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Discussion (72 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
completely unsurprised, given the state of online papers publishing. if you don’t have an subscription or aren’t an organisation member, the fees are insane
Things are slowly changing but I can't wait for this parasitic business model to collapse for good.
How about assigning a real copy editor with subject matter expertise? How about publishing open source libraries that automatically validate and output visualizations for their formats? How about hosting multimedia supplements?
It would not be difficult at all to earn the money they charge. There is so much room for creativity and innovation and adding value in scientific publishing.
Why pay money to make a better product when you can pay zero money for a worse product and no change in subscriptions? What are your customers gonna do, go get the paper somewhere else?
To be clear, I’m not talking about subjective style issues, I mean conforming to their own spec and avoiding careless bugs.
All remaining work fell on the backs of the physics referees. I’m not sure what value Springer provided from an editorial standpoint. It was disappointing to say the least after all that hard work.
Seems like, in 2026, we can have direct publishing without the need of these services? Is it the infra, like query tools and such, that prevent a migration away?
If you don't care about how science street cred works, nothing stops you from just throwing your papers up on arxiv. But then you get no publishing rep. And no visibility either. A big name journal in a given field gets eyes on your paper by default - but in the pits of arxiv, if you don't put your work out there yourself in the circles, no one will see it.
There are a lot of researchers writing papers. In many fields it isn't possible to read them all, so you need someone to make a selection of what is useful. Get into Nature any "everyone" will read your paper because it is important. However if you fail that you only get into a small niche publication - the only people who will read your paper are people who search it out - likely because they are in that tiny niche (and have personally met you to discuss this niche at a conference). There are even lower grades up publications which nobody reads, but in theory someone could find it in a search.
What physics papers should a chemist read? If you are a physicist you should be reading more papers, but there are still too many to read them all so you need a selection, but that selection should bias to others working on similar problems to you. The same applies for every other field: you can't know everything so you need someone to apply a selection to tell you what is important for you to know.
It's easy for anyone to publish papers online, but it's very difficult for a journal to build credibility and reputation. If you publish in some random journal no one has ever heard of, everyone will assume your paper couldn't get through peer review at a "real" journal.
That's why the established journals exist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4%E2%80%B233%E2%80%B3#Plagiari...
1. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-11964995
(Yes, they are morons because no reasonable person would think this is fair. You need convoluted nonsense arguments to justify this)
The system is broken
In 2014 MPDL purchase 110k out-of-print and historically significant titles. In 2015 Springer acquired open-access journals from Max Plank Society. In 2022 There was an open-access book deal allowing Plank Institute members to more easily publish books.
Things were more not always so intertwined and in 2007 the Society canceled a licensing agreement with Springer due to subscription prices and usage restrictions.
For profit journals need to die.
There is almost zero reasons why the governments or NIH-like institutions don't have their paper repository.
it's designed that way.
Most everyone and everything has been captured by the ultimate cynicism of Capitalism: if I don’t do it someone else will, so might as well put the money in my pocket right??
I agree with @kingleopod — this system is designed to do what it is doing: keep knowledge private and keep profits high. Full stop.
One of the recent posts:
"A study claiming a tenfold decrease in bugs splattered on evolutionary biologist Anders Møller’s windshield over two decades has been retracted."
On the other hand there are other similar studies that reach similar conclusions, and specifically try to control for aerodynamics e.g. [1] which says
> The weak positive relationship between vehicle registration year and splat rate suggests that newer vehicles are more efficient at sampling insects than older vehicles.
i.e. they saw more insects on newer cars compared to older ones in the same time period.
In general ecology studies aren't like lab physics, you can't control every possible confounding variable; the systems are too complicated and studies ex-situ have their own limitations. But refusing to engage with the data we do have because it's not perfect isn't going to help you make better decisions, and doesn't represent some moral high ground.
[1] https://cdn.buglife.org.uk/2022/05/Bugs-Matter-2021-National...
Although the funniest one was driving through a cloud of moths on the A9 one summer about 30 years ago in my little Nissan, which hoovered up enough of them to choke the air filter and die on the next (fairly long and steep) hill. They were hell to get off the windscreen too.
I wish I could say such behavior was shocking. Everything Springer touches turns to shit.
Unfortunately, that's nothing new.
In many cases, it's value-added, because the bundler may also do some curation and interpretation.
Not sure that's what's happening, here, though...
Plank is very famous. If this happens to you, but 50 years after you die: odds are you are not famous and nobody will notice.
Was it a bot commenting as well? That's a hilariously tone-deaf response. Guess we'd better bust out the ouija board to ask max plank himself.
Good luck sharing that information with Max Planck. It's amazing how robotically humans can act sometimes. I suppose this could be an AI or automated response, but it's just as likely it's someone following the letter of the law without using any critical thought.
Counting papers is death. Everything connected with it is death. This is Max fucking Planck, who gave us the photon. We're judging him according to today's "standards." He's "failing."
Ok. So be it. We'll get what we incentivize.
Time for a séance.
Saved you a click.
lol, getting paid for nothing. Highest levels of capitalism
See (and listen to): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wTP2RUD_cL0