Mastodawn

"Imagine being an expert in your field, and working for months – maybe years – on a cutting-edge research project. And then imagine sending that research to a publisher who pays you nothing for your work. Instead, they charge you an enormous fee for the privilege of having it appear in their journal ... Unfortunately, that’s the entire business model of academic publishing."

Dr #KristenScicluna, 2024

https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/the-academic-publishing-rort/

#AcademicPublishing #AcademicJournals #PeerReviewedJournals #research

The academic publishing rort

As much as $1 billion in taxpayer funding may be being funnelled into the pockets of for-profit academic publishers every year, writes Dr Kristen Scicluna.

The Australia Institute

"In many countries around the world ... funding bodies require the research they fund to be published with 'open access', meaning that it is not put behind a paywall. ...publishers ... take advantage of academics and institutions by charging them an open access publication fee, called an 'article processing charge' (APC). In the science journal Nature, the APC is currently around AU$19,000 – that’s for one single article."

Dr #KristenScicluna, 2024

https://australiainstitute.org.au/post/the-academic-publishing-rort/

(1/?)

The academic publishing rort

As much as $1 billion in taxpayer funding may be being funnelled into the pockets of for-profit academic publishers every year, writes Dr Kristen Scicluna.

The Australia Institute

An oligopoly of enshittified corporate publishers are charging authors thousands of dollars per article, for the privilege of having their copyright choices respected when they engage in necessary academic publishing that is essential to their work. This is extortion, plain and simple. How do we got about criminalising this kind of practice?

I refer back to my proposal to reform copyright law so that imposing exclusive licenses on authors is no longer possible;

https://mastodon.nzoss.nz/@strypey/115986492747055324

(2/?)

Strypey (@[email protected])

One simple change to copyright law that would make a huge difference is making exclusive licenses unenforceable. Here's an example. After decades of consolidation, an oligopoly of 3 corporations control licensing for the majority of the world's recorded music (Universal, Sony and Warner). If an artist wants their music distributed by one of them, they have to sign over 100% control of their music licensing rights. (1/?) #PolicyNZ #copyright #CopyrightReform

Mastodon - NZOSS

"Encouraging the rapid publication of research results through preprint servers."

#KristenScicluna, 2024

Maybe the solution is for preprint servers to have their own volunteer-driven peer review processes? They need to be co-designed with academics and meet their approval before being put in place. But I'm imagining something like ...

(3/?)

* Unreviewed articles are posted anonymously

* Volunteers reviewers are notified about new articles relevant to their discipline and research interests, with a deadline for comments

* Reviewers post anonymous comments, and maybe rate each other's comments, pol.is style. The author can comment to seek clarification or further references

* Once the peer review deadline is reached, the author has an editing period

* When the editing period ends, authorship of the article is attributed

(4/?)

Raw, unreviewed research could be found on preprint servers, with the same checks and balances used now, but unattributed. But if the author's name is on preprint article, that would show it's been through peer review there, and the anonymous comments from peer reviewers appear with the article.

I'm not imagining this as a complete replacement for the journal system. But I think it's an achievable step towards moving the functions of journals out of the control of academic publishers.

(5/5)

I'm not sure how this could be actioned, but imagine that copyright and trademark law was reformed to recognise the editorial staff of academic journals as its owners. Not the publisher who distributes them.

That way the editorial staff have decision-making power over whether the articles published in their journal are open access, and what style. If the publisher was unhappy with their decisions, they could move to a different one.

#CopyrightReform

Ooze 𓁟 Feb 7

@strypey You don't need anonymous, you need open.

1. Papers submitted publicly with author identification.

2. Anyone can do a review, which is also posted publicly.

3. Anyone can reply to reviews, also public.

4. Moderators do governance, also open.

@Ooze
> You don't need anonymous, you need open

There's method to my madness, see the next post in the thread.

Ooze 𓁟 Feb 7

@strypey I read it. I don't agree with anonymous reviews because people need to be accountable for their reviews.

@Ooze
> I don't agree with anonymous reviews because people need to be accountable for their reviews

For sure. But we're not talking about anyone on the net being able to comment like it's a Wikipedia page. We're talking about account-holders on a preprint server. So as with editors in traditional journal peer review, the reviewers are known to the server admins, but not to the author being reviewed.

It's akin the anonymity of a person's vote in an election, or verdict in a jury trial.

Ooze 𓁟 Feb 7

@strypey I was not talking about account holders on a preprint server. I am advocating for complete openess. I do think anyone should be able to review because there are a LOT of people out there who have the knowledge to review papers but who are excluded from doing so because they didn't go to university, because they didn't go to the right university, because they aren't in the clique that is running the preprint server, and many other reasons.

Yes, this means moderation will take some effort.

Disciplines are super specialised nowadays so reviewers, journal editors and paper authors all know each other. They know who is the most likely person to have written a paper on a given topic and they recognise each others' styles. Don't forget reviewers are journal editors and paper submitters and vice versa. It is all very incestuous. People have grudges against each other and try to sabotage each others' careers. They often do this by hiding behind anonymous reviewing processes.

In any system we have to accept the realities of human behaviour and factor it in. Academics can be arseholes too. A completely open process will minimise them getting away with it.

@Ooze
> I do think anyone should be able to review

So to be clear, you want preprint servers to allow anyone on the net to be able to drop comments on academic articles, without an account.

> this means moderation will take some effort

This is like saying burning our remaining fossil fuels would make the world somewhat warmer. Anyone who has moderated anything online, ever, will tell you this is totally impractical. For reasons explained here;

https://jmberger.substack.com/p/the-five-stages-of-content-moderation

https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you-speed-run-the-content-moderation-learning-curve/

The Five Stages of Content Moderation

How quickly they forget

WORLD GONE WRONG

Ooze 𓁟 Feb 7

@strypey I can see you have had a strong reaction to my suggestions. Dumping semi relevant blog posts into a post because you disagree about a point is super patronising my friend. Rather than trying to rely on an argument from authority I'd rather you engaged the point yourself.

With respect, I do know what I am talking about. I have done moderation for many years so I recognize the challenges. Moderation can be hard. Those of us academically trained are supposed to be able to do such things as our stock in trade, so let's consider how it could be done.

To fix academic publishing we do need to address problems like cliques, the poor quality of many degrees and recognising the fact that many people who are entirely without degrees can still be totally competent contributors.

Wikipedia, for all its faults, has shown that this can be done. There are some weaknesses in the approach that make moderation more difficult though. I understand why they went for allowing anonymous user accounts, but it makes governance a lot more difficult. In academic papers you do need accountability so anonymity needs to go.

When I said anyone can edit I didn't mean mean accountless editors. I meant that anyone should be able to sign up to be an editor. One could easily automate a process to discover the competence level of aspiring editors and then allow editors to pass to a more thorough level of assessment.

There is no reason one can't have different levels of editors who could do different levels of review. Such a process would be a great pedagogical tool for those new to editing. People at undergraduate level are treated as morons with nothing to offer by most universities when they can in fact do certain tasks well. A system where editors can grade each other and thus progress and build a bigger body of editors is totally doable.

Though there are challenges to be overcome simply throwing our hands up in horror and saying it is hard is not going to serve us.

edit: This system for vetting contributors just popped up in my timeline in a quite timely manner. https://wirejunkie.net/@mitchellh@hachyderm.io/116031529260241382

Mastodon

(1/?)

@Ooze
> Rather than trying to rely on an argument from authority I'd rather you engaged the point yourself

I have no interest in arguing about the practicality of running a fully open publishing website. I learned the hard way why it's impractical when I was part of the moderation team for one, starting in 2000. I see no point explaining it 500 chars at a time, when the links I shared do a perfectly adequate job.

(2/?)

@Ooze
> To fix academic publishing we do need to address problems like cliques

I'm not disputing this. Practical ways to decentralise control over publishing could include;

* having many preprint servers, which is already the case. If one is too cliquey for you, publish on one that isn't

* federating preprint servers, so that people with an account on any preprint server can peer review an article on any other. See the Open Science Network built on Bonfire as a PoC

(3/?)

@ooze
> I understand why [Wikipedia] went for allowing anonymous user accounts

For the same reason Indymedia did, idealism. They mostly retreated from this, and most WP edits have been made with user accounts for years. Any edits made without a user account are heavily checked after-the-fact. Which only works because WP is a huge platform, with thousands of people available to check edits at any given time.

(4/?)

@Ooze
> In academic papers you do need accountability so anonymity needs to go

Total anonymity, sure. But peer reviewers can be anonymous to the author whose work is being reviewed, but known to the editors. That's where the accountability lies.

If this style of anonymity doesn't improve the peer review process, why has it remained common practice across most (if not all) academic journals for centuries?

(5/?)

@Ooze
> When I said anyone can edit I didn't mean mean accountless editors

What you said was;

> I was not talking about account holders on a preprint server. I am advocating for complete openess.

That may not be what you meant, but it was exactly what you said.

(6/?)

@Ooze
> I meant that anyone should be able to sign up to be an editor

Is it not the case that anyone can sign up for an account on a preprint server?

> A system where editors can grade each other and thus progress and build a bigger body of editors is totally doable.

You mean like this?

> Reviewers post anonymous comments, and maybe rate each other's comments, pol.is style

(7/?)

Most of the suggestions towards the end of your post are great, and totally compatible with my proposal. The only thing I was knocking back was the suggestion to allow reviews without accounts, which it seems we agree is not necessary.

So we seem to be mostly in heated agreement here : )

(8/8)

We differ on the merit of making preprint articles anonymous for a pre-review period, and making peer reviews anonymous (in both cases anonymous to anyone who isn't an admin/mod). But let's run the experiment, try all 4 combos on different preprint servers, compare the results.

Maybe one approach would emerge as a clear winner, or maybe there would be pros and cons to each, and preprint servers could choose the approach they think serves their needs. Let a thousand flowers bloom.