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The New York Times has an opinion piece about Open Access publishing. It starts with the case of Alexandra Elbakyan a guerilla open access activist who is on the lam from the US government acting on behalf of the copyright cartel. Pricing and other restrictions put many journals out of reach of all but the few researchers at major, well-funded universities in developed nations. The large publishing companies usually have profit margins over 30% and subscription prices have been rising twice as fast as the price of health care, which itself is priced insanely, over the past two decades, so there appears to be a real scandal there. Several options are available including pre-print repositories and various open access journals. The latter require the author to pay up front for publishing. However, the real onus lies on the communities' leaders, like heads of institutions and presidents of universities, who are in a position to change which journals are perceived as high-impact.
Edit: Alexandra Elbakyan founded Sci-Hub in 2011.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2016, @12:42AM
Political correctness comes to scientific publishing!
You're just ignorant, and foolish for pontificating on that which you know nothing about. The problem is that Political Correctness [youtube.com] is already rife in academia. [thefire.org] For instance: In order to prop up their bogus narrative that women and men are exactly the same SJWs have positioned themselves to decide acceptance of papers to medical journals and have been censoring anything that talks about "sex differences" for decades. [youtube.com]
Now, with your foolish and ignorant naiveté out of the way, what are your plans for reforming the absolutely broken publishing system?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2016, @12:56AM
I have an idea. It starts with broad perhaps even world wide implementation of RFC 1945 https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1945 [ietf.org]
Researchers could publish using that standard or whatever replaces it.
Then someone could create a system that gathers documents published utilizing RFC 1945, parses the full text into individual terms and then ranks their quality based on how many others have cited them using similar terms.
We could call such a ranking system a "page rank" and the tool to crawl this "web" of links, a spider.
Or since it's really just vacuuming up the pages and their links like a pig we could call it a "spider pig!".
(Score: 2) by Pino P on Tuesday March 15 2016, @03:26PM
It starts with broad perhaps even world wide implementation of RFC 1945
Let me know when they get around to actually specifying how 402 Payment Required is supposed to work. Otherwise, how will the infrastructure of organizing peer review be funded?
We could call such a ranking system a "page rank"
You propose a method of ranking articles' impact by the likelihood that following citations randomly will end up on a particular document. Trouble is that Stanford owns a patent on that method and licenses it exclusively to Google, which is part of the multinational Alphabet conglomerate. Any idea when U.S. Patent 6,285,999 [google.com] expires?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2016, @01:00AM
Why, by simply decreeing where one is allowed to publish, of course. It is all about freedom! My freedom; not anyone else's. If I don't like something, then we shall force others to our ways, not with incentives or reason, but force them, for we are on the side of righteousness.
We can have the university presidents dressed up, say, in 15th century garb, with an Elsevier journal in one hand and a big, roasted turkey leg in the other, and loudly announce:
By what by-paths and indirect crook’d ways I met this journal;
And I myself know well how troublesome it sat upon my head:
To thee it shall descend with better quiet . . .
. . . For all my reign hath been but a scene acting that argument; and now its death
Changes the mode: for what in it was purchas’d,
Falls upon thee in a more fairer sort;
So thou the PLOS One wear’st successively.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 15 2016, @01:29AM
Minor correction, as the bard intended.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Tuesday March 15 2016, @01:41AM
But... magister!... turkeys were only brought into Europe one century later [wikipedia.org].
Did you want to say: roasted Kuzu Tandır [about.com]?
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Tuesday March 15 2016, @01:56AM
SJWs have positioned themselves to decide [youtube.com] acceptance of papers to medical journals and have been censoring anything that talks about "sex differences" for decades. [youtube.com]
So either there are censors on the journal from the movement or the journal is simple bowing to external pressure (or else..). Time to put some pressure on the journal?
Either way the journal(s) have exposed themselves to have an attack surface. So perhaps another location for publishing can fill the gap or opportunity? (like Sci-Hub [wikipedia.org] or ArXiv [wikipedia.org])
Let's hope this is another real good nail in this non-scientific garbage arbitrators existence.