5 ms·

Yog’s Law and Self-Publishing

19 points by daddylonglegs 7y ago

hprotagonist 7y ago
Every once in a while, someone who knows about Yog's law learns about peer-reviewed journals and the academic publishing model, and they absolutely lose their minds. I pay $750 extra just so i can self-host a PDF of my own work legally, on top of $96/page just to publish it at all! Also my editor and copy-editor are unpaid volunteers, I'm an unpaid volunteer reviewer, and i have to buy my own paper copy of the journal issue in which my work is published at no discount.
- nine_k 7y ago
  But is your work yours? Did you not yield most of the rights to it when you accepted a grant, or joined the lab where you did the research? I likely would never be able to get any rights to the closed-source code I wrote. I knew that at the moment when I read the employment contract.
  - daddylonglegs 7y ago
    Traditional academic publishing fails Scalzi's corollary to Yog's law as well: the academic publishers take everyone else's work and lock it away. The academics, their university, external funders and the editors and reviewers all have to pay [1] to produce the work and then pay to read it. I hope you got paid, and paid fairly, for writing that software. To be honest, starting a career in academia seems to require making a checklist of every warning signal you can think of with respect to terms of employment and control over your work and career; and then ticking every single box. I think that the downside of having so many keen and talented young people wanting to advance science is that they end up rather exploited. The same is probably true in other fields where the work has an intrinsic artistic or intellectual worth and an opportunity for accomplishment, like music or writing. Hence the need to remind people of Yog's law. [1] Some only pay in kind.
- yummypaint 7y ago
  Maybe dont submit articles to predatory journals. Many such requirements are now going away (even at some elsevier journals) as a direct result of pressure from people refusing to play by their rules. If your field has an equivalent of the arxiv, there isnt much a journal can do if you post your preprint prior to submission.
  - hprotagonist 7y ago
    this is a perfectly reputable journal that’s the oldest in its field. It wasn’t on Beall’s list or anything. Preprints are fine in general. Bioarxiv exists, but isn’t the dominant force that arxiv is.
deogeo 7y ago
Is that the Yog of Yog-Sothoth fame?

19 points by daddylonglegs 7y ago

Every once in a while, someone who knows about Yog's law learns about peer-reviewed journals and the academic publishing model, and they absolutely lose their minds. I pay $750 extra just so i can self-host a PDF of my own work legally, on top of $96/page just to publish it at all! Also my editor and copy-editor are unpaid volunteers, I'm an unpaid volunteer reviewer, and i have to buy my own paper copy of the journal issue in which my work is published at no discount.

nine_k 7y ago
But is your work yours? Did you not yield most of the rights to it when you accepted a grant, or joined the lab where you did the research? I likely would never be able to get any rights to the closed-source code I wrote. I knew that at the moment when I read the employment contract.
- daddylonglegs 7y ago
  Traditional academic publishing fails Scalzi's corollary to Yog's law as well: the academic publishers take everyone else's work and lock it away. The academics, their university, external funders and the editors and reviewers all have to pay [1] to produce the work and then pay to read it. I hope you got paid, and paid fairly, for writing that software. To be honest, starting a career in academia seems to require making a checklist of every warning signal you can think of with respect to terms of employment and control over your work and career; and then ticking every single box. I think that the downside of having so many keen and talented young people wanting to advance science is that they end up rather exploited. The same is probably true in other fields where the work has an intrinsic artistic or intellectual worth and an opportunity for accomplishment, like music or writing. Hence the need to remind people of Yog's law. [1] Some only pay in kind.
yummypaint 7y ago
Maybe dont submit articles to predatory journals. Many such requirements are now going away (even at some elsevier journals) as a direct result of pressure from people refusing to play by their rules. If your field has an equivalent of the arxiv, there isnt much a journal can do if you post your preprint prior to submission.
- hprotagonist 7y ago
  this is a perfectly reputable journal that’s the oldest in its field. It wasn’t on Beall’s list or anything. Preprints are fine in general. Bioarxiv exists, but isn’t the dominant force that arxiv is.

deogeo 7y ago

Is that the Yog of Yog-Sothoth fame?