4 ms·

Tenure-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 kn

Tenure-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 ago
The 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 ago
  My 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 ago
      They 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.
      - kronos29296 9y ago
        I will say this. I am currently a student working in a project and I cannot afford any kind of subscription and my institution does not subscribe to the journals I need for reference. Without Scihub my project is doomed. I find this a real bottleneck for me.
  - crispinb 9y ago
    I don't know what country you're in, but here in Australia I have known people have to travel hundreds of kilometres to get access to the latest research. If a wide range of papers are needed this can be cheaper than paying per-article, but is still an extremely expensive method of access to research which (a) we are forced through taxation to partly pay for, and (b) is surprisingly often required (eg. environmental & medical data for legal purposes, making political representations, etc).
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
  - dredmorbius 9y ago
    I'm not asking how students (and in particular undergrads), or the public are to get access to materials published in journals, but how academics or professionals gain access to publication venues. These are two entirely different matters. You'll also find that the question of who controls the mafia itself is of utmost significance to those who control the mafia. Your comment is rather wide the point.

dredmorbius 9y ago

The 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 ago
My 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 ago
    They 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.
    - kronos29296 9y ago
      I will say this. I am currently a student working in a project and I cannot afford any kind of subscription and my institution does not subscribe to the journals I need for reference. Without Scihub my project is doomed. I find this a real bottleneck for me.
- crispinb 9y ago
  I don't know what country you're in, but here in Australia I have known people have to travel hundreds of kilometres to get access to the latest research. If a wide range of papers are needed this can be cheaper than paying per-article, but is still an extremely expensive method of access to research which (a) we are forced through taxation to partly pay for, and (b) is surprisingly often required (eg. environmental & medical data for legal purposes, making political representations, etc).
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  I'm not asking how students (and in particular undergrads), or the public are to get access to materials published in journals, but how academics or professionals gain access to publication venues. These are two entirely different matters. You'll also find that the question of who controls the mafia itself is of utmost significance to those who control the mafia. Your comment is rather wide the point.