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by ggrrhh_ta 2313 days ago
As many of us doing research, writing, reviewing, typesetting, checking proofs, organizing their dissemination conferences, administrative tasks, filling up IP forms, returning them, getting them checked by attorneys paid on our side, etc., etc., etc., do not get absolutely anything remotely in value to the price it costs to our institutions or peers to access our work.

We force ourselves though to do something so illogical and nonsensical because we are evaluated according to inefficient and silly performance bars that emerge from a herd of seemingly intelligent people each acting in their best interest (both those that seek showing their merit, and those that seek evaluating the merit of others), most of which do not have enough power and/or leadership to be the first ones to disrupt the current status quo. ['Tradegy of the Commons' theme]

Of course, I would not suggest any student to try to subvert it, as doing it "heroically" will only constitute an obstacle for themselves without doing anything to convince your rightly-so competitive peers to join your efforts rather than to overtake you. [edited: sentence corrected]

However, things are slowly changing, as people & institutions with the right amount of power and leadership are starting to take action.

1 comments

> things are slowly changing, as people & institutions with the right amount of power and leadership are starting to take action.

Where exactly, what people and institutions?

The American Astronomical Society has taken a pretty powerful stance against the predatory journal publishing practice.

They are pushing their own field-recognized journals that are partially open-access (12mo blackout window, then fully open access) with the option to go full open access from the beginning for a surcharge, and are even working to provide publishing cost assistance for those in need of it (such as early-career scientists who may not have a lot of funding to lean on).

It's not ideal, given that there's still a somewhat high cost for a fully open-access publication (the "gold open access"), but at least it's there. Also, the fact that a paper "ages" into open access after 12 months means that the knowledge does eventually make it into public hands.

See eg the various initiatives against Elsevier's pricing practices with all/most German universities and a number of American universities refusing to pay Elsevier's fee/ransom.

Similarly the whole 'open access'publishing movement which sadly has been somewhat coopted by the big publishers.

Well, sci-hub's one.
You can check for yourself - on providing and dissemination, check Arxiv & Siblings. On institutions, check e.g., University of California, or search, e.g., "Elsevier's Paywall" using some internet search service to find names.
I was gladly surprised that a "low quality" (data/experiments were fine, but terrible copywriting) paper I wrote while in academia which I uploaded to Arxiv actually got some good amounts of citations ( and is even indexed by google scholar).