Publishers are a cancer. Knowledge is meant to be shared, freely.
The university should be the place demonstrating socioecological change, serving as a site of experimentation and praxis (see Dunlap et al., 2023). This, however, could not be further from the truth. Beside advancing technologies of digital, political and military control (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014), not to mention genetic dissection and animal vivisection—or some degree of this (Pellow, 2014)—universities fail to enact real examples of socioecological of renewability and sustainability. How come universities are not overflowing with agroecology, permaculture and forest gardens on and inside universities? How come universities are not self-generating their own electricity needs through wind, solar and other lower-carbon infrastructures? We, unfortunately, are witnessing the opposite at university campuses around the world.
This is also a big reason why I'm few weeks from submitting my masters for inspection, and 90% of my references/sources are from Annas Archive / Zlib. Our uni library, in supposedly rich nordic country Finland, just cant afford all the licenses. Luckily all our professors and researchers are in on the "secret", but its just a fucking joke.
Most of the world economy is on the same fucking joke. Just leeches upon leeches upon leeches... And so few people giving anything usefull to the world. I fucking try, but god damn these useless money leeches in the middle try to make it hard as possible. Fuck. So fucking angry, but what can I do but try to minimize the damages I do on my personal part.
They are but until "apes together strong" takes peoples minds nothing will change. People feel powerless to do anything so companies just get away with it
Very cool. I know someone, in a fairly small but funded field, who had this sort of requirement --- Elsevier had the relevant publication, but they couldn't publish there due to access policies (or it was going to be painful to do so at any rate). So they started their own publication!
I forgot the specifics, but it essentially uses arXiv as the backend, and there's a (commercially available?) frontend that lets editors and reviewers do their thing. "Publishing" in this journal is essentially just endorsing an arXiv paper; so it's open access by design.
Really cool stuff. Their field is small enough that iirc they could kinda get critical mass to give Elsevier the finger and adopt this new platform. Warm fuzzy feeling thinking about it!
so back in the day we needed publishers for distribution. now with the Internet, distribution is easy. but prices only went up
associate editors and referees are unpaid volunteers. typesetting is also mainly done by the authors. but prices are high because the publisher wants to profit.
there are quite a few high quality journals that are fairly priced and published by non profit publishers. these are the only journals authors should publish in ....
Given the times I've seen news articles and screenshots of poorly vetted published journals. Surely a free open source publisher managed by the academic community can't be much worse?
I also don't know shit about the requirements to actually publish so this is probably a naive take
You'd think that they're using the money for prizes for reviewers or as scholarship prizes. What are they doing with all that money? Hosting a journal can't be that expensive.
I would like to see this written up for a wider context because it's not just a science problem. The Humanities, Arts, and pretty much the whole campus is the same in this way. It's why I left academia. Universities are set up wrong because employee incentives make it a sort of feudalistic system. All you have to do is work as a professor for a few years and discover it's pretty much the same as grad school. You don't really collaborate with the people you work with every day in person. All your contacts are outside your home campus. Nothing useful for the world happens on the campus. You do that outside of the campus to gain "reknown" and your outside brand gets you cred on campus. Meanwhile, on your home campus, your so-called colleagues do everything they can to block any cross-listing of courses they can because the administration counts the beans. The department needs to generate credit hours. Cross-listing is viewed as bean subtraction.
I think (another reason I left academia) you missed my point. You posted to a science place. My point is that it should be cross posted to many places.
Academic publishing seems like a problem that should be easy to solve. It's a situation where greed is outright making the service worse for everyone, so it seems like a new journal that does things differently (e.g. by not charging researchers) could become wildly successful... So why doesn't that happen? Are there barriers to creating new journals?
Luckily there are several tools and scripts to bypass paywalls and also those that redirect to the original publication, when the anti-paywall does not work.
Why isn’t Brazil on the list of countries that have their fees waived? Are they on the “rich” side of the spectrum for that to be considered or is there simply no agreement between Brazilian government/publishers?
Yes, I know this is treating a symptom rather than illness itself, but for the sake of today’s science and not the science of tomorrow, at least such an option should be available.
Brazil's approach for fostering innovation and technology is to tax all outside tech at 100%, even though no local industry for the products even exists. I don't have high expectations for them investing in scientific publishing.
Doesn't publishing come after getting your stuff reviewed by peers?
(But even if it's done after, then self-publishing then makes it easier for peers to get your work to review it, which should increase overall quality)
I mean hypothetically yes, but if you're in the sciences tenure, promotion, and wages will be based on publication in high impact factor, for profit journals, so that's not realistic.