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from the ♪gimme-all-your-dollars,-all-your-dimes-and-pennies-too♪ dept.
Over at Techdirt, Glyn Moody writes briefly about how to stop the large academic publishing houses from completing their attempts at gaining control over the entire publishing process from end-to-end.
Techdirt's coverage of open access -- the idea that the fruits of publicly-funded scholarship should be freely available to all -- shows that the results so far have been mixed. On the one hand, many journals have moved to an open access model. On the other, the overall subscription costs for academic institutions have not gone down, and neither have the excessive profit margins of academic publishers. Despite that success in fending off this attempt to re-invent the way academic work is disseminated, publishers want more. In particular, they want more money and more power. In an important new paper, a group of researchers warn that companies now aim to own the entire academic publishing stack: [...]
As it stands, universities stand for the salaries of the faculty members who research, write, and edit the journal articles at no cost to the publishers which then charge exorbitant prices for access to the results.
Journal Reference:
Björn Brembs, Philippe Huneman, Felix Schönbrodt, et al. Replacing academic journals, (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.5526635)
Previously:
(2020) Open Access Journals Get A Boost From Librarians—Much To Elsevier's Dismay
(2019) University of California Boycotts Publishing Giant Elsevier Over Journal Costs and Open Access
(2019) German Institutions Reach Open Access Deal with Scientific Publisher Wiley
(2018) Elsevier's Demands are Unacceptable to Germany's Academic Community
(2017) List of "Predatory Publishers" Disappears
(Score: 5, Informative) by Kell on Monday October 04 2021, @01:49AM (5 children)
Academic and senior editor of an IEEE journal here: yes, they are parasites - they charge money and contribute
nothingvery little. Some, like IEEE are ok and mostly work for the benefit of members. Others are riding high on the reduction of costs that's come from moving entirely to digital dissemniation, without correspondingly lowering prices to customers or academics. That's right - they charge us money to publish with them (typically in the form of extra page fees or open access charges). If you want your manuscript available to all without limit then you need to pay upwards of $1500 per paper, which gives you a reasonable estimate of what their expected profit per publication works out to be. Given the thousands of publications that go to "print" every year, that's a ton of money for doing very little more than running a server.So why do smart academics put up with them? Because we are beholden to "prestige" publications with good names that act like a brand-name for our papers. Being published in a top journal means your paper must be good, whereas lesser papers may not - and everyone wants their science to be held to high esteem. It's a type of popularity club. Note, that the choice of journal doesn't actually change the substance of the paper at all, short of useful comments and suggestions of the reviewers (who work for free).
If we all banded together and said "Fuck this, we'll run our own servers hosted by the university" then there'd be a bunfight over whose journal was best and who should be editor and so on. This is all driven both by ego and by the resource scarcity in the university sector, where metrics have become sharp edged instruments by which one's career thrives or falls. As the saying goes: publish or perish.
Scientists ask questions. Engineers solve problems.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @01:58AM
Boils down to a corrupt economic system. Can't be any other way until we alter our entire system of exchange, and mentality in general
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday October 04 2021, @08:10AM (3 children)
"Hosted by the university" doesn't do a damned thing for those like me, who have little to no access to these universities. It's weird how motels and restaurants offer free WiFi to all, but university WiFi is password protected so only students and faculty can access it.
If I want to access some journal article, I can't, not online through a university. Have to travel to their library, beg them to let me use their facilities, which takes a bit of tedious explanation that, no, I'm not a student or faculty. Even being an alum isn't good enough. They usually do have some sort of guest usage protocol. Then I can access whatever journals they have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @01:16PM (1 child)
schihub exists
(Score: 3, Informative) by http on Monday October 04 2021, @05:04PM
Scihub is a potential workaround, not a bugfix.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 04 2021, @06:35PM
You are wondering why everyone is dropping out of schools. Because these institutions and the ones they work with, which were supposed to be about promoting academic advancement, have turned into a for profit business.