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Isn’t it a bit ridiculous for researchers to have to pay a publisher to publish the content that they themselves make money from?
They’re double dipping, and also triple dipping with the peer reviews done on a volunteer basis.
A racket, I say.
Quadruple dipping because they publish both open access journals that authors pay extra for, plus the standard subscription journals where universities need to pay for access too. Subscription obviously never got cheaper, no matter if the amount of open access journals increased (didn’t check that though, but fits well into the scheme)
The House of Elsevier has been gaming the scientific community since it was still called “natural philosophy”.
I’m still not sure, what exactly the journals are actually doing.
Like, in all seriousness, what service do they provide? Just hosting the platform for anonymized reviews and basically a blog for the actual articles? That should cost maybe a few millions each year, yet this sector makes billions in revenue.
Name recognition. That’s pretty much it.
They offer reputation. Career advancement is highly dependent on publication history and impact. Getting into a prestigious publication means your work will more likely be read and cited. Because highly reputable journals can charge high publication fees (because it’s in such high demand), they get to set the industry norm, which other less reputable journals/publishers get to follow. It does cost money to develop and maintain that reputation for rigour and impact (i.e. good science). But yeah it’s exploitative AF. There are attempts for less profit-motivated publications… But making those rigorous while still being democratic is hard
I’d say (a couple years ago) the service is also supposed to be access via DOI in perpetuity and presence in all the relevant databases, so that’s gotta cost some money for the reassurance as opposed to a pdf file “hosted” on Google Drive. But after Heterocycles fiasco I am not sure about that anymore.
Well, and some mark that this is likely a valid piece of research if it’s at www.reputablejournal.com as opposed to this likely being half-baked something at www.somerxiv.com or this likely being absolute lunacy at www.anyothersite.com.
Still, yes, billions in revenue vs millions spent essentially on essentially simple tasks like hosting and cataloguing (plus matching authors to reviewers I guess, though with how often I am asked to find them myself it’s doubtful) does not compute indeed.
Obviously scientists don’t want to work any more and eat avocado toast too much.
Have they tried getting a college degree to increase their job prospects?
Oops, all my research keeps getting leaked online.
“Have a cup of coffee every morning? Maybe switch to every other day to offset the costs!”
You are a monster
just publish an LLM-written article in a trash journal so you can get more funding 👉🧠
if you have any credibility on the line you can even sell co-authorship slots for a little pocket cash!
Find a new job.
Honestly it’s crap like this, and the constant need to write grants, worry about funding, and crank out papers like there’s no tomorrow is why I ended up just going into industry instead.
Don’t get me wrong, I love science and scientific advancement, but the current system of publishing is super broken. What if you’re a civilian researcher who doesn’t have access to the big name journals? Well then be prepared to pony up $50/article.
What did science and medicine ever do for me?
If you paywall publication and peer-review, you suppress a huge amount of science that doesn’t have the kinds of checks that corporate sponsorship and review introduce. This means studies of things like the dangers of CFCs, smoking, microplastics, thalidomide, and countless other things that’ll kill you will never see the light of day.
Chiming in with barely any knowledge on the topic.
Universities are massive institutions, with serious cash behind them. What the hell is stopping, say, all the public Australian universities just setting up their own journal, running it at cost for all the universities in Australia?
Make it make sense.
C.R.E.A.M.
