Of all the crazy parts of our crazy system, the craziest part is where taxpayers pay for the research, then pay private companies to publish it, and then pay again so scientists can read it. We may not agree on much, but we can all agree on this: it is time, finally and forever, to get rid of for-profit scientific publishers.
This seems like it would be an easy thing for some doo gooders to set up for free. Maybe with a few ads to fund it.
That was one of the biggest cultural shocks when I did my PhD. What do you mean I need a super expensive subscription (it was paid by university luckily) to access other publications? what do you also mean I have to pay a large fee to also publish? if I want others to access my publications for free I need to pay even more? oh and you don’t pay reviewers, they do it for free all? then where all this money of charging both ways goes? your block storage is probably costing you 0.01 usd per year for my paper…
The entire thing seemed like an aggressive business model making some people super rich at the expense of poor students for the most time who are required to publish.
People should make their own papers available for free, either on Bittorrent or just upload it publicly in many places (ideally both). It’s not like you get anything when people pay to access it from one of these journals.
Capitalism is essentially about inserting non essential middlemen into every supply chain and increasing profits of these “people” who do the least work.
“Economics” need a re-write too. They have elevated “profits” higher than “Truth-seeking”, and their field are swamped in non-scientific claims and processes that cause ‘Truth’ to become second fiddle to “profits”.
The profit motive compromises Scientific thinking/behavior on ALL levels of the Scientific system, is orthogonal to the truth incentive so only align/overlap in rare cases. Capitalism/free markets is a combative ideology - a belief-system - that generates a perpetual need for profits and kills good Science behavior.
That’s just the ones on TV.
I’m an economist and many of us don’t have much to do with currency economies and could be better described as “find the root cause experts.”
Hell, I use my skills in the IT field.
No, wrong, try again. Many of us, certainly at least tens of thousands of academics, have switched to submitting and supporting free open journals.
So I agree with your conclusion, but your factual basis is faulty.
I think you got to specify which research area you are in. In terms of life sciences for example, I don’t see what you are saying.
Here’s a bit of how it got started.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-scienceFather of Ghislaine Maxwell, yes the Epstein one, had quite a lot to do with it, which sure bears mentioning!
Fuck “The Guardian” (no shade to you, commenter), Behind The Bastards did a competent 4-piece or something (for those who enjoy such a format) on the guy, and to a degree, the topic. Interesting - mostly, but oddly not all - bad stuff.
I’m amazed and disgusted at how all roads lead to Mossad.
Fun fact Robert Maxwell established the for profit scientific publishing companies. If that name seems familiar he is the father of Ghislaine.
🤮
We need more profit in science, like we need to reward the most the greedy and unscrupulous people in capitalism.
Everyone but Elsevier wants that.
Agreed. Honestly can’t believe how this is even still a thing at this point.
I think it’s a great lesson in hiw good people can create and tolerate bad systems …
… how a bunch of clever and thoughtful people (academics) can walk into creating a dumb system which they simultaneously hate or disagree with, and don’t know how to effectively change or fix.
Worth studying IMO as a case study on these general problems. My understanding is that it was a manipulative capitalist that kicked it off by appealing to academics’ egos by creating increasingly specialised and likely redundant Journals (IE more subscriptions). And of course most academics know it’s dumb, but have no sense of collective action. And so humanity just stumbles along doing dumb shit.
And their service stinks
leech parasites
