Context (for those who might not be in academia): many academic publishing companies (like Elsevier) charge exorbitant prices for researchers to get their papers published as open access. Meanwhile, none of these researchers actually get anything in return for it (except for major street cred if their papers get highly cited)
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Fun fact! The current dismal state of scientific publishing is largely attributable to Robert Maxwell, father of Ghislaine Maxwell.
Are you fucking kidding me? Why the hell do we even allow this shit.
You have to pay them money to publish your work so they can sell it to your peers. Oh and you have to work for free reviewing other potential work. It’s the most broken business model ever.
It’s pretty impressive that they managed to trick a whole field of the smartest people into doing it too. What kind of crazy con artist thought this up? Lol
Until the world accepts that certain bloodlines should just be purged, progress is impossible.
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I’ve been looking for a good write up ty.
Oh wow, he appeared as one of the bad guys in the movie Tetris. Didn’t realize he was the father of …
I feel like in the age of the Internet people should just publish their own stuff. The problem then is being able to find it though. I think a site for only research papers where you can vote links to them up or down and submit peer reviews would be awesome. I’m looking in from the outside though so maybe that already exists?
Why do academic journals still exist? I’m not trying to be “journals bad” glib here, even though they are awful and have been as long as I can remember. What technical or academic hurdles are preventing researchers from publishing their work to free outlets like, say, a university’s public website? I genuinely don’t understand why they haven’t collapsed with the rise of the internet. Is it really all street cred?
Because in a lot of hiring processes the worth of the researchers is based on this streer cred. It’s a messed up system.
Even more messed up is that journals that do try to be more open about their procedures and that don’t try to make a profit are marginalized or in some cases even not indexed. For example, eLife no longer has an impact factor calculated because it’s experimenting with a publishing model that disincentivises profit and some other undesirable things in academic publishing.
Would be cool to see a decentralized journal or something. No idea how it would work actually work, but since research is supposed to be peer reviewed, why not just let the whole structure of it become open and decentralized?
Before cryptocurrencies really went to shit and became so toxic/scammy, I used to believe crypto could help decentralize it by democraticing the process and making it fully transparent, while also rewarding authors and peer reviewers for their work. But alas
I am somewhat familar with ERIC’s CLARIN (or ERIC CLARIN? or just CLARIN? I’m not sure how the two names are supposed to be used together). from the linked site:
CLARIN stands for Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure and ERIC stands for European Research Infrastructure Consortium.
I don’t fully understand how to operate it because it’s complicated but it does seem like a distributed scientific repository. It seems to focus on language but it’s not clear to me why it can’t, or doesn’t (or maybe it does IDK) function as a general datashare. I’m not sure if it’s a model for a full replacement of for-profit publishing houses but it seems like a promising direction for research to go.
I like the idea, but how to handle authentication in a decentralized system?
There are services like ORCID exist for uniquely attributing papers to an author. I think a federated review / publishing service could just provide a number of integrations for credential linking.
I was thinking about how such a tool might work over activity pub and I think it could work.
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Obligatory sci-hub plug. When I went to uni, our teachers literally told us, that the school doesn’t have the money to pay for access to everything, so here’s a site you can use
Sci-hub needs support though, it does not have all of the most recent papers, which are often the ones we’re looking for :(
In academia, promotion, tenure, funding, and pretty much everything someone needs to keep their job is tied to publishing in peer-reviewed journals. If I self publish I won’t keep my job. If a university ran a website for publishing, they would have to reimplement the peer review process, and often there may be ~a dozen people worldwide qualified to review a particular paper so it’s not just that others from within the university could review work. If a university is implementing all that, they have basically become a publisher and likely have costs they’ll want to try and recoup and could foreseeably implement a fee to publish.
Don’t get me wrong - the journals have a predatory and exclusive model that should be dismantled. But until we fix promotion, tenure, and funding pathways in academia that have enabled the publishers to become what they are there will always be these problems – any other system that pops up will not get widely used because academics will be disincentivized from using it (as discussed in some other comments here).
I’ve been in academia as a student and/or employee for 35+ years and yes so much is a scam.
I have a friend who went to go work at Elsevier. Couldn’t ever see her the same way after that.
Is that because she started charging for access?
Angela Collier had a video about this topic a few years ago that was great, I can’t remember which video it was but it might have been her first generation Grad student video.
I watch Justin Sledge (of Esoterica), I always see him wanting to cast curses against those publishing companies. And I totally understand
