internet points
internet points
92 comments
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To mention the obvious, it's the same network effect that keeps people on X and Reddit.
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Where there's a platform, there's enshitification.
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To stay obvious, what's fascinating is that those networks are small, its members the most intelligent people available and they meet each other regularly in person at conferences.
Why do they accept the lock-in?
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Not every community does it this way. For example, computational linguistics put most of their conference proceedings online for free: https://aclanthology.org/. Deep learning researchers just publish a lot of stuff to arxiv.
Academic publishers like Elsevier are predatory scammers.
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They may be intelligent in their fields but that doesn’t mean they think thing through in every aspect of their lives. The status quo is the easiest thing to deal with they can devote more time to their careers/research
Unless their field is in social engineering, then yeah why are they going along with it?
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Why do they accept the lock-in?
Looks like there is no good answer if we view them as one entity which could simply make up it's mind. But it's a bunch of individuals, who probably disagree at least over details. Some probably have individual ambitions or pressures, some may struggle to pay their bills or satisfy their family or even themselves.
And for each individual on the fence, it's always an advantage to still publish to the network while hoping the rest of the group abstains and establishes a better platform in the meantime. Would you risk publishing your finally successful hard work to an immature platform, where it might not receive the attention it deserves?
And because they're smart, they know everyone else is thinking the same. Now we have reasonable doubts in something which relies on trust.
Basically, game theory. The system will find it's Nash equilibrium at a point where every individual move will worsen that individual's standing.
To break this spell, you need agreements and contracts. Someone needs to work on that, negotiate and lobby for it. But who? Would anyone who would benefit from that step away from their actual work and work on that meta-system instead? Would anyone who would not benefit from that system work on it? Maybe this could be a research project for scientists who already study these topics. Otherwise, I don't know.
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In my discipline we only pay if we want the article to be open access. Are there journals that charge $1000 and still put articles behind a paywall?
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It’s $3000 for Association of Horticultural Scientists
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Yes
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High impact factor journal are among those that ask fees depending on number of pages and figures. Or at least they used to when I used to do academic research
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Can confirm, I cannot even imagine paying for papers. Like why do you endure such an issue?
..Predatory journals?
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Don't forget that sometimes you also do work for that journal, telling them if a paper is good enough or not for them, and also basically don't get payed.
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don't think you wanna get payed, unless you are a ship, but getting paid would be nice for them
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Publish or perish.
Academic publishing is in a very weird place and is very, very political. Its true that authors have to pay to have their papers published in most journals or conferences after they've been accepted, but like all things academic, this is highly dependent on the field. Some universities will reimburse professors publishing costs, others need to pay out of pocket or with grant/public funding.
While its true that there are open-access journals and conferences without such costs, I would wager that most well known researchers would avoid such avenues of publication due to prestige. The larger journals and conferences have review boards where the top scientists in the world sit on them. As a potential published author with such an outlet, its a great honor to even be considered. Most researchers don't want to take the risk of going with a less prestigious outlet if it will run the risk of smearing their image or damaging their ability to publish in better outlets in the future.
Source: Was a Doctoral candidate that ran the whole ringer besides the dissertation.
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While its true that there are open-access journals and conferences without such costs
To publish open access normally costs upwards of $3k USD as well. There's practically no point in the publishing chain where academics aren't getting screwed.
Let's also not forget that you have to review other people's papers for the journal for free.
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Y'all are getting fucked
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Cake or death?
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Death.. No! I mean cake! Ahhhhhh!
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And all those reasons are why I don't want to go into academia. It really feels like a the competition/politics/pissing contest of who you know is more valued than people coming together to push the boundaries of what we know and how we understand things. What are the upsides?
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So here is the funny thing, with most research you're expected to get the funding, which includes wages, before you even begin the research.
Meaning you're not paying to let other people make money off your research, you're just paying for services needed for fulfilling your end of the bargain which you had previously agreed upon from the very beginning.
The cool part of all of this is that in many places when you get public funding the research can be made available to others for free after it's peer reviewed.
Honestly, if you could trust individuals in every industry with this much credit, then it is how the entire world would work. But you can't trust everyone that much.
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That’s all correct, of course, but it represents somewhat of an ideal case.
First, yes, you have to secure funding. Your best chance is to be someone who has already successfully completed grant-supported research with a solid history in your field, and to be looking at something considered sexy at the time. I’m not in the business anymore, but I shudder to think about how many grant proposals are offering to use LLMs. The rub is that grants can be tough to get - there’s orgs within the NIH that have a less than 5% acceptance rate. Let’s say you’re lucky and you get your grant. Depending on your institution, a big chunk of that goes into administration. The rest is for you and your colleagues and students and lab workers and so on, as well as equipment and other expenses.
You also will probably want to hold back about $10k or more for publication fees. Many journals do not require a fee to publish, but do require one to make the paper open access so that others can read it without paying a $30 fee for a single paper. When I was doing it the fees were usually between $2-3k per paper. It’s not that big of a deal if your grant is $500k, but it can be quite a chunk of money for smaller grants. In any case, you’re paying someone to print your paper, which you wrote and edited and which was reviewed and recommended for publication by other unpaid academics. If you cannot pay the fees, your work will not be accepted by most open access journals, and will not be open access if accepted by a paywalled journal.
It is not true (at least in the US at the time I was doing it) that government sponsored research will be open access by law after peer review. We fought hard for it, but the publishing lobby is pretty strong. I think the law is currently that government financed research must be made open access within a year or so of publication.
The problem comes with smaller institutions and less well known researchers. I had a friend who was a professor of finance at a smaller university, and he had to pay out of pocket for his publications as well as some of his conferences. And their salaries aren’t that high in any case. He had hard money - his salary for teaching classes - but also had to keep publishing to keep his job and advance. I had another situation where I was publishing a paper in a very small but within its subject prestigious journal, where I was more than happy to pay the pub fee. The editor told me quite frankly that he was working with a researcher from another country who was trying to figure out how he could afford to pay the pub fee because he said our paper would essentially be paying for his as well.
So, after all of that, I do consider the academic publishing business predatory and parasitic. Here’s how to get papers for free - legally. I’m not touching on any other means.
- Search for the title - in quotes - that you’re looking for. You can find individual papers by their abstracts, which generally are made publicly available. There are preprint services like ArXiv where researchers upload their papers before they’re published. If it exists, most of the time a published paper will have its final form available as a preprint with the layout being the only thing that changes. It makes sense to check though.
- Go to the author’s website. Researchers will often have links to their publications on their professional page.
- Write to the researcher and request a copy. We love that. You might need to ping them a couple of times because people get busy and forget things, but overall you’ll probably find someone who would be very happy to send you a copy.
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That's why scihub is so popular
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And Arxiv.
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"I just proved unified field theory. Upvotes to the left!
(Please, I need to keep my job)"
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This guy, Dr. Glaucomflecken also does a ton of skits, some funny, some critical. For his most recent ones he did a satirical set, 30 days of US Healthcare, and they were both funny and depressing. I did not know some of the stuff he mentioned in those. Worth the watch.
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The getting to keep your job bit is not quite right. Often, one also has to go find their own funding. Sort of based on the publications, but not necessarily.
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I think the implication is the whole "publish or perish" mindset in academia.
If you don't constantly publish something then your career and work is considered stagnant. At which point you lose out to other researchers, and effectively can't get paid for your work. Aka: you lose your job
At least that's how I understand it.
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The academic system is a tiered system. Publish or perish is a term that mostly applies to early to mid career researchers, who are pracitcally all employed on fixed term contracts.You don't lose your job if you don't publish, you just can't get (or are less competitive for) your next job.
Tenured academics (professors/A. Prof.) are on ongoing employment by the university. Their job is never really under threat. Although if they wanted to move jobs and be successful in grants then they want a productive group (many publications) to prove they are leading cutting edge research.
Universities care directly around how much grant funding their professors can pull into the university. However, in many countries it's difficult to remove long serving academics. It's not uncommon for 'retired' proffs to die at their desk, even though they checked out decade's ago.
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Getting paid in exposure.
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Yes, this is correct. Also, if you want to publish your dissertation, you'll need to do all editing and indexing yourself and wait like 3 years to publish it and receive about 1% of all sales
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Wouldn't matter if I made 1% or 100%, it's still 0 sales :P
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EXPOSURE
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Has there been an attempt at a charity-based distribution platform, á la Wikipedia?
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The challenge is the peer review system - not saying it can't be done, but facilitating quality reviews is often costly.
There has, however, been a push to publish articles as "open access" which costs more for the author but makes it publicly available free of charge to read.
Overall the system is still a pretty big scam, but would be difficult to make 100% free.
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There's groups doing free peer review in a mutual aid sort of way. As I understand it, reviewers don't really get paid anyway and the work is often dumped on students around the professor. Example of a group doing community peer review: https://archaeo.peercommunityin.org/PCIArchaeology/
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but facilitating quality reviews is often costly.
States/academic institutions have to make it part of the job description of people. Get designated an editor of a journal? Your Uni understands and hands you an additional TA to lighten the load elsewhere and/or deal with the paperwork aspects.
The reviewing itself is already done pro bono anyways.
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Yes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_journal_publishing_reform?wprov=sfla1 (see Reform initiatives)
Bonus background:
https://pure.port.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/3696109/Military_Industrial_Complexities.pdf
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What‽ I've published around 5 articles, and I've never paid anything. Is this something new?
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This system looks like it has such a great opportunity to be overtaken by free journals. Universities are in a great position to make this happen if they can weed out their political corruption through a system of rules and transparency. However, having worked in academia, I can see how this would be really hard to pull off. All of those egos competing to be the top ego and cliques can catastrophically toxify a project without resolve.
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Varies from field to field. But many journals that ask for money from authors without providing open access are scams.
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Yea they do seem like predatory/scammy.
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Kinda fucked up that it's not only about being smart or having the tenacity to acquire these kind of jobs but that it's also depending on the altruistic mindset and resiliency of people. The pool of people having most if these traits is quite slim..
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Publish it to social media and you get the prestige and points without paying the $1000!
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I don't think you can convert social media prestige points to academia prestige points
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Unless you are popular enough, that you get honorary degrees
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After it’s published, do you get to do whatever you want with it? Like put it on your own website with a link to where it was published?
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This guy missed the "funding" kpis. No one gives jobs on prestige points, you need to bring in Kilo-$ or kilo-euros
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Capitalism strikes again
92 comments