Sunday: Hili dialogue

18 thoughts on “Sunday: Hili dialogue”

1. Hope that you have landed as I write this. Thank you for sticking with today’s WEIT through last call for your flight last night. Your best is excellent indeed. TWiV 1233 this morning has a discussion of recent Trump directive that NIH funded research results be freely available. The guys say that that was really a Biden initiative that Trump accelerated by 6 months. I know that you have hosted some discussion on this site that taxpayer funded research results should be freely available. I agree with that though I do not know how the peer review logistics would work. At Nasa (in the good ole days…do not know how it works now), we published Nasa memos, technical papers, and technical reports, all peer reviewed to some level within the agency and printed within the agency and were freely available. Some of these papers were also given at conferences or appeared in specialty journals (with additional peer reviewed) for which the public paid to access.

   1. Peer review is typically completely voluntary; journal publishers take advantage of scientists’ desire to help guide the direction of their fields, taking their time and their work without paying them, while often simultaneously charging the authors large sums to publish articles that may have taken years to write. This is why journal publishers have one of the highest profit margins of any legal type of business.

      It is a system that really needs to be disrupted. But the Trump directive will probably only drive up the page charges of the journals, making it harder for scientists to publish. Those scientists who can will just increase the the budget of their grant proposals, but independent scientists will suffer.

      There are a few journals that are both open-access and free of page charges. These are usually run by academic societies or independent institutions. These are getting very rare.

      1. Lou, is there a way this could be done that does not drive up the page charges of the journals? I’m not familiar with this industry other than as a reader.

         1. They could lower the page charges significantly right now, but that is not in their corporate interest. Judging from the profit margins, they are already charging much more than the actual cost of their services. As far as I can tell, the marginal cost to the publisher of making an article “open access” is practically zero. The press of a button for them. However, if most of their articles are open-access, most publishers will lose their subscription fees (especially to libraries) for their print and online journals. So in this sense it does cost them to make their journals open-access, and they will make up that lost revenue by charging scientists more per article.

            The publishers won’t do something that will lower their profit margins. They have scientists trapped.

            Recently there has been some resistance to this, including a movement to refuse to do peer reviews for the big publisher Elsevier, but it is sometimes scientifically hard to refuse.

            Also recently DEI has crept into the review system, asking reviewers to fill out identity questionnaires. The implication is that the journals prioritize not just the scientific expertise of the reviewers but also their gender and race identity.

            1. How can it be simultaneously true that the marginal cost of making an article open access is ~ zero AND that doing so will cost the publisher his subscription fees from individuals and libraries. This sounds to me like it just is the marginal cost, and a very large one at that. Not just “in this sense.” It’s the whole enchilada of the business model. Why buy a dairy herd if some of the cows can give away free milk at no cost to themselves?

               The author who wants his article to be open access, to be read and cited widely by other authors who won’t have to pay anything for the privilege, surely has to compensate the publisher for lost revenue and profit that his open-access election imposes on said publisher, No? OK, maybe Somebody Else should pay to provide this free service but easier to nominate someone than to volunteer.

               Coel suggests that finding agencies could stipulate that the work they fund must be published in journals that are open-access and charge no more than $100 for a manuscript using an all-volunteer structure. At first I thought this was a Modest Proposal but I’m not sure. So I have to ask, What if there are no such journals? (Such as the learned societies discovering they don’t know the first thing about the business of running a publication and it is to bite off more than they can chew.) Then what?

            2. Leslie, the huge profit margins show that they could charge much less for their services (not “giving it away”) and still make a healthy profit.

            3. Lou, you’ve answered your own question at the very start. It’s not in their corporate interests, i.e., not in the interests of their shareholders, to charge less than the market will bear. High operating profit, if sustained and likely to be sustainable, is a good thing, attracting shareholder investment. No one wants to invest in companies that leave money on the table. You don’t suggest any reason that makes sense to investors, the principal fiduciary obligation of the Board, why the publisher would reduce his page charges when he doesn’t have to. If management lowered its price to increase market share, that would make sense to investors provided the move was likely to increase profitability. But complaints from the public that price could be reduced because profit is too high? Management is simply not going to listen. Set up your own journal if you think you can do it cheaper, it might say. Or invest in ours and share in the juicy profits.

               Maybe this isn’t the best way to disseminate new knowledge. But I don’t think the commercial publishing industry can do much other than what it does.

         2. It would be very easy. All that need happen is that the funding agencies mandate that, as a condition of being awarded funding, the results must be published in a journal that is (1) open access, putting everything openly available on the internet, and (2) charges no more than $100 per paper “processing fee”.

            Yes, this can be done. As Lou explains, editors will work for free, for the prestige and as a community service, while referees will review papers as a community service (or, re-phrasing, they see this as part of the job that their universities pay them for). Such journals should be run on a cost-neutral basis by the learned societies in each field.

            Note that the arXiv pre-print server opperates on a budget of about $10 per paper. So $100 per paper is entirely realistic. Nearly all academic teams are capable of producing good-enough-quality pdfs using today’s software (as demonstrated that in many fields no-one reads anything other than the author-produced uploaded preprint pdfs; the journal refereeing is then just a quality stamp). Anything above $100 per paper is pure profiteering on the part of the publishers.

            It’s baffling that this hasn’t been imposed already. The only explanation is that politicians don’t know enough about this, and talk to publishers who want their rapacious profits.

            1. Besides government funding agencies, I believe universities also fund research. Why haven’t they followed this path? Or have they? The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and other similar organizations fund a significant portion of research. Do they insist on the results being open access? I raise these questions because neither requires political involvement.

            2. Beg to differ. I was editor-in-chief of a small society-owned journal for many years. I would not have done all that work for free or for the “prestige” (I assure you it was not prestigious). The journal had production and web hosting and other costs that had to be recouped. Yes agree the arXiv model is a good one, but it has significant financial support behind it. Nothing is free.

               “Operations are maintained by the arXiv Leadership Team and arXiv staff at Cornell University. Governance of arXiv is led by the Leadership Team with guidance from the arXiv Editorial Advisory Council, Institutions Advisory Council, and Science Advisory Council. arXiv is a community-supported resource funded by Cornell University, the Simons Foundation, member institutions, and donors.”

               https://info.arxiv.org/about/index.html

   2. If “NIH funded research results [must] be freely available” then NIH (and NSF and NSERC etc.) needs to start a journal to organize peer review, vet the results, and host the accepted article and its data online. It’s baffling to me why this isn’t happening.

      1. I don’t think that is a good idea. Those organizations do of course vet their grants carefully, but having these same organizations judging the results of their grants is like the fox watching the hen house. There would be significant unconscious or conscious pressure not to overly criticize the research they themselves funded, as this would demonstrate faults in their vetting system.

         1. Agree that it would be a bad idea. It may save us from e.g. Elsevier. But in this current political administration where ideology trumps everything, what happens? RFK Jr and Mehmet Oz would only allow publishing worthless articles, or ones that profit their other businesses.

         2. Then what do you suggest Lou? It’s expen$ive to run a journal. Who should do so? All organizations that could do so have either (1) a financial incentive to charge lot$ to authors (APCs) or libraries (subscriptions) or both, or (2) a conflict of interest over whether work gets published (funding agencies, universities). Even the scholarly associations that run journals have expenses they must recoup from authors or funding agencies or subscribers.

            You suggest above that the commercial publishing houses could charge less and still make a profit. But their shareholders beg to differ, and if the executives at Elsevier or Springer or Wiley were to drop prices just to make things easier on scientists they would soon be fired by the board and replaced with executives who put shareholder intere$t first.

            There are no solutions, only compromises.

2. Must be an excellent cutlet. Hili looks like he would really like that piece of meat!

   And, the Texas flood is a huge tragedy. The death toll is getting worse.

   Finally, of course, the muscle cat. Who would think of such a thing? Free will? Not a chance that those cat muscles are a product of free will. Clearly an unplanned compulsion.

3. Bon voyage!

4. 🧊

   😁

5. Such a fun way to play classics! Hypakle

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