Maths and physics have largely moved to arXiv, which is open access. Biology seems to be finally moving in that direction. Of course, many academics also leak their own papers to SciHub.
Comment on Publisher Wants $2,500 To Allow Academics To Post Their Own Manuscript To Their Own Repository
pennomi@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Blows my mind that everyone in academia hasn’t rejected this and moved to a platform more like GitHub, but for papers.
Publishers are no more than leeches in an internet-enabled society.
emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
magnor@lemmy.magnor.ovh 11 months ago
Alas they have not moved there. They use them for preprint, and sure you can get the exact text of what will become the printed paper most of the time, but they are still being forced to feed the greed machine.
emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
Right, but once almost everyone in a field moves to a preprint system, publishers and authors both start realising that the publishers aren’t really essential for sharing results, and so the balance of power shifts to the authors. As more and more places stop treating journals as the sole providers of information, we may move to a system where journals do the quality-control, but the papers themselves can be found on the authors’ websites or other online repositaries.
magnor@lemmy.magnor.ovh 11 months ago
I’m afraid availability is not the issue here. Perceived legitimacy is.
In order to get a job (or simply to exist) in academia you must publish. There simply is no alternative. And so the greedy parasites will continue to be fed, whether or not the papers are available elsewhere.
eran_morad@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I’m sorry, I can’t pay you any mind until you give me your count of ScienceNatureCell.
magnor@lemmy.magnor.ovh 11 months ago
A lot have in some capacity; see preprint servers like arxiv.org.
The problem is that without papers published in actual journals, you are literally worth nothing in academia. Nothing. Can’t stress this enough, publish or perish is no joke. You won’t get any kind of job without a stupidly high number of published papers. Young researchers have nowhere near the bargaining power to initiate any kind of change there. Neither do older ones, tbh.
pennomi@lemmy.world 11 months ago
That’s a culture problem that could be fixed with collective bargaining. Everyone knows it’s wrong, they just don’t have the balls to fights against it.
magnor@lemmy.magnor.ovh 11 months ago
That is a very hasty and reductive opinion to my mind. While I absolutely agree with you on what the issue is, this is a complex problem and not a question of genital appendages.
It is impossible for young researchers to “earn” a permanent position without giving their soul and toil to this system. This makes sure that the people actually “succeeding” are the ones less likely to actually go against the system, since it benefited them. The ones that do try are hopelessly alone, and no amount of male gonads is going to help them change the culture.
Zeth0s@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Thanks for saying this. This is the absolute main problem of academia. It select people who don’t want to change a failing system because they are great at gaming that system. This is also the reason average quality academic researchers has dropped so much, while the best minds moved to industry, doing incredibly well very mundane tasks.
pennomi@lemmy.world 11 months ago
The current publishing cartel is like an abusive spouse in this situation. They gaslight you into thinking there’s no way for you to survive without them, but they are the ones who would suffer without you.
It would take less than 12 months for the system to completely collapse if there was a general publishing strike. But people are paralyzed by the idea of leaving that abusive system in favor of a far superior unknown.