Medlife Crisis
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2020–2021
22:32 · 1.1M views · Oct 14, 2020
Medlife Crisis asks whether academic research should sit behind paywalls, covering publisher profit margins, unpaid reviewers, Sci-Hub and Aaron Swartz. It includes an interview with Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan.
HN recommends it as an informative review of the academic publishing business and its monopoly-like structure.
5 comments from Hacker News
The devils are in the details. This does not still justify current model and the steep price they are paid (by taxpayers, FYI a typical university pay millions of dollar to these institutions). Consider openreview by ICLR[1] as an counter example for your claim. The maintenance, quality control, software development is not as steep as current gatekeepers advertise yet their review quality is much higher (network/transparency effect). Not to mention the profit margin of scientific publication is 3x of the Apple (38% for Elsevier) and it should be because the science workers, works free for these institutions (fighting for credit). The current business model as a whole is a legacy institution based on earlier monopoly by a charlatan named Maxwell [2]. He basically lured scientist by shiny hotels+extra packages to build the initial reputation and then monopolize the entire industry for decades. It's interesting how the model works by rip off the taxpayers twice (by publishing and access) while still peer-review process is free (from money, not credit). You can find a good review of this scheme from below YouTube video[3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] this video
The current scientific publication model is only benefits the gatekeepers in publishing industry. It directly goes to the packet of publishing industry by ripping off the tax-payers twice with a steep price. Nowadays research institution pay high fees both for paywall and open-access. No matter you access or publish you some how give tax-payers money to these publishing industries. It has been shown the steep price is also un-justified as peer-review are done freely (for credit, not money) by science worker themselves and there are plenty of open-review and open-science projects which prove the price is not justified. It might worth it to repeat part of my comment in [1]: > The current business model as a whole is a legacy institution based on earlier monopoly by a charlatan named Maxwell [2]. He basically lured scientist by shiny hotels+extra packages to build the initial reputation and then monopolize the entire industry for decades. You can find a good review of this scheme from below YouTube video[3]. [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] this video
Science Publisher Elsevier's reported profit margin is 38%, compared to Apple's 21% – there's lot of cash at stake for them and a big warchest to defend it For anyone looking to understand the background on the science publishing industry, how it ended up this way and why they will fight Sci-Hub so aggressively, I found this discussion really informative: this video
> That pirate bay and scihub are still around, that their authors are walking around freely Let's not equate these sites. scihub gives people what they are likely already paid for. Academic publishing business is a fraud. this video (recent video on the topic that I liked)
The funny thing is taxpayers ripped twice, on publishing and on access to the science and the profit goes to publication industry (not universities, research institution). If you summarize the cash flow, the publishing industry charges twice the taxpayers in addition to the science worker and research institutions costs. If you want to make your article open access, then you pay extra fees and nowadays, the university funds ripped off twice: they still bear the cost of pay-wall publishers and open access. Long story short, the whole system is rigged in favor of gatekeepers. You may check this video[1] [1] this video