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Time to break academic publishing's stranglehold on research
HERE is a trivia question for you: what is the most profitable business in the world? You might think oil, or maybe banking. You would be wrong. The answer is academic publishing. Its profit margins are vast, reportedly in the region of 40 per cent.
The reason it is so lucrative is because most of the costs of its content is picked up by taxpayers. Publicly funded researchers do the work, write it up and judge its merits. And yet the resulting intellectual property ends up in the hands of the publishers. To rub salt into the wound they then sell it via exorbitant subscriptions and paywalls, often paid for by taxpayers too.
[...] The latest attempt to break the mould is called Plan S, created by umbrella group cOAlition S. It demands that all publicly funded research be made freely available (see "An audacious new plan will make all science free. Can it work?"). When Plan S was unveiled in September, its backers expected support to snowball. But only a minority of Europe's 43 research funding bodies have signed up, and hoped-for participation from the US has failed to materialise. Meanwhile, a grass-roots campaign against it is gathering momentum.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 26 2018, @03:12AM (9 children)
No, they should go do something else if they care about getting ahead more than growing knowledge and understanding. I would love to return to academia when they are gone.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 26 2018, @04:05AM
If we could purge the careerists or at least encourage them to seek a different path in life hopefully that would get rid of the postmodernists.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Monday November 26 2018, @12:17PM (7 children)
If I publish in a "second rate" journal, I don't get as much funding. If I don't get as much funding, I can't push all of the ideas and research that I want to push. Funding instead goes to bob/brenda down the road who I know have worse research.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 26 2018, @03:53PM (6 children)
Yep, the only way to win is not to play. Get out, make money, fund your own research. Treat all the money wasted by bob/brenda as a cost of civilization (ie, jobs program).
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday November 26 2018, @07:21PM (5 children)
If you are making lots of money (enough to fund research), then you don't have that time for research.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 26 2018, @08:13PM (4 children)
Smart research only requires a fraction of the funding used by crappy research. At most it would be 1/100th by my estimation. Even official admissions have grown to about 90% of their own research is crap: https://nihrecord.nih.gov/newsletters/2016/07_01_2016/story3.htm [nih.gov]
In reality, we can probably get better results from $3 million a year of good research over $10 billion per year of "cancer/depression/alzheimers is many diseases" type research.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday November 26 2018, @08:50PM (3 children)
So how many people have the ability to make three million dollars a year, and at the same time do full-time research?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 26 2018, @08:57PM (2 children)
Very few, it is a luxury. But that isnt the real point, the real point is to purge the careerists every few generations so academia can be refreshed with people who would do this stuff as a hobby (if wealthy enough).
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday November 27 2018, @06:20AM (1 child)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 27 2018, @01:34PM
Because that is the only opportunity to do science left when the careerists are suffocating out all the people who want to do science from funding.