Comment on Publisher Wants $2,500 To Allow Academics To Post Their Own Manuscript To Their Own Repository
magnor@lemmy.magnor.ovh 8 months agoAlas 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 8 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 8 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.
emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
I understand your concern, but I feel that free access will eventually erode the monopoly that journals have on conferring legitimacy. If only a few can read the actual text of a paper, the rest of us have to trust the journal’s quality control. But as papers become more accessible, they will start getting judged on their own merit, rather than based on the journal’s impact factor. This change could take years to happen completely, but at this point I feel that it will happen sooner or later.
magnor@lemmy.magnor.ovh 8 months ago
I worked in academia. Everybody already has access to the texts (thanks to arxiv) where I did. And yet still publishing was the only way to gain legitimacy. This is the problem.