Publishers are a cancer. Knowledge is meant to be shared, freely.
Publishers are a cancer. Knowledge is meant to be shared, freely.
The university should be the place demonstrating socioecological change, serving as a site of experimentation and praxis (see Dunlap et al., 2023). This, however, could not be further from the truth. Beside advancing technologies of digital, political and military control (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014), not to mention genetic dissection and animal vivisection—or some degree of this (Pellow, 2014)—universities fail to enact real examples of socioecological of renewability and sustainability. How come universities are not overflowing with agroecology, permaculture and forest gardens on and inside universities? How come universities are not self-generating their own electricity needs through wind, solar and other lower-carbon infrastructures? We, unfortunately, are witnessing the opposite at university campuses around the world.
This is also a big reason why I'm few weeks from submitting my masters for inspection, and 90% of my references/sources are from Annas Archive / Zlib. Our uni library, in supposedly rich nordic country Finland, just cant afford all the licenses. Luckily all our professors and researchers are in on the "secret", but its just a fucking joke.
Most of the world economy is on the same fucking joke. Just leeches upon leeches upon leeches... And so few people giving anything usefull to the world. I fucking try, but god damn these useless money leeches in the middle try to make it hard as possible. Fuck. So fucking angry, but what can I do but try to minimize the damages I do on my personal part.
Keep screaming. People are not informed on this.
Good luck on this final push; take care of yourself where possible and stay angry at the things that deserve it
“OSF is a free, open platform to support your research and enable collaboration.”
Core has also been quite helpfull in open access science.
Such a young person and already so realistic and cynical?
If the research was conducted with public money, it should be freely accessible by the public, change my mind...
Very cool. I know someone, in a fairly small but funded field, who had this sort of requirement --- Elsevier had the relevant publication, but they couldn't publish there due to access policies (or it was going to be painful to do so at any rate). So they started their own publication!
I forgot the specifics, but it essentially uses arXiv as the backend, and there's a (commercially available?) frontend that lets editors and reviewers do their thing. "Publishing" in this journal is essentially just endorsing an arXiv paper; so it's open access by design.
Really cool stuff. Their field is small enough that iirc they could kinda get critical mass to give Elsevier the finger and adopt this new platform. Warm fuzzy feeling thinking about it!
You forgot the part where this resulted in giving even more money to the publishers for the "Open access". World is fucked.
Haha, PeNAS
Buncha dix.
so back in the day we needed publishers for distribution. now with the Internet, distribution is easy. but prices only went up
associate editors and referees are unpaid volunteers. typesetting is also mainly done by the authors. but prices are high because the publisher wants to profit.
there are quite a few high quality journals that are fairly priced and published by non profit publishers. these are the only journals authors should publish in ....
How I sleep after downloading my research papers illegally
is the meme that you're sleeping well, you're sleeping in prison or that you're sleeping well in prison?
And sci-hub paused adding more papers 😞
What? When? Why? Fuck!
science is meant to be pirated.
Fuck publishers.
also a lot of research work in brazil disallows you to get a second job. you are forced to live with the little money they pay you.
its almost like they don't want there to be research here.
Given the times I've seen news articles and screenshots of poorly vetted published journals. Surely a free open source publisher managed by the academic community can't be much worse? I also don't know shit about the requirements to actually publish so this is probably a naive take
One should do a study about much these supposedly open access journals are profiting and who are their shareholders and what not
sighs from Eastern Europe
You'd think that they're using the money for prizes for reviewers or as scholarship prizes. What are they doing with all that money? Hosting a journal can't be that expensive.
It all goes to the C-Suits and any investors.
I would like to see this written up for a wider context because it's not just a science problem. The Humanities, Arts, and pretty much the whole campus is the same in this way. It's why I left academia. Universities are set up wrong because employee incentives make it a sort of feudalistic system. All you have to do is work as a professor for a few years and discover it's pretty much the same as grad school. You don't really collaborate with the people you work with every day in person. All your contacts are outside your home campus. Nothing useful for the world happens on the campus. You do that outside of the campus to gain "reknown" and your outside brand gets you cred on campus. Meanwhile, on your home campus, your so-called colleagues do everything they can to block any cross-listing of courses they can because the administration counts the beans. The department needs to generate credit hours. Cross-listing is viewed as bean subtraction.
Please don't give the overlords ideas. "Minimum wage" as a currency? Talk about dystopian present, damn.
Libgen and Scihub exist for this exact reason. How is it we've arrived at a situation where capitalists are deciding how knowledge is propagated?
Academic publishing seems like a problem that should be easy to solve. It's a situation where greed is outright making the service worse for everyone, so it seems like a new journal that does things differently (e.g. by not charging researchers) could become wildly successful... So why doesn't that happen? Are there barriers to creating new journals?
Is that 15 weeks of minimum wage or 15 months?
Months. Brazil's minimum wage is BRL 1413 per month, which is around $273.
Time to start another journal, one not run by antiscience moneygrubbing trashbags!
Luckily there are several tools and scripts to bypass paywalls and also those that redirect to the original publication, when the anti-paywall does not work.
only option is pay out of pocket
Or, ya know, self publish.
That's not compatible with the rest of the managerial bureaucracy. And it's not peer-reviewed...