Government grant-funded research should not be published in for-profit journals

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Scope of the Problem

  • Many agree that for-profit scientific publishing is exploitative and misaligned with public funding, but see it as a symptom of deeper issues: prestige incentives, publish-or-perish culture, and underfunded universities.
  • Journals are framed less as knowledge-dissemination tools and more as career-advancement and credentialing infrastructure.

Government OA Mandates & Proposed Ban

  • Strong support for the idea: “If taxpayers fund it, results shouldn’t be paywalled”; some see a grant condition banning for-profit journals as a clear, straightforward lever.
  • Others argue this is politically and institutionally hard: entrenched interests, legal changes, and money flows make it nontrivial, even if conceptually simple.
  • Several commenters note that US agencies (NSF/NIH and similar) already require open access via repositories like PubMed Central, but there’s debate over how much this actually weakens publishers’ business models or OA fees (“article processing charges”) replacing subscriptions.

Collective Action & Incentive Traps

  • Suggestions to have top departments collectively boycott predatory or luxury journals meet pushback:
    • Senior academics often built their careers on those journals and tie their own prestige to them.
    • Junior researchers, postdocs, and grad students depend on high-impact venues for jobs and tenure; unilateral boycotts could punish them.
    • Coordination across many institutions and countries is seen as very hard.

Peer Review and Journal Prestige

  • Broad agreement that “peer reviewed” ≠ “true”; peer review is limited, variable in quality, and often fails to detect fraud or weak methods.
  • Disagreement over how much the public actually trusts “peer review” as a concept, and whether high-prestige journals are better or worse on reliability.
  • Some argue journal-based pre-publication review is a weak, noisy gatekeeper that mostly adds delay and cost; others emphasize its value as a basic filter in an overwhelming literature.

Alternatives & Partial Successes

  • arXiv and similar preprint servers are widely used in some fields (especially CS), but:
    • Not seen as “credible” by many committees and funders because anyone can upload.
    • Suffer from slush-pile problems and increasing low-quality or LLM-generated submissions.
  • Proposed models:
    • Overlay journals on top of arXiv (e.g., Open Journal of Astrophysics); curated lists rather than exclusive publishing.
    • Open-access society or non-profit publishers (ACM, Dagstuhl, eLife-style assessment overlays).
    • Community-driven recommendation/curation signals layered over open repositories.
  • Conferences in CS are cited as an example where most work is effectively open, but travel, visas, and review quality are significant issues.

Systemic Critiques

  • Several commenters argue the real core problems are:
    • Prestige-based evaluation and funding, which journals serve.
    • Structural incentives for quantity over quality, leading to fraud and reproducibility crises.
    • Capitalist profit-seeking that will reappear elsewhere in the pipeline even if journals are reformed.
  • Some advocate radical overhaul (“burn it down”), others favor incremental reform via OA mandates and new publishing models.