5 ms·
In my experience as a mathematician, most for profit journal publishing companies are essentially rentiers making money off a captive clientele, who don't even
by tacomonstrous 9y ago
In my experience as a mathematician, most for profit journal publishing companies are essentially rentiers making money off a captive clientele, who don't even get much utility any more from them, except for access to some older articles. Moreover, the services they provide to authors are also usually worse than the non-profit journals: no copy editing, crappy editorial tools, just a complete disregard for the actual producers of the (free) content they make money off. It's a complete and unmitigated scam.
- dredmorbius 9y agoIt's critical to realise that the main role journals play among active, tenure-track academics is in restricting upward professional growth. If you must publish in high-impact journals, and those journals are closed-access, then you must publish in closed-access journals. Unless and until a significant portion of the tenure committees of major academic institutions changes their selection criteria, this will not change. The rentiership is actually on the professional advancement track. Corollary: it is only necessary for journals to retain the tenure committees on their side in order to keep their money-printing operation running.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoTenure-track academia is an exercise in restricting upward professional growth, anyway. It's built into the system. When you've chosen the tenure track, you know you might be spending a decade at a school nobody has ever heard of pumping out research nobody is ever gonna read. There are some stars undoubtedly but there are only so many tenure track jobs. Academics have embraced that system for a long time, the journals are just a side-effect of that acceptance.
- dredmorbius 9y agoThe question is: where do you place control of that gate, and what consequences derive from that. Counterpoint: if closed-access journals are no longer the constraint, how does that change the overall academic landscape? For better or worse? Information filters will remain, and they will remain imperfect.
- aaron-lebo 9y agoMy perhaps biased belief is they aren't any real constraint. Closed journals do have more power than they should, but they are also an effective signaling mechanism: if something is in X you know it's worth paying attention to over the hundreds of thousands of other papers that will get pushed out every year. My personal academic experience has been that as the lowliest student at a uni you get access to everything anyway. If you're bored you can Google and grab the pdf. The closed nature hasn't been any real constraint and for the majority of researchers it isn't. You spend more time as a researcher filtering out material that is irrelevant and even now there are a ton of mediocre journals. To answer your question, the effect on the overall academic landscape will probably be minimal. It's an obvious and easy target - hey, look at this cartel which dominates academia, but academia is a giant cartel, anyway, where everyone follows arbitrary restrictions and rituals because that's how you get a degree and a job. You can even argue (not sure it's believable) that this dynamic is useful - if you want to get access to the world's academic information, you need to get plugged into an institution with scholars around you who can help guide, inform, and interpret your work and the work of others and even if that isn't strictly necessary, it's more beneficial than not. If you're interested in "serious" research, you've probably already self-selected into this system of controlled but essentially free access already.
- jummyfo 9y ago"essentially free access" costs libraries thousands to millions of dollars a year. For publicly funded or resource constrained institutions librarians have to make hard choices about what they can cancel just to pay for the more expensive journals. Why should publishers get all of this money?
- aaron-lebo 9y agoThey should not, but that's not to say out of all the things wrong with academia that it's a real chokepoint for research. It's just one small part of a system which throws away millions every year.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago> Unless and until a significant portion of the tenure committees of major academic institutions changes their selection criteria, this will not change. Couldn't the top tier of Post-docs also make this happen? If they simply refuse to publish in the top tier journals, the departments who are competing for them will have to either relax their publishing requirements or take a 2nd tier candidate. This only works if a truly top tier candidate who can continue to work without limitation in a Post-docs position. I.e. someone with the research equivalent of "fuck-you money". But it doesn't have to be all of them. When a 2nd tier institution can just make an administrative change and basically get a free 1st round draft pick, there's going to be institutions that take the deal. It doesn't even really hurt the scholar, because they really don't need to be at Yale, they can be successful anywhere with strong students and plenty of money.
- marcoperaza 9y agoThe reward for defecting is too high. It's a classic collective action problem.
- dredmorbius 9y agoTextbook case. Someone should write an article on that. And publish it ... Well, that's left as an exercise to the student.
- smallnamespace 9y agoThere's also no enforcement mechanism for punishing someone from defecting.
- jonathanstrange 9y agoIt's a classic collective decision problem. If almost all postdocs at the same time decided to boycott closed journals, then this would work. However, in practice solutions are always failing whenever they are based on the idea that a majority has to voluntarily make the right move within a short time period, if that means smaller wins for people who do not make the move. To give another example of such a problem: If in urban areas everyone switched his WIFI router to some open mesh network software at the same time, the gains from this ad hoc network would be tremendous. But if only few switch, the gains are almost nonexistent and the losses can be high. So it's never going to happen.
- FabHK 9y agoCeterum censeo Elsevier esse delendum.
- wolfgke 9y agoBeside Reed-Elsevier also Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis and Sage.
- FabHK 9y agoThey're not great, but Elsevier deserves special opprobrium as far as I can tell; just see the longest section in their wikipedia article. They're just so antithetical to what science is about. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Criticism_and_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Criticism_and_controv...
- honestoHeminway 9y agoDelenda Carthago, delenda springer?
- lorenzhs 9y agoWouldn't it be Elsevierum? You need an accusative, and –er nouns tend to be second declension iirc.