5 ms·
See my reply to swsieber.
by civilized 5y ago
See my reply to swsieber.
- ethanbond 5y agoYes we agree that a few people at the top of the premier publishing orgs hold lots of power.
- civilized 5y agoAnd once they climb that ladder, academics who reach prestigious journal positions very consistently choose not to rock the boat, even though they hold all the cards. I think that says a lot about academia at large.
- ethanbond 5y agoYeah, in the same way that the existence of Murdochs, Sacklers, and Kochs says “a lot” about every person working in the retail or service industries. What you’re seeing is simply incentives and human beings’ universal responsiveness to them.
- civilized 5y agoIndeed, it says precisely what I said in the original post.
- crazy_horse 5y agoIt's hard to overstate how tired the entire argument is. Doctorow feels like tweetstorms are an acceptable means of getting communication across (yikes), so maybe some things are just unbridgable. HN sounds like cranks about this. In my podunk region 2 school I have access to all the journals I want, always have as a student. I rarely need that because it's easier to Google Scholar and then just grab the paper off of someone's site, which pretty mch everyone does these days. Some of the commenters here could have written a phd in the last decade about this topic but I don't think it's the massive stopper of progress that people think it is. Billions of dollars! Wish we didn't have to bust my ass to get a portion of that, but keep beating up on the academics.
- civilized 5y agoSome fields have good preprint representation while others don't. Talk to academics outside your field and you'll quickly learn this.
- crazy_horse 5y agoCould you provide examples?
- civilized 5y agoLarge swaths of the humanities and social sciences, biology, chemistry... There are exceptions of course. The preprinters tend to be the more CS/quantitative subfields of these disciplines.
- crazy_horse 5y agoI work in the social sciences where we have lots of overlap with other social sciences, stats, and data science, machine learning. Those are the domains I know and in those domains anyone born after 1970 knows that if they want to distribute their work they put it on their site or a number of free archives.
- civilized 5y agoAs I said, you're probably in a more quant-oriented subfield like economics. Ask your colleagues in field biology, or physical chemistry, or anything less quant/CS/stats/data/tech-flavored.
- ravel-bar-foo 5y ago> HN sounds like cranks about this. In my podunk region 2 school I have access to all the journals I want, always have as a student. Perhaps you are in computer science. As long as we're trading anecdotes, I went to one of the top universities in my country. I regularly came across articles that were not accessible from large professional societies such as IEEE, ACS, and SPIE. Now I work in a hospital, and they don't have subscriptions to anything non-medical! I have to go through sci-hub for access to my own papers!