Comment on Publisher Wants $2,500 To Allow Academics To Post Their Own Manuscript To Their Own Repository
emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works 1 year agoRight, 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 1 year 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 1 year 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 1 year 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.
emergencyfood@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
I think there are two different issues here. The first is how journals make money off publicly funded research. The second is how journals and impact factors act as a gatekeeper in academia. I think open access is solving the first issue pretty well. The second is a bit more complicated. The pressure to publish at any cost is bad, but what is the alternative. If we go by subjective criteria, we will probably end up with nepotism and corruption. Of course the current system needs reform, but I feel that it is a huge improvement on the previous system.