I once had to explain, to a copyeditor at one of the leading mathematics journals, that the meaning of a fraction changes if you move stuff between the top and the bottom.
The annual subscription cost for this journal is $3,250.
I am bewildered that we continue to tolerate this state of affairs.
Over the years that I published (in a humanities field), I was astonished by the rapid decline in copy editing quality at even top publishers like Oxford University Press. They stopped budgeting for specialists, and started contracting out copy editing to people who couldn't even tell apart common non-English languages. I started getting back "final" proofs with diagrams in the wrong order or with the wrong captions, and was so dearly tempted to just sign off "looks great!" like they were expecting me to. If only it wasn't my own reputation on the line if I let these things through.
Interesting. I have multiple paper published in SIAM journals (Applied math) and I have consistently be blown away (in a good way!) by the quality of their copy editing.
I mean as a broke masters student with a graphic design degree this sounds like the kind of job I would actually enjoy doing, only I have no idea how one goes about finding such things. Is the real problem here the hiring process and where these things are looking for people?
And the bad thing about this is that their employees there do not receive a lot of training. So they are stuck with not a lot of knowledge about a process and are often the ones who have to endure the wrath of authors.
How underqualified are the staff? I'm Indian and I know Chartered Accountants (5+ years of self study, rigourous exams), pharmacists, lawyers doing outsourcing.
As jehewson said, among large commercial publishers it's common to outsource abroad. For journals run by professional societies, it might be more common to do things in-house.
That said -- and keep in mind that this might be different in different academic disciplines -- I'm not sure that this would be appealing work for a graphic designer. There just isn't room for creativity of any sort. Mathematics papers have an extremely homogeneous look and feel, and everyone in the discipline is perfectly okay with that.
Maybe textbook companies would be a better bet -- although with its $200+ textbooks that industry has its own set of problems. That said, if I were writing a student-oriented book (as opposed to a research paper), I would welcome the chance to work with someone with creative ideas for the visual presentation.
It's not some kid with a low-voltage humanities degree using Grammarly who got the gig though Upwork, reality is worse than that.
Journals employ language editors to smooth out papers written by non-native speakers with a poor command of the language. If you want to edit for language you have to comprehend somewhat the content. People who know mathematics and are willing to put up with poor language skills are rare.
A long time ago I knew a guy who kept his head above water after he lost his job in the dotcom crisis doing scientific editing. He worked through an agency, but I don't know the name.
I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if half the adult population of the US has an understanding of fractions that falls apart if you move past what you need to read cooking recipes (which nb. is basically none whatsoever, unless scaling recipes up or down). Maybe a lot more than that. Many with bachelor’s degrees or higher. I think both the level of numeracy in and the degree to which it is perceived to actually matter for the general population is greatly overestimated on sites like HN.
[edit] in this particular case the person had likely gotten by pattern-matching 1, a slash, and a 3, as one-third, and simply never cared why one might write 3/1 to mean 3, for example. Why do that, after all? I see a one, I see a slash, and I see a 3. One-third. It’s worked every single time before so why would your thing be a special case?
It's actually terrifying to think about. I don't want to denigrate people or be mean, but when you realize that your own standard of literacy is something many people truly struggle to obtain, it helps make a lot of things make sense.
For example, I saw a thread on Reddit the other day where someone mentioned "taking the 30 seconds to read something"; the discussion went on a tangent where someone called themselves a slow reader because it took them a whole minute, and then others chimed in that it was taking them longer still. So, I timed myself and it took me 14 seconds to read it.
What that made abundantly clear to me was that my own experience in the world - seeing _words_ as first class entities everywhere, immediately tagged and understood as whole components, instantly, without ever "reading" them... is not everyone else's experience. Some adults who nominally believe themselves to be literate must actually have to sit there and spend some effort to recognize each letter and sound out a word, the way my children did when they were ~4 (and some children get even younger). What is the world like for these people? I can often speed-read a paragraph and come away with an understanding within seconds, skimming over it for key words and familiar grammatical constructs; my assumption is that most people posting here can do the same. Maybe that's not the case?
There's also a lot of talk on the Internet in the last year or two about inner monologue, with the growing realization that it is likely that a large part of the population simply does not experience the ability to talk to themselves within their own head. This makes me wonder if they can read silently without having to mouth the words; perhaps this is the tip of the iceberg for a differentiation in intelligence that hasn't really been extensively studied yet (unsurprisingly, since psychometrics are not in vogue right now).
>I saw a thread on Reddit the other day where someone mentioned "taking the 30 seconds to read something"; the discussion went on a tangent where someone called themselves a slow reader because it took them a whole minute, and then others chimed in that it was taking them longer still. So, I timed myself and it took me 14 seconds to read it.
Not that I don't agree with your overall message but petty one-upsmanship at things one should never strive to one-up someone else on is kind of a staple of Reddit and that's probably what you were reading.
I guess so. I'm not making up my 14-second number, nor would I pretend that I read at an extremely high speed compared to the average HN poster. It's not a boast. I wasn't speed-reading, I've seen speed readers and they can get up to 1000 WPM apparently - I think I'm in the ~400-500 range based on a few online tests I did.
I think the “Reddit one-upsmanship” that the parent was referring to was actually in the other direction; i.e., people “one-upping” how long it took them to read it.
Exactly. You post about how you broke your something playing sports in hihh school and it's never been quite the same. Someone else posts about how they hurt themselves worse. Seven nested comments later you've got someone trying to score virtue points by claiming they had a wood chipper accident now they're a head floating in a jar like in Futurama. It's bizarre.
Speaking of lack of internal dialog I noticed a quieting of it as a side effect of a medication I was on - normally volume didn't exactly apply but it was difficult to head myself think - not like it getting drowned out but that the thoughts themselves were harder to hear. Speaking of mouthing the words when reading - subvocalization occurs when reading with most people in their larynx. Most people who don't mouth the words silently say them instead as a "good enough" measure. Obviously not the case in deaf-mutes who never learned to speak of course.
Interesting. Would you really qualify that as being like "quieter volume", or was it more like it was harder to "recognize" words out of the dialogue?
> Obviously not the case in deaf-mutes who never learned to speak of course.
I wonder what reading is actually like for these folks, since letters symbolize sounds; they _must_ recognize word-at-a-time with no sub-vocalizing, right? I hope we get lucky and a random person with experience in the field stops by ;)
Being more charitable, you could argue fractions are complicated - you're essentially passing someone a function, rather than the result.
You could argue that of any number system, but if you can count to ten and understand "more left of decimal point = bigger, more right = smaller" then most comparisons in numerals are easy. 0.25 vs 0.33, 1/4 vs 1/3. We are, I believe, the only animals able to comprehend either, especially in conjunction with units of measurement.
Side note, but one of my favourite gotchas is in optimisation - say for a race car, where we want to minimise time (for a constant distance), rather than maximise speed. Strictly speaking, they're equivalent, but people doing the latter almost always end up focusing on top speed, and overlooking the time lost going slowly.
Oh, I wasn’t trying to be insulting. I think it’s a sign of 1) how legitimately hard “basic” math stuff is for a lot of people, and yeah, fractions seem to be the earliest point at which a lot of (even actually, truly smart!) people stop really “getting it”, 2) people not getting why they should care, and never being sufficiently motivated to care—frankly a lot of math comes off not just as pointless, but like mathematicians are trolling the mere normals, as commonly presented, and 3) “math people” largely not getting that math beyond basic arithmetic actually doesn’t matter very much for a huge portion of jobs and lives, and that they’re failing as a field to communicate the ways in which it could.
You might guess from the above that I’m pretty firmly in the camp that thinks “k-12 math just isn’t mathy enough and that’s why it’s bad” is dangerously wrong. You’d be right about that.
This seems to be missing any discussion of non-profit academic society publishers, which in many fields are the dominant publishers and so much better than the for-profit companies that seem more dominant in the life sciences especially. I'm most familiar with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in computer science. Sure, they have their own bureaucracies and added costs, but they run all kinds of other programs and events based on the profits from journals and conferences, including the kind of student scholarships to conferences they suggest. The overall costs are way lower, they're governed by the leading professors who are elected from the membership, they've been far more willing to negotiate with universities in the big transition to open access, and I've found very little meddling of the sort this piece describes.
In ACM / CS, the publishing pipeline is now fully based in LaTeX, so authors effectively do their own typesetting for their own articles. There is now a standardized template for submissions, so the version of the draft you send to peer review is typeset in the same way it will be published in the final version. In my experience, almost always the version that gets published is identical to the final "camera ready" version I submit after peer review.
Finally, peer reviewing is indeed not paid, but the way my fields treat peer review is that you are supposed to review proportionally to however much reviewing you obligate on others by the papers you / your students / your lab submit to peer review. If your paper goes out to three reviewers, you sign up for three reviews. Then for the reviewer coordinator / meta-reviewer burden, if your group/lab is submitting 6-8 papers a year, then you have an obligation to be on the editorial board / program committee, which comes with the reviewer coordinator burden of what a decent sized group/lab obligates on others. Of course, some people are still free riders, and many people submit publications who are not qualified to peer review, but it does change how you think about the "peer reviewing is free labor" issue.
Author here; you make a lot of good points! I should have phrased the context of this article more clearly: I am aware of the existence of these 'good' publishers, and in machine learning (my main field), the publishing is mostly done via conferences anyway.
My bad experiences stem mostly from established publishers such as Springer or Oxford University Press, who are often very important for certain application areas, such as as bioinformatics. The point about equations is very much true, though: _despite_ the fact of existing LaTeX templates, they take your paper and typeset it once again---often with detrimental results :-/
Concerning the peer reviewing: I fully agree! I myself am seeing reviewing as an honour and a duty to support my field. I am objecting to the reviewers/editors doing all this work and the publisher charging ludicrous prices to access a paper. Wiley still charges 42 USD for a PDF download and online only access of a paper I wrote 6 years ago! This is absolutely bonkers and not useful for people in countries/universities that are less well-off...
At least their servers are reasonably fast. I failed to mention in the article that this is also ridiculous: having to wait 30s to access your article, while clicking through three paywalls...
> In my experience, almost always the version that gets published is identical to the final "camera ready" version I submit after peer review.
This is actually a bad thing, and a sign of standards slipping. Even if one uses a LaTeX template there are all kinds of quality-typesetting nuances that many authors are not aware of: where non-breaking spaces are necessary, proper hyphenation of foreign-language names, en dashes instead of hyphens in ranges, etc. I have seen so many publications in maths and sciences where the author was expected to provide camera-ready copy and the final result was sloppy.
I agree that learned societies can do a great job of publishing journals and Festschriften, and it is the norm in my own field where our learned societies never handed over their journals to a for-profit publisher. But I am happy that in my own field one's submissions still get hands-on work by trained copyeditors and typesetters so that the final result is perfect regardless of the author's own typesetting competence.
Except for getting people's names right.. if people don't notice something wrong with the typesetting, is it truly wrong? If the people writing and reading documents don't notice the difference between en dashes and hyphens, then in what sense is the difference important?
I don't see why your last paragraph should even slightly change how one feels about the "peer reviewing is free labour" issue. As you've described it, they are reviewing because they are indebted to other reviewers, not the publishers who are selling the fruits of their labour and keeping the profits.
Journals aren't charging for the publication - either for the editing, or the reviews.
They're charging huge tolls for their work as peer-review gatekeepers, and for the career benefits - and potential improved access to funding for departments and universities - that can result from having work published in a prestigious journal.
Essentially it's like a more complicated form of buying likes (i.e. prestige and marketable crediblity) on social media, for an older and much richer market - with a monopolistic twist.
Opening access to content and paying editors more won't necessarily help. This market won't go away until the tacit benefits become equivalent. This means breaking their ability to operate together as a cartel.
Besides - in reality they only the highest profile journals provide any benefits at all. Most journals are low-profile throw-aways with limited influence and prestige. But the publishers have contrived a situation where universities have to buy an all-or-nothing access package.
If citation prestige is opened up, the cartel will collapse almost overnight.
I mostly agree with what you say, but I disagree with this:
> Besides - in reality they only the highest profile journals provide any benefits at all.
In my discipline (mathematics) there is a large middle tier of "respectable" journals, that regularly publish good work, including work by well known people. A typical tenure dossier at a middling research department might list say, 15 papers, most of which were in this middle tier, and a couple of which were published somewhere really good.
I agree that the system is a cartel and would love to see it collapse. In my opinion, whatever replaced it would need to duplicate the signaling mechanism to succeed.
Every since I got my own lab, I've been skipping "traditional" publication, for these reasons and more. I've had great success and satisfaction sharing my research via "DIY" publishing:
Advancing my field is my life's mission, and disseminating my research is too important to outsource.
Believe it or not, Twitter has been crucial to the process. It's not great for nuanced discussion, but it's AMAZING for advertising the existence of technical information. For example:
I hate publishers as much as the next guy, but playing the twitter high-school popularity game is the last thing I want to do with my time, and IMO it's leading to the click-baitification of research in AI. This year there was even an instance of literal ASTs being hailed by deep learning hoards as some amazing new idea.
If science gets attention according to its level of twitter amplification, then scientific publishing is going to start looking a lot like journalism. That's already happening. Ask journalists how their search for truth is going.
As opposed to the traditional publishing high-school popularity game? I'm partially joking, but traditional publishing is very much a popularity contest. You're free to ignore this, but I don't recommend it.
My personal experience (twelve years of traditional publishing followed by five years of DIY publishing) is that I spend substantially less of my time on publishing/dissemination, have higher impact, and produce higher quality work. You should give it a try!
That's a good example! I never bothered soliciting formal peer review for that article, but many of the principles we simulated there have since been demonstrated:
> To me, it is super weird that research that is often funded by the taxpayer cannot be accessed by the taxpayer.
This is so completely true, and is something everyone should be fighting for. As for the U.S., it doesn't look like our FASTR bill has gone much anywhere at all.
In the US, the NSF and NIH both have public access policies requiring that published papers resulting from taxpayer-funded research be made available free of charge no more than 12 months after publication.
It should be available immediately, of course, particularly since the official "publication date" can be delayed many months after the article is actually available. But taxpayers do get what they paid for in a somewhat reasonable time frame. The part where academic institutions provide publishers with content for free, then buy the same content back, is the insane part.
It isn't that weird that things funded by the taxpaper be accessible by the taxpayer for free. Governments fund lot of things that are inaccessible (military sites, intelligence dossiers, aid in other countries, space stations...)
Peer review is a cornerstone of academics, and there continues to be a prestige associated with it as well as with certain journals. This is especially true in certain circles.
As far as I can tell though, functionally this is breaking down. People can find preprints and archived papers, and do, if they're searching by topic.
So journals at this point are providing a peer review portal, and formatting. I happen to think the formatting does provide value. My sense is that at a good journal, there's a kind of stochastic improvement in errors and formatting, so that the numbers of errors go down on average, and the formatting improved, on average, over iterations back and forth with the copyeditor.
As for peer review, I'm not so sure anymore. My sense is that it does provide some kind of stamp of approval from experts in the area, so if you don't know much about an area, it provides some sense that at least some small group of people in the area believe it meets some kind of basic standards. But that says very little, and the amount of noise in the review process is large.
I think the core of the academic communication system is slowly being hollowed out, and being replaced by blogs, things like twitter and mastodon, and archives. At this point the peer review journal process provides some value, but it's being propped up by tradition. Already, with COVID, we're increasingly seeing the focus on preprints. Journalists and others are careful to note something hasn't been peer-reviewed yet, but everyone knows it matters little because they can turn to experts to find out what they think of it.
If there aren't formal attempts to create an alternative, I think we'll just be left with people posting and passing around preprints and discussing them on twitter, mastodon, blogs, and message groups. If people want the nice formatting, and some stamp of approval, I think something else will have to be worked out. But the journals are starting to feel like they're getting in the way, in general, and represents some kind of power or status structure more than quality control system.
Paying reviewers I think creates bad incentives as the author of the post points out. So do author-pays systems. What is maybe missing from the piece is some recognition that in the past, reviewers reviewed and editors edited in part as part of their job. That is, you were paid as a faculty member at a university, and that was what people understood you did. Pre-internet, this was all valuable service. Now that universities and others are more focused on faculty bringing in profits rather than paying for their services -- and questions are being raised about the value of journals in general -- we are seeing these questions about what reviewers get paid.
I think in the future there will be value in article hosting and searching, and providing website frameworks for discussion and peer review, but I'm not sure they will look like journals per se. You'll see things like arxiv.org, but with commentary, rating, discussion, and approval infrastructure over them. That's what large libraries and research centers will be donating money to or paying for. I think journals per se will eventually start to seem kind of stodgy and old fashioned.
It isn't, it was a mistake trying to bring it everywhere. Peer review is a way for your jealous colleagues to stop your novel, disruptive, or counter-intuitive research from being published; and while it may serve some purpose in some limited fields, for most fields it does little else but suppress good science.
If your peers understood where your field was going, they'd be doing the research, not reviewing it.
Now, that doesn't mean we shouldn't have journals with editors, but peer review is not necessary to good science, and in most fields it is a parasite.
If not for the issues with paying and incentives ISP interchange style balancing upon the net incoming vs outgoing reviews would be a tempting way to get some focus upon it with "networked" universities. That would of course encourage low quality spammed peer reviews to up the volume.
The annual subscription cost for this journal is $3,250.
I am bewildered that we continue to tolerate this state of affairs.