22 ms·

The entire academic system forces them. Hence the phrase "Publish or Perish".

• endisneigh 4y ago
  You can be a scientist without involving yourself with the broken American higher Ed system. Additionally there are journals that do not charge for access.
  • anigbrowl 4y ago
    Sure, but if the kind of science or research you do costs money and you are not independently wealthy, then you will have to have to beg for patronage in the form of grant funding or an endowment. And since it's hard for non-specialists to evaluate the quality of your claims, your record of publications and citations will probably be treated as a proxy for the quality of your ideas.
    • endisneigh 4y ago
      That may be true, but submitting to a paid journal isn’t necessary, still. Scientists can and do cite and publish independent of the large publications. Arxiv being an example.
      • anigbrowl 4y ago
        Sure, if your work is theoretical or you already have the lab equipment you need. I see your point, but you are being a little unrealistic to ignore that some kinds of research costs money to conduct, in materials, equipment, travel, or rental and storage costs.
  • PeterisP 4y ago
    In many fields doing science requires a team and equipment, and in all fields doing science requires being able to sustain yourself while spending most of your time on science. All of that requires funding, which almost universally (not limited to American higher Ed system) requires demonstrating that your science is accepted by being published in respected peer-reviewed venues, and if it's only self-published then it's considered not worthy (and there indeed is a big correlation for that) and results in you being denied the means to continue to do science. In essence, science gets validated by being published in selective places which demonstrably filter out most of the chaff (and a lot of science-like products should get filtered out - even in this domain attention is scarcer than content, so almost nobody wants to read things that haven't passed a certain filter) and if something gets published in a less selective venue, the general assumption (again, strongly correlated with reality) is that it wasn't good enough to get published in a better one. Technically, of course, you can be a scientist without involving yourself with all that, if you're independently wealthy and/or doing it as a hobby in addition to your main job. Science used to be done that way (e.g. by bored educated aristocrats), but I think we have a strong consensus that the world would be worse than the current situation if there would be a de facto limitation to doing science only by those who can self-fund it.
    • endisneigh 4y ago
      I do not necessarily disagree, but it stands that you don’t have to involve yourself with academia or journals to be a scientist. Clearly there are pros and cons to the current system as you’ve pointed out.
      • PeterisP 4y ago
        True, but for someone who is already working in academia (i.e. most people producing science), refusing to getting involved with that is equivalent to quitting not just your current job but the whole industry and career, ceasing to do science by moving to a different profession.
• asdff 4y ago
  Plenty of researchers are opting to publish in open access journals instead. Cell press journals will let you publish open access these days, for example.