Comment on Laws only matter if you're not rich.
andros_rex@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Academic journals are huge grifts.
You pay to submit your article. The people who review your article are usually doing it for free/prestige - they aren’t usually paid by the journal. You don’t get paid when someone reads or downloads your article. The journals then make deals with institutions and libraries to sell these articles at monstrously ridiculous subscription fees, making the articles effectively inaccessible to the public. (JSTOR now lets you make a free account and access a couple little things, even that is a concession)
It’s not beneficial for anyone. They depend on the fact that you have to publish to have a career. Keep in mind tons of research is funded by public money too. These companies add almost no value and take in all of the profit.
Because of how shitty and scammy this system already was, more serious grifters have realized that they can run journals just to get paid. There’s an epidemic of these predatory journals publishing abysmal research.
Most of the people who write the articles hate this system too - many profs will often happily send you a pdf or chapter if you send a nice email.
rektdeckard@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Ok I simply don’t understand how the same means and methods used by the free and open source software community have not been employed here. These are smart people! Just start your own damn free journal service, found a council and tap some industry-leading researchers in some common fields to start reviewing papers.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
This is like driving through a decent neighborhood and being like “The mob rules this neighborhood? Why don’t people just tell them to leave?”.
Academic publishers are just very specialized gangs, there is no functional difference between the business model of Elsevier and the business model of a local crimelord.
This isn’t hyperbole, it is a joke, but it is also just basically the truth of it.
rektdeckard@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I am not in academia but did participate in published research both in college and in a job as a lab assistant afterward. I don’t really think your analogy holds up. There is literally no cost to such a change; scientists just need to start READING and CITING papers from free, alternative journals for them to be legitimized. The profit incentives of the universities, private industry, and government are not affected by the choice of the medium of exchange of ideas. Only the journals’ pockets.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
You aren’t wrong, there isn’t actually a lot holding the system back from changing, which again is exactly why I compare it to a mafia model.
The mafia is only ever just one guy at the top who makes every single chump underneath them sacred enough not to look to their neighbor and go “do we really need this asshole?”.
umbraroze@lemmy.world 1 week ago
There’s actually a bunch of journals that have Open Access (making the articles available for free, usually under Creative Commons licenses). That at least eliminates the cost for the readers.
However, that’s not a guarantee the OA journals don’t collect publication fees, or even that the fees would be smaller than on non-OA journals. Fees range from “just trying to keep the lights on” to “same ol’ grift, but ostensibly nicer to the reader”.
Also, starting a new journal is always a bit of a tricky process in that you obviously want the people to trust in the journal and starting from total zero makes it harder. There have been a bunch of journals that were outright scams and OA obviously won’t fix that.
supersquirrel@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
Also guess what kinds of journals are considered prestigious in academia.
hint, it isn’t the ones trying to make academic publishing better