To mention the obvious, it’s the same network effect that keeps people on X and Reddit.
Where there’s a platform, there’s enshitification.
To stay obvious, what’s fascinating is that those networks are small, its members the most intelligent people available and they meet each other regularly in person at conferences.
Why do they accept the lock-in?
Not every community does it this way. For example, computational linguistics put most of their conference proceedings online for free: https://aclanthology.org/. Deep learning researchers just publish a lot of stuff to arxiv.
Academic publishers like Elsevier are predatory scammers.
Yep if something in CS and adjacent fields isn’t open access (or there’s a pre-print floating around somewhere) chances are it’s a textbook, not worth reading, or is obscure/arcane and was written with a typewriter. Heck some of the best stuff is blogposts by people who don’t happen to be in a publish or perish situation so why bother with journals. (Trouble with that, of course, is a lack of doi but what’s archive.org for).
Meanwhile there’s fields which can’t even figure out TeX.
Why do they accept the lock-in?
Looks like there is no good answer if we view them as one entity which could simply make up it’s mind. But it’s a bunch of individuals, who probably disagree at least over details. Some probably have individual ambitions or pressures, some may struggle to pay their bills or satisfy their family or even themselves.
And for each individual on the fence, it’s always an advantage to still publish to the network while hoping the rest of the group abstains and establishes a better platform in the meantime. Would you risk publishing your finally successful hard work to an immature platform, where it might not receive the attention it deserves?
And because they’re smart, they know everyone else is thinking the same. Now we have reasonable doubts in something which relies on trust.
Basically, game theory. The system will find it’s Nash equilibrium at a point where every individual move will worsen that individual’s standing.
To break this spell, you need agreements and contracts. Someone needs to work on that, negotiate and lobby for it. But who? Would anyone who would benefit from that step away from their actual work and work on that meta-system instead? Would anyone who would not benefit from that system work on it? Maybe this could be a research project for scientists who already study these topics. Otherwise, I don’t know.
It’s human nature to defend a walled garden that you are already inside of. Change is scary and might not end up better for you.
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In my discipline we only pay if we want the article to be open access. Are there journals that charge $1000 and still put articles behind a paywall?
Yes
It’s $3000 for Association of Horticultural Scientists
High impact factor journal are among those that ask fees depending on number of pages and figures. Or at least they used to when I used to do academic research
Don’t forget that sometimes you also do work for that journal, telling them if a paper is good enough or not for them, and also basically don’t get payed.
don’t think you wanna get payed, unless you are a ship, but getting paid would be nice for them
Publish or perish.
Academic publishing is in a very weird place and is very, very political. Its true that authors have to pay to have their papers published in most journals or conferences after they’ve been accepted, but like all things academic, this is highly dependent on the field. Some universities will reimburse professors publishing costs, others need to pay out of pocket or with grant/public funding.
While its true that there are open-access journals and conferences without such costs, I would wager that most well known researchers would avoid such avenues of publication due to prestige. The larger journals and conferences have review boards where the top scientists in the world sit on them. As a potential published author with such an outlet, its a great honor to even be considered. Most researchers don’t want to take the risk of going with a less prestigious outlet if it will run the risk of smearing their image or damaging their ability to publish in better outlets in the future.
Source: Was a Doctoral candidate that ran the whole ringer besides the dissertation.
Cake or death?
Death… No! I mean cake! Ahhhhhh!
This guy, Dr. Glaucomflecken also does a ton of skits, some funny, some critical. For his most recent ones he did a satirical set, 30 days of US Healthcare, and they were both funny and depressing. I did not know some of the stuff he mentioned in those. Worth the watch.
Capitalism is evil
This is why I left academia.
Yup… Somehow, being able to suffer financially is somehow a sign of your academic commitment. Post-docs are rare enough and most professors dont even get tenure anymore. The result is an insular community of hyper-competitive credit-chasing asshats looking to put their name on your work because you needed their signature for something once.
No thank you.
Kinda fucked up that it’s not only about being smart or having the tenacity to acquire these kind of jobs but that it’s also depending on the altruistic mindset and resiliency of people. The pool of people having most if these traits is quite slim…
What‽ I’ve published around 5 articles, and I’ve never paid anything. Is this something new?
This system looks like it has such a great opportunity to be overtaken by free journals. Universities are in a great position to make this happen if they can weed out their political corruption through a system of rules and transparency. However, having worked in academia, I can see how this would be really hard to pull off. All of those egos competing to be the top ego and cliques can catastrophically toxify a project without resolve.
Varies from field to field. But many journals that ask for money from authors without providing open access are scams.
The getting to keep your job bit is not quite right. Often, one also has to go find their own funding. Sort of based on the publications, but not necessarily.
I think the implication is the whole “publish or perish” mindset in academia.
If you don’t constantly publish something then your career and work is considered stagnant. At which point you lose out to other researchers, and effectively can’t get paid for your work. Aka: you lose your job
At least that’s how I understand it.
Has there been an attempt at a charity-based distribution platform, á la Wikipedia?
The challenge is the peer review system - not saying it can’t be done, but facilitating quality reviews is often costly.
There has, however, been a push to publish articles as “open access” which costs more for the author but makes it publicly available free of charge to read.
Overall the system is still a pretty big scam, but would be difficult to make 100% free.
The challenge is the peer review system - not saying it can’t be done, but facilitating quality reviews is often costly.
What’s the cost? People aren’t paid for peer reviews, right? So, is it just difficult to arrange peer reviews?
but facilitating quality reviews is often costly.
States/academic institutions have to make it part of the job description of people. Get designated an editor of a journal? Your Uni understands and hands you an additional TA to lighten the load elsewhere and/or deal with the paperwork aspects.
The reviewing itself is already done pro bono anyways.
There’s groups doing free peer review in a mutual aid sort of way. As I understand it, reviewers don’t really get paid anyway and the work is often dumped on students around the professor. Example of a group doing community peer review: https://archaeo.peercommunityin.org/PCIArchaeology/
Yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_journal_publishing_reform?wprov=sfla1 (see Reform initiatives)
Bonus background:
https://pure.port.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/3696109/Military_Industrial_Complexities.pdf
After it’s published, do you get to do whatever you want with it? Like put it on your own website with a link to where it was published?
Nope.
no. but sometimes you can buy distribution rights from the journal for thousands of dollars!
It’s common practice to share papers when requested for no fee.
But the fact that you can’t just post it publicly is crap.
You can on Research Gate.
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This guy missed the “funding” kpis. No one gives jobs on prestige points, you need to bring in Kilo-$ or kilo-euros
Capitalism strikes again
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