'd call attempts to recreate the distribution channel foolish and misguided (at best).
Number 2 is much harder. When I was in academia (and watching my wife go through a Masters and then a PhD in a science related field) SciHub was an excellent way to find and read a paper, but it was not an excellent way to judge the quality or trustworthiness of that paper.
> Opposition to the industry is difficult for individuals. While technically anyone can upload their research online without sending it to a publisher, career prospects are dependent on getting published in established journals.
Does anything prevent you from publishing your work publicly after its been published in a journal or do you normally transfer all right of the work to the journal?
[edit] Reading further into the article, it appears that they don't retain rights after publication
> There is an alternative to this model. Plan S stated that researchers should be allowed to make their work freely available via a ‘rights retention strategy’: making it a condition of funding that authors retain their copyright over the peer-reviewed manuscripts accepted for publication.
There is a distinction between preprints and the papers published by IEEE. Typically IEEE will let you put the preprint up, but the finalized paper accepted and printed by the journal is off limits. Usually this just means the preprint is missing page numbers and has different margins.
Depending on the field and journal, it may or may not be the case. In medicine for example, full copyright is systematically transferred to the publisher.
Some journals require copyright transfer, some don't.
However, another issue is that respected scientific journals generally publish only "novel research" - i.e. no matter if copyright allows you to publish it, if you have published it somewhere then it disqualifies you from publishing that work a "good place" afterwards. So the "good journal" has to be the first publication and sometimes even if you retain copyrights they require an "embargo" that you won't publish it elsewhere (e.g. on your institutional site) for a year or two.
Title: We Can’t Trust the Market with Scientific Knowledge
First claim: The publisher rakes in 100 percent of the subscription fees, and access to what is meant to be a public good is restricted thanks to intellectual property laws.
This is the exact same issue with the "right to repair crowd."
Step 1. There's something wrong with the market.
Step 2: Analysis: because of IP law.
Why isn't the argument made against the actual cause? Bad intellectual property law has been a major issue in the US for decades now. Indefinite copyright, extortionate liabilities, patent trolling, and the farce of the DMCA.
It seems to me that "the market" isn't even getting a chance here.
In this case the two are tied by what some would call “political economy”. The IP laws are broken because IP holders pay for them to be broken. Civil activism in the IP space is inneffective as its both an esoteric topic and one with long duration. The IP holder needs just one bill to pass in their favor while activists need to block hundreds of bills over decades.
> Why isn't the argument made against the actual cause?
Practicality.
Personally, I advocate for the complete abolition of both copyright and patents, but realistically it's not something that's going to happen before I'm six feet underground.
Reforming access to scientific papers is still going to improve the situation, and there's a realistic chance of that happening.
And source of bad law is the government. It's appalling how often people scream for the government to come save them from a situation created by said government.
Source of bad government is certain members of government acting in bad faith. It's appalling how often certain members of government scream for one thing while doing another.
Bad laws are created by the government at the behest of the wealthy, who can purchase all the access to, and by extension influence over, members of the government who make all the decisions.
All that aside, who would you suggest people turn to for a solution? Replacing bad laws with good ones requires government. Replacing bad laws with no laws at all, also requires government.
Who should we be screaming at? Industry? Good luck with that.
Perhaps because laws and regulation are part of the market. And unfortunately even in democracies, small but vocal minorities have proven to be very able to bend the laws i their favor. I bet there is no democratic majority to support DMCA and indefinite copyright. Still there is no way to turn back these laws, as a few well organized people with a lot of financial interests are for these laws, a and a large part of the general population is (I suspect) somewhat against but mostly indifferent. For most people copyright reform is just one of the many things they would applaud, but not really fight for.
Same with climate issues, tobacco industry, opioid crisis... A small, vocal, well organized minority can have it their way and the rest of us stand by and suffer.
I would love to hear of a better way, but as it stands, you cannot see this mechanism as a failure of politics alone, and not market, as it are market forces that push the above mentioned minorities to influence the law.
> Perhaps because laws and regulation are part of the market.
To be more precise, there would not even be a market without regulation. Since IP can just be copied, only when "ownership" is artificially enforced by some sufficiently mighty entity with the power to do so is there anything to trade in the first place.
While enforcement of ownership needs to exist for everything, as the basis for markets, for these intangible things it is far more important. Defining copying as "stealing" sure is a cultural and arbitrary decision, not something the universe demands of us.
The effort necessary to track and enforce ownership for IP is huge and itself not part of the "market". It's much easier for tangible assets. The effort required to create a "market" for IP is on another level.
>only when "ownership" is artificially enforced by some sufficiently mighty entity with the power to do so is there anything to trade in the first place.
Every instance of funding open software and free content disproves this.
The valuable thing is the creation of IP. If you want IP pay for its creation. The market can do that.
> Same with climate issues, tobacco industry, opioid crisis... A small, vocal, well organized minority can have it their way and the rest of us stand by and suffer.
> I would love to hear of a better way
Democracy! People should have the right to petition for referendum vote on issues like these.
In theory that sounds nice, but somehow all the referenda I got to participate in asked the wrong questions. I also recall the Brexit referendum... I've heard the Swiss have organised it better, wonder how it works for them. The most promising alternative Ive heard are Citizen councils
I worked at a scientific journal as a copy-editor, the CEO was an unaccomplished scientist and scummy businessman who drastically underpaid his scientifically trained employees while he collected as many Teslas as he could.
The entire business model was to pitch their suite of video publications to university library systems, not to individual scientists themselves. I also was obligated to legitimately spam professional researchers to get peer reviews so this greedy CEO could get another Tesla or pay capital for his wife to flip another house. Every publication meant thousands in fees, so spam away we did until we got poached or gave up on it and left without another job.
Would it make bad policies better if the CEO was a Nobel Prize winner, paid well, and was a wonderful person? I don't see the value of the personal attack.
No, I think you're saying buying Teslas is unethical. What I'm doing here is calling out the anti people-who-have-more-than-me sentiment instead of passively going along with it. Got a problem with that?
Why do you care how many Teslas he has or how many houses his wife flips. That is completely separate from whether or not his business is ethical. It sounds like you think that having Teslas and flipping houses are evidence of being a bad person.
Also, criticizing an unethical business while working there and advancing it doesn't really paint you in a favorable light either, unless you had no job alternatives.
If you want something that is a social good, there has to be an economic model to support it.
That could be a government using taxation to establish an agency to do the work. That could be a business seeing a means to make a profit to provide it. That could mean a volunteer organization getting set up to do it.
Each of the above have their pluses and minuses.
A government agency in charge of scientific knowledge? What could go wrong?
A business charging $$ for access to knowledge? What could go wrong?
A volunteer organization beholden to plutocrat and partisan doners? What could go wrong?
The best answer is to push for many alternatives and make whatever organizations that are providing the good to compete against one another.
>Scientific publishing is currently a multi-billion dollar industry, forcing scientists to pay huge sums to access or publish publicly-funded research – it's time for a democratic alternative.
I'm always amazed at how easily people fall for the extremely naive "those poor academics being manipulated by these horrible publishing companies" narrative.
The scientific publishing industry exists specifically because it supplies academics with what they need - a barrier for entry keeping others out. This, of course, is the purpose of peer review; that is, to ensure that the academic asking for the paper to be published has done the required work, read all the literature, and learned all the correct jargon and can therefore enter the prestigious club. The better the journal, the more exclusive the club. The academic must pass many hoops in order to move up in prestige and this protects those who have raised themselves through this imaginary system. (nowhere is the accuracy of the results assessed during peer review by the way, though accordance with current political trends is assessed).
The other important trick academics use is esoteric language which the layman has trouble understanding. Together these two devices allow the academic to keep his cushy job, and also helps to ensure the layman doesn't realize 90% of what gets published in academia is absolute nonsense.
Of course I could be wrong and tens of thousands of academics around the world are have spent the last 50 years prisoners to the publishing industry for absolutely no reason what so ever. What seems more likely to you guys?
> Scientific publishing is currently a multi-billion dollar industry, forcing scientists to pay huge sums to access or publish publicly-funded research – it's time for a democratic alternative.
I don't know that I trust a democratic replacement for a for-profit replacement, since both have their flaws.
In the for-profit model (plutocracy) we have gatekeepers, and rent collectors.
In the democratic model we have an oppressive majority, and the silencing of the minority ~ e.g. Galileo with copernican heliocentrism. Practically though, this can be more Oligarchic than democratic oftentimes.
Let us not trade cash driven tyranny for ballot driven tyranny
Maybe we do need an alternative governance model, but I think something different from for-profit, and democratic may be best. I don't know what word best fits that definition, Open Source, or something in the Creative Commons, but there must be a better alternative
Except we currently have both of those. Publishing in a journal anyone will bother to read, and getting the credentials to work in a lab doing research anyone will publish, are both gated by a tyranny of the scientific majority. Then they're still charged to actually read anything they publish.
42 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 90.4 ms ] threadThe scientific publishing industry exists because of either (a) inertia as we move to the new equilibrium or (b) because of government regulations and interference via IP law. And even that isn't enough to stop market forces. The marginal cost to copy knowledge is around 0.
1. Knowledge dissemination and preservation
2. Community consensus and reputation building
SciHub is the obvious answer to problem number 1. It costs literally nothing to distribute this knowledge to the community, and I'd call attempts to recreate the distribution channel foolish and misguided (at best).
Number 2 is much harder. When I was in academia (and watching my wife go through a Masters and then a PhD in a science related field) SciHub was an excellent way to find and read a paper, but it was not an excellent way to judge the quality or trustworthiness of that paper.
How is this a problem? You knew where the paper was originally published, right?
Does anything prevent you from publishing your work publicly after its been published in a journal or do you normally transfer all right of the work to the journal?
[edit] Reading further into the article, it appears that they don't retain rights after publication
> There is an alternative to this model. Plan S stated that researchers should be allowed to make their work freely available via a ‘rights retention strategy’: making it a condition of funding that authors retain their copyright over the peer-reviewed manuscripts accepted for publication.
However, another issue is that respected scientific journals generally publish only "novel research" - i.e. no matter if copyright allows you to publish it, if you have published it somewhere then it disqualifies you from publishing that work a "good place" afterwards. So the "good journal" has to be the first publication and sometimes even if you retain copyrights they require an "embargo" that you won't publish it elsewhere (e.g. on your institutional site) for a year or two.
The price should approach the marginal cost in a real competitive market.
First claim: The publisher rakes in 100 percent of the subscription fees, and access to what is meant to be a public good is restricted thanks to intellectual property laws.
This is the exact same issue with the "right to repair crowd."
Step 1. There's something wrong with the market.
Step 2: Analysis: because of IP law.
Why isn't the argument made against the actual cause? Bad intellectual property law has been a major issue in the US for decades now. Indefinite copyright, extortionate liabilities, patent trolling, and the farce of the DMCA.
It seems to me that "the market" isn't even getting a chance here.
Practicality.
Personally, I advocate for the complete abolition of both copyright and patents, but realistically it's not something that's going to happen before I'm six feet underground.
Reforming access to scientific papers is still going to improve the situation, and there's a realistic chance of that happening.
All that aside, who would you suggest people turn to for a solution? Replacing bad laws with good ones requires government. Replacing bad laws with no laws at all, also requires government.
Who should we be screaming at? Industry? Good luck with that.
Same with climate issues, tobacco industry, opioid crisis... A small, vocal, well organized minority can have it their way and the rest of us stand by and suffer.
I would love to hear of a better way, but as it stands, you cannot see this mechanism as a failure of politics alone, and not market, as it are market forces that push the above mentioned minorities to influence the law.
To be more precise, there would not even be a market without regulation. Since IP can just be copied, only when "ownership" is artificially enforced by some sufficiently mighty entity with the power to do so is there anything to trade in the first place.
While enforcement of ownership needs to exist for everything, as the basis for markets, for these intangible things it is far more important. Defining copying as "stealing" sure is a cultural and arbitrary decision, not something the universe demands of us.
The effort necessary to track and enforce ownership for IP is huge and itself not part of the "market". It's much easier for tangible assets. The effort required to create a "market" for IP is on another level.
Every instance of funding open software and free content disproves this.
The valuable thing is the creation of IP. If you want IP pay for its creation. The market can do that.
> I would love to hear of a better way
Democracy! People should have the right to petition for referendum vote on issues like these.
The entire business model was to pitch their suite of video publications to university library systems, not to individual scientists themselves. I also was obligated to legitimately spam professional researchers to get peer reviews so this greedy CEO could get another Tesla or pay capital for his wife to flip another house. Every publication meant thousands in fees, so spam away we did until we got poached or gave up on it and left without another job.
The only constant in life is change.
(Assuming libel law where you are couldn't bite you. If it could, please don't)
Also, criticizing an unethical business while working there and advancing it doesn't really paint you in a favorable light either, unless you had no job alternatives.
That could be a government using taxation to establish an agency to do the work. That could be a business seeing a means to make a profit to provide it. That could mean a volunteer organization getting set up to do it.
Each of the above have their pluses and minuses.
A government agency in charge of scientific knowledge? What could go wrong?
A business charging $$ for access to knowledge? What could go wrong?
A volunteer organization beholden to plutocrat and partisan doners? What could go wrong?
The best answer is to push for many alternatives and make whatever organizations that are providing the good to compete against one another.
Without peer-review and reputation, the journals contribute nothing.
I'm always amazed at how easily people fall for the extremely naive "those poor academics being manipulated by these horrible publishing companies" narrative.
The scientific publishing industry exists specifically because it supplies academics with what they need - a barrier for entry keeping others out. This, of course, is the purpose of peer review; that is, to ensure that the academic asking for the paper to be published has done the required work, read all the literature, and learned all the correct jargon and can therefore enter the prestigious club. The better the journal, the more exclusive the club. The academic must pass many hoops in order to move up in prestige and this protects those who have raised themselves through this imaginary system. (nowhere is the accuracy of the results assessed during peer review by the way, though accordance with current political trends is assessed).
The other important trick academics use is esoteric language which the layman has trouble understanding. Together these two devices allow the academic to keep his cushy job, and also helps to ensure the layman doesn't realize 90% of what gets published in academia is absolute nonsense.
Of course I could be wrong and tens of thousands of academics around the world are have spent the last 50 years prisoners to the publishing industry for absolutely no reason what so ever. What seems more likely to you guys?
I don't know that I trust a democratic replacement for a for-profit replacement, since both have their flaws.
In the for-profit model (plutocracy) we have gatekeepers, and rent collectors.
In the democratic model we have an oppressive majority, and the silencing of the minority ~ e.g. Galileo with copernican heliocentrism. Practically though, this can be more Oligarchic than democratic oftentimes.
Let us not trade cash driven tyranny for ballot driven tyranny
Maybe we do need an alternative governance model, but I think something different from for-profit, and democratic may be best. I don't know what word best fits that definition, Open Source, or something in the Creative Commons, but there must be a better alternative