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
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?”.