4 ms·
It's hard to get rid of the conspiracy because you have to become them to fight them. The journals promote a self-fulfilling number called an "impact factor".
by rspeer 10y ago
It's hard to get rid of the conspiracy because you have to become them to fight them.
The journals promote a self-fulfilling number called an "impact factor". The people who boycott the gatekeeping publishers end up with publications with a lower impact factor, so they don't get as far in academia, so they will never end up on tenure review boards, and never get to suggest better criteria for evaluating scientists than their "impact factor".
However, in some fields, people are quietly resisting the publishers by disobeying them, posting their own paywalled papers on arXiV or their personal web sites. I have never heard of a publisher suing a scientist over this. Strength in numbers.
- a3_nm 10y agoNote that putting your paywalled papers on arXiv or on your website is very often perfectly legal, because, as a result of open access lobbying, many non-open-access publishers allow exemptions for this in their copyright transfer agreements (sometimes under some conditions). You should check with your publisher for details (or look at the specific details of the copyright agreement), and there is a database of publisher policies http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/browse.php?letter=ALL&la=en&fIDnum=|&mode=simple http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/browse.php?letter=ALL&la=en&fI... (For anyone wondering, the reason why publishers routinely accept this is because they derive their revenue from university subscriptions, and the availability of even a large percentage of non-official article versions online apparently does not suffice to encourage libraries to unsubscribe.)