maybe academic prublishing is... not-broken?

[oligopsony]

(N.B. - this got some good pushback in the comments, specfically pointing out that the major publishing companies aren't doing much and that the situation may not last for long, depending on who wins what copyright battles)

The complaints about academic publishing are diverse, so I'm only here to speculateYesterday's xkcd inspired a quick thought, which has probably been had before:



Namely: what if academic publishing is fairly effective public goods provision disguised as an dysfunctional market?

The obvious absurdity of the market (at least on the consumption side - I'm going to leave the production side of it alone for now) shows up whenever Elsevier offers you 24-hour access to an article for $29.99.

I don't want to say that no one has ever been rich, clueless, and also genuinely scientifically curious enough to pay for one of these. A close friend of mine has published a lot of articles in a scientific field and learned about SciHub only recently (though even she wasn't paying for articles, just going the long way of actually logging in through her uni/workplace and personally emailing researchers when that didn't work.) Rather, academic libraries and I guess institutions like pharmaceutical companies are paying for what must be close to 100% of Elsevier's income. Then Elsevier uses this to produce public goods, by sponsoring the production of journal articles that they nominally charge $29.99 for but that are also immediately uploaded to their actual distribution mechanism, arXiv/SciHub/Book4You.

Presumably universities could defect from this equilibrium by just not bothering with the part where they pretend to pay for the library coverage. Partially of course that could land them in trouble (I know of professors who have gotten disciplined or fired for being overly honest about how to actually access textbooks and other materials, which is tragic,) even when no one is getting punished for pirating academic materials as a private individual (leaving aside other tragic cases that weren't really as "private individuals," like Aaron Schwarz.) But also probably having a subscription to the right suite of journals is just the kind of prestige purchase that major universities like to make (or even are required for credentialing, which would make the public goods provisioning aspect even more explicit. "You want to be in the Elks Club, you better pay your maintenance fees.") In this sense, if Elsevier's shareholders are skimming off the top of this process that could maybe be provided more efficiently (relying on lots of volunteer labor driven by intra-guild prestige considerations, etc) then that's possibly just another instance of administrative bloat. If pharma companies are paying for subscriptions, then that's likewise just another instance of them contributing to what they should be paying for anyway.

I am less informed on these topics than I should be, however - especially as someone who will soon be shopping a book around to academic publishers. (No investigation, no right to speak, but I'm speaking anyway.) So I welcome corrections to my likely numerous errors.

Comments

[hebethen]

but that are also immediately uploaded to their actual distribution mechanism, arXiv/SciHub/Book4You.

As the comic implies, though, that's only true for some academic disciplines?

[oligopsony]

I can believe that about "since the 90s" (per the comic,) and I could believe it about particular fields that may operate weirdly. But I have pretty diverse interests and have never had any difficulty finding things on SciHub or Book4You (which may represent a more recent development.) I've had trouble with particular books, almost always ones that either just came out or came out prior to pdf proofs, but not subjects. So I would guess that it's a minority of fields, granting that I might be exaggerating how worldly I actually am.

But if someone knows their own field (or just a field they have an interest in) isn't generally available I would certainly be interested to hear that! (If disappointed for their own sake.)

[hebethen]

Book4You is a new thing since I was last in academia, that's true! Academic publishing and the various problems folks complain about have been around for much longer than that, though, and plenty of non-officially-sanctioned websites exist for all kinds of things other than scholarly literature -- I'm not sure if "disguised as" would be the relationship so much as "bandaided by", if you see what I mean.

[entanglingbriars]

If those resources exist for my chosen fields, I'm entirely unaware of them and I feel like someone would have mentioned them in one of my classes, especially my more intro-to-x or writing-about-y classes, if they were.

[kleptoquark]

> sponsoring the production of journal articles

Do they do this? In what sense?

The usual complaint is that articles are produced by authors (in a journal-ready format!), who pay for the privilege, edited by the author and volunteers through a peer review process (the reviewers are the "volunteer labor driven by intra-guild prestige considerations" you allude to), distributed through arXiv by the authors, etc.

The journals don't even provide much editorial filtering -- that's the peer reviewers again. It's not clear that the money that pours into Elsevier goes towards anything other than advertising, lobbying, minimal operating expenses, and profit. And, I guess, some proofreading which is notoriously sloppy ("they like to change equations to make them wrong", says one professor I know) and doesn't include formatting or structural/semantic changes (that's left to the peer review process).

Actually, a lot of physics journals are open-access, so it's evident that the massive subscription fees aren't necessary to do what they do. (They only charge a small fee to authors.)

Math has a few "arXiv overlay" open-access journals that don't charge the author fee either, IIRC, and seem to accomplish this by cutting down on operating costs in ways that don't matter.

(I'm open to being convinced that journals provide some value, I just don't see where.)

[xenostalgic]

This confused me too. It's like public goods provision, except... they're not really the ones providing the goods, and they're doing their best to prevent them from being public.

[youzicha]

I saw a twitter exchange the other day, which says that subscriptions generated 72% of revenue and transactional sales 26%, so it seems lots of people do pay the insane prices.

I also note that these companies are quite active at lawsuits to try to suppress sci-hub, so they clearly do feel threatened. Given the general developments of SOPA/FOSTA/Article 13/Megaupload prosecution/etc, I would give them better than even odds of eventually suceeding. For computer science I don't think that would matter too much, because everyone is publishing their stuff directly on their homepage anyone, but e.g. in medicine there doesn't seem to be any similar culture, so, uh, enjoy the golden era of scientific access while it lasts.

I would also echo kleptoquark's comment that it's not clear to me that Elsevier contributes anything at all to the production processes. Maybe it was different a few decades ago, when you needed to print the journals on paper---back then I think the publishing companies basically handled all the "physical" parts of the pipeline.

Incidentally, while it's common (and, of course, proper) to condemn the absolute evil of Elsevier, I personally feel a greater hatred for the corrupted good of JSTOR. I mean, not only did they kill Aaron Swartz, but also they are a non-profit organization with a nominal mission of providing access to papers; and they do so my adding paywalls to them, suing people who circumvent the paywalls, and spending almost all their budget on sending their management on glitzy holidays conference trips.

[youzicha]

Thinking a bit more about this, it strikes me that the very idea of having a homepage where you can just put whatever you like seems to be another thing from the Web 1.0 days that's about to vanish (except among computer scientists, maybe). Nowadays, many people's internet presence seems to move to things like Facebook or LinkedIn, which don't give you any affordances to upload random files, and indeed will soon be legally mandated by the EU to implement upload filters...

[eightyonekilograms]

Chiming in to agree with others: the frustrating thing about Elsevier and other paid journals is that they don't seem to provide any service at all. They don't pay the authors of the papers, they don't pay the peer reviewers, they don't offer any kind of verification. As far as I can tell, the only things they do are proofreading and typesetting, which are honestly the sorts of thing that could be handled by a grad student, if not actually a computer program (and it already is: most typesetting is done by the author(s) with LaTeX). These outrageous subscription fees are paying for nothing.

This is why, even though most people eventually age out of the mindset where they think pirating movies and games is OK, these same people see nothing wrong with Sci-Hub. Elsevier is a useless middleman-slash-parasite, and nothing of value will be lost when it eventually disappears. The research community will shrug and mostly continue along like it always has.