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These journals are like parasites onto the scientific enterprise and ultimately tax payers dollars.
by j7ake 2y ago
These journals are like parasites onto the scientific enterprise and ultimately tax payers dollars.
- xhkkffbf 2y ago[flagged]
- bigfudge 2y agoIn my view a free market cant include massive asymmetries of power between actors. Individual authors face large costs for not playing the game, and Elsevier and others have used their market power to do everything they can to perpetuate a stupid system of intellectual snobbery that keeps them incumbent. Authors are in small part to blame, but mostly they are the victims.
- xhkkffbf 2y ago[flagged]
- matthewdgreen 2y agoMost real problems in the world are coordination problems, where one motivated/coordinated entity sits on an essential “toll bridge”, and the whole world can theoretically just coordinate to route around them. But because “everyone else in the world” is a huge number of people with their own mixed up set of incentives, and the solution doesn’t work unless a critical mass coordinates to do the same thing, this turns out to be really hard.
- kelnos 2y ago> They don't need to work with any formal publisher. LaTeX and the Internet make it easier than ever. Nobody needs any of the publishers to get their work out. That's not how academia works, though. It would be great if it did, but it doesn't.
- throw10920 2y agoCan you describe why not? Is it because a citation in academia (as opposed to corporate R&D) isn't "real" unless it comes from a big publisher?
- outop 2y agoCitation needed that it's a free market. It looks a lot like a market where entrenched players have excessive power.
- xhkkffbf 2y ago[flagged]
- ta988 2y agoAuthors have to sign away all their rights when they want to publish with those publishers.
- donatzsky 2y agoAccording to the article, Elsevier demands that the author signs over the copyright. So no, they don't retain complete control.
- xhkkffbf 2y agoThey have complete control -- until they cut a deal. They don't have to work with Elsevier if they don't want to do so.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- calf 2y agoYou are so confidently wrong it's embarrassing. Any grad student--who does the grunt work in academia--will tell you they would not be allowed to put up their research online without their lab's permission. And grad students sign a form that anything they say and write is owned as IP by university anyways. Please look into how the academic sausage is made before spouting more misinformation as well as specious takes on spherical-cow free market theories. Your comments are all over this thread and I can't mentally unread them.
- ahoka 2y agoOf course it’s not free market.
- fabian2k 2y agoNo, they don't. Not unless you want to sabotage your own career. There is a limited set of journals for a specific area of science, and you need to publish in the most reputable journal possible. There is only a very limited choice here in most cases.
- xhkkffbf 2y agoSo you're confirming that somehow the best publishers somehow manage to provide something of value. The people judging your career are the ones you're complaining about and somehow they're choosing to respect a few publishers. Instead of just imagining that Elsevier is somehow bad, you might ask yourself why these committees respect their journals so much. What are they doing that's right?
- fabian2k 2y agoIt's solely about prestige, and self-reinforcing.
- joe5150 2y agoDo you imagine the suits in Amsterdam are actually responsible for the quality of any given Elsevier journal? Most of the genuinely prestigious titles they publish were acquisitions. It is as clear an example of rent seeking as anyone can come up with.
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago> publishers somehow manage to provide something of value So do the Mexican drug cartels. does that mean they are good? Does that mean they are ‘free market’
- azan_ 2y agoMost authors are rated based on the journals they publish in, and the most prestigious journals are typically from predatory publishers (Elsevier, Nature etc., yes I know that predatory journal is typically used in other context).
- nabla9 2y ago> It's a free market. Free market is not magic. Do you want to learn how network effects combine with coordination problem?
- ta988 2y agoThis is simply not true. Funding agencies, revieweds and universities incentivize the researchers to publish in "high-impact" journals. If researchers weren't pushed by institutions to publish more and more and in highly ranked journals things would be much better. The problem is nobody wants to do the move (researchers, institutions, funding agencies), so publishers (Elsevier isn't alone, ACS, Springer, Wiley, they all do that) increase the prices as much as they can because nothing happened when they did. And even now, as was shown by a comment above only a tiny percentage of their clients take action...
- zem 2y agohttps://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-the-elsevier https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/16/the-public-sphere/#not-th... talks about that
- ilayn 2y agoYou misspelled oligopoly. My guess from your comment is that you don't have a handle on how academia works, which is perfectly fine. You don't have to. But then don't hold such strong opinions because what you wrote is not even wrong.
- kelnos 2y agoThey choose the journals because if they don't, their career doesn't advance. It's a classic collective-action problem: you need a large portion of researchers to more or less simultaneously stop doing it. Good luck with that. The journal system/cartel is an effective oligopoly.
- throw10920 2y ago> They choose the journals because if they don't, their career doesn't advance. Is this basically saying that publishing in non-big-journals (e.g. ArXiV) doesn't really "count" as citations? If so, then that's probably the right language to use here - that citations are a currency that only big (expensive, monopolistic) publishers can actually pay for papers in.
- stainablesteel 2y agothey're effectively cartels
- hhs 2y agoIndeed, "data cartels"; if interested, there is a book that talks about this in detail: https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=33205 https://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=33205
- PopePompus 2y agoAcademia's Ticketmaster