Author-paid publication fees corrupt science and should be abandoned

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Author-paid open-access publishing fees are criticized as amplifying the “publish or perish” culture, incentivizing low-quality or even fraudulent work while enriching large commercial publishers. Commenters argue the deeper problem is academia’s reliance on crude metrics—paper counts, impact factors, and citations—for grants and careers, which encourages gaming, citation rings, and prestige-chasing across many fields. Proposed remedies range from funding and evaluation reforms that reward careful peer review and replication, to arXiv-style open platforms with stronger post-publication filtering and society-run or overlay journals that reduce paywalls without pay-to-publish distortions.

Author-Paid Open Access and Incentives

  • Many agree high APCs (author publication charges) are exploitative given publishers’ high margins and minimal added services.
  • Pay-to-publish models are seen as fueling low‑quality and spammy journals; MDPI is mentioned as an easy-to-ignore “spam” brand.
  • Some argue author-paid OA is not the core problem; it’s the incentive structure that rewards sheer publication and citation counts.

Prestige, Journals, and Prisoner’s Dilemma

  • Career advancement, grants, and PhD completion heavily depend on publishing in high‑impact, selective journals.
  • This creates a prisoner’s dilemma: everyone knows arXiv/WWW-style publishing could be better, but no one can risk abandoning prestige venues alone.
  • In some fields (e.g., biomed), journal brand and editor gatekeeping matter more than reviewers per se.

Peer Review: Problems and Proposals

  • Complaints about superficial or misguided reviews, reviewer anonymity, and political/editorial interference.
  • Suggestions include:
    • Rewarding peer review more than raw publication counts.
    • Making reviews public and subject to “peer review of peer review.”
    • Double-blind review to hide author identity; disagreement on whether reviewers should remain anonymous.
  • Concerns that open, non-anonymous review could lead to favoritism and retaliation.

Metrics, Gaming, and Goodhart’s Law

  • Heavy criticism of reliance on paper counts, h-index, and citations as proxies for quality.
  • Examples of citation rings, mega-collaborations with thousands of coauthors, and ML/CS papers that are hard or impossible to reproduce.
  • Observations that metrics invite gaming, shifting effort from doing good science to optimizing numbers.

Field Differences and Quality Crisis

  • Perceived severity varies by field:
    • Medicine/clinical research and epidemiology described as especially plagued by poor design, data dredging, and careerist projects.
    • CS/ML has its own replication issues and selective reporting, despite strong preprint culture.
  • Some link systemic flaws to declining public trust in science; others argue denialism would exist regardless.

Proposed Structural Reforms

  • Shift evaluation toward importance of questions, rigor, and quality of review rather than volume of output.
  • Strengthen society/overlay journals and institutional curation of arXiv.
  • Tighten grant and hiring standards to penalize use of dubious venues and metrics gaming.
  • A few argue the root problem is broader political/economic pressures (competition for scarce funding, student loan system).