People trying to change or improve the publishing process _do_ understand academia - most of them work or have worked in academia.
The reason they're not engaging with you is likely that that your model is so obviously broken, and arguably unethical, that they don't want to help you or work with you - they want to put you out of business. Personally, I think that is an entirely reasonable response to the behaviour of academic publishers. Publishers have had more than enough time to reform.
I didn't mean engage with the publishers to work together with them. I meant engage in the conversation to really understand why changing the behavior of academics is so hard, so that you can be more effective at doing whatever you are trying to do to put publishers out of business. There are a lot of things that publishers don't like about academic publishing (journal impact factor is highly contentious within the industry), and yet changing the behavior of the academic community is incredibly difficult.
Respectfully, it troubles me a bit to see the burden of responsibility being shifted to "the academic community." On my docket for the day is completing a referee report for a 500-page academic book manuscript. It's my second time reading this ms and making pages of comments on it, and the publisher is paying me $80 for my time. That works out to pay of about $2/hour.
As I get further into academia I am amazed at the amount of work we do that is uncompensated yet required of us by the antiquated system of prestige that you mentioned in your parent comment. Perhaps it isn't so much that academics are stubbornly committed to an outmoded system, it's that we literally have no time or energy to do anything beyond the bare minimum of meeting that system's constraints.
Given that the public for-profit publishers are reporting profit margins that put tech companies to shame, I don't really buy the argument that it's the academic community who are holding things back. The perverse incentive here is clearly concentrated on the publisher side, not ours.
I really appreciate that you are taking the time to respond to comments in this thread though, thank you for posting.
I think there's enough frustration to go around. I don't doubt your story. The life of an academic (especially a young, non-tenured academic) is brutal.
To provide a frustrating anecdote from the publisher's side: we'd love to heavily invest in launching new open access journals (which we do, but we'd love to do even more). The problem with launching a new journal (either subscription or OA) is that nobody will publish in it if it doesn't have an impact factor. Impact factor is controlled by a private, for-profit company (Clarivate) that's owned by a private equity firm. Getting an impact factor takes 3-5 years and also relies on the total crapshoot of what Clarivate decides to list or not list. So the prospect of launching a new OA journal is one where you are guaranteed to lose money for the first 3-5 years and then you have to put all your eggs in the impact factor basket, hope you get listed and receive an impact factor, and only after all that will academics choose your journal over any established legacy brand. And all this because at some point academia decided that they'd outsource academic career assessment to the magic number that is Impact Factor.
I also want to thank you and the other commenters for some good discourse here. This has been refreshing and I was only called an asshole once the whole time! But jokes aside, a sincere thanks :)
>> Impact factor is controlled by a private, for-profit company (Clarivate) that's owned by a private equity firm
In the first year of my PhD the final-year student on "our" project, who I shared a bench with, told me all about impact factors and which journals he was hoping to get his paper published in.
I think there is plenty of engagement in that conversation, via new alternative publishing models, but putting that aside for a second, I think there are two separate issues here:
1. Academia has a broken incentive model. I agree with you, I think this is a valid point.
2. Academic publishing is an exploitative monopolistic business.
I don't think the big publishers will be able to do much about (1), because they haven't done anything about (2) - which seems to me to be a much easier problem to solve, as the power is in your hands to immediately start paying reviewers for their time, as a simple example.
I hear you and it's a totally valid point. We could start paying reviewers tomorrow. I'm not convinced that adding a monetary incentive to the peer review process doesn't have its own serious negative consequences, but I'm certainly open to the idea that that's a potentially better version of the system than what we have now. It's certainly a difficult business decision to push through, given the universal lack of anyone doing so industry-wide, but that doesn't make it the wrong thing to do, and it certainly could be a differentiating factor if done well (ie by speeding up the review process a publisher might be able to increase author satisfaction and also increase article output, which in an OA world has a direct revenue impact).
I do have an issue calling it a monopoly, however. At best you can call it an oligopoly. The top 5 publishers publish about half the total articles each year [1]. So half the research is published by a combination of hundreds of smaller publishers (both for-profit and not) or independent scholarly societies. And then within the top publishers, they are absolutely in competition with each other, which becomes readily apparent when you dig into the royalty deals that publishers offer scholarly societies for the rights to publish their journals, which continue to get richer for the societies (which poses a whole different interesting problem in terms of the collateral damage to modern-day scholarly societies if or when the business model blows up).
Other disciplines do indeed pay reviewers - a friend's partner told me about being paid in the humanities. So it can work as a model.
Regarding the monopoly comment: firstly, you have (usually) a complete monopoly on the content you provide. The same paper is available from one publisher.
If we talk in more general terms, then we're in the classic situation where the monopolist (or oligopolist, which is often used synonymously nowadays) pretends they don't have a monopoly, because they don't want to be punished or reformed. But, even if we took your viewpoint, that strength of market power - 5 companies controlling 50% of the market - is overwhelming.
In practice, Elsevier and Springer control nearly all Computer Science publishing (for example), so the situation is extremely bad.
Because those people are already being paid anyway - their full time jobs, whether that’s PhD student, lecturer, professor, or industrial researcher, includes the job of reviewing and editing for publications.
It’s a society. You publish papers which get reviews, and you also work to review other people’s papers. Everyone contributes to make it work.
I think it would make a lot of sense for countries to have laws stating that the results of publicly funded research must be publicly available. It's bizarre to allow a profit-driven business to monopolise and exploit it without paying for it.
You're asking a totally separate question - you're asking 'since tax payers funded the research shouldn't they be able to see the output?' That's a great question.
But the question I was replying to was 'who is paying the reviewers'. The answer is that their employers are.
The question wasn't "who is paying them?", the question was "why aren't the publishers paying them?". And that is a crucial question, and not answered by the observation that they are already paid by others.
The answer to 'why' is that no money changes hands for any review - not to pay to get a review for your paper, and not to review a paper for someone else. It's a social system.
You 'pay' for reviews of your papers, by reviewing other people's papers.
All the publisher does is connect people up and produce the final product. You can argue that the cost to subscribe is therefore too high for that service. Fine, it may be so! But saying 'why don't they pay their reviewers' is to misunderstand what the entire setup is here.
But the publisher is the one making the profit here. From other people's work, that other people pay for. The publisher doesn't add any real value to the process. They charge a high price for people to access other people's work. At no point does the publisher pay anyone for anything, yet they do get all the profit.
It's pretty clear why this is a stupid system, isn't it?
Simply saying "but that's the way it is" is not an answer. It's the problem.
> It's pretty clear why this is a stupid system, isn't it?
Maybe! I'm just explaining why the reviewers aren't doing the work unpaid on their own time, which is a misconception people seem to have. Fewer misconceptions is better for the discussion about the remaining issues like whether the system is stupid or not.
But that's the point: the reviewers are paid, but by the tax payer, not by the publisher. The publisher profits, while the tax payer has to pay 3 times to finally get what they paid for. The publisher is getting a free ride here.
You claimed "It's all through this thread, and every thread on this topic", so it shouldn't be hard to find plenty of examples.
The example you gave is not an example of it. Notice the "if" in it? Go read that comment again, and read the comment it is replying to. The person is not expressing a positive belief. They're not familiar with the system, are trying to make sense of the parent comment's statement, and are asking how it works.
Creating a "market" for reviews would be a terrible idea - I agree that the reviewing part of the process seems to work pretty well (or at least did when I was last involved, which is a while now).
Edit: The bureaucracy of charging for reviews would be bad enough - but I suspect perverse incentives would soon arise as reviewing would soon be seen as a revenue generator to be maximised and a cost to be minimised.
> Because those people are already being paid anyway - their full time jobs, whether that’s PhD student, lecturer, professor, or industrial researcher, includes the job of reviewing and editing for publications.
This is inaccurate. This is not a part of a postdoc's job description, for example, in the UK. The university does not pay you to do this - you have to review on top of your day job.
If your job is an academic then of course the job implicitly includes reviewing papers. That's what being an academic involves. It's part of your normal paid day-job if you have an academic position, either in industry or in a university.
Do you think academics and industrial researchers take holiday when they have to travel to a program committee meeting? No of course not, they do it during work time and are paid for it and their employer pays for flights etc.
While I was in academia I was specifically tasked with reviewing papers for an external conference, and so were all my colleagues.
[Speaking from my experiences as a PhD student] once an academic is sufficiently senior they can do what they damn well like. My boss came in late, took long lunch breaks, and went home early.
Back to the topic: if he received papers to be reviewed, he gave them to his post-docs.
Turn of phrase here, fair point. I meant "if you want to review, then it will be additional time outside of doing your paid work."
Second question is an interesting point: what happens if you don't review? I can tell you that it is certainly the case that a lot of academics don't do reviewing. Given the amount of reviewing I and my colleagues do, there must be others who are not doing their fair share (say 3 x your submission rate) of reviews. What are the consequences of not reviewing? Perhaps you can be seen as a freeloader, some social cost, but mostly people just won't know unless you're replying to them directly.
To expand on what the parent said, what makes it weird that the incentives for people in the community are mixed: there are market incentives (mainly publishers), community incentive (reviews and volunteer expert work), resume incentives (pubs in top journals). They interact in weird and sometimes toxic ways.
- 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?