151–160 of 254 posts
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It's funded by its members. So they basically pay to meet and promote their business to invited leaders and politicians. I guess you can make an argument that the more exclusive and mythical you can make it, the more likely are businesses to pay to participate.
The new version of the Bohemian Grove or Bilderberg
Honestly if even $1 of public money goes toward research, the work, data, journal, etc should all be public domain. End of story. That should be a basic requirement of taking public funds.
Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? First off, if the only publisher you have a problem with is Elsevier, you have already shown your hand. A half dozen other publishers are more expensive, but you can only name Elsevier. That means you're just repeating a meme that started on forums like this one. So take a moment and ask yourself why any of these publisher…
The analogy you made using Louis Vuitton handbags is fairly weak. Louis Vouitton handbags are prestigious because they're expensive. If the time comes where Louis Vuitton handbags are given free of charge to any Tom, Dick, or Harry, Louis Vuitton loses its prestige. On the other hand, successfully publishing in a prestigious journal, would still be prestigious even if it was done for free.
Honestly if even $1 of public money goes toward research, the work, data, journal, etc should all be public domain. End of story. That should be a basic requirement of taking public funds.
One thing that many scientists do is start businesses using their research, which serves as an incentive in the face of meager salaries. If not for the prospect of commercializing their work, many people might not even go into the field. In our capitalist system, this is unfortunately how things work.
So if you want to make scientific work all public domain, then as a society we need to make real investments into science to properly fund it. We also need to close the loop, such that large corporations who profit off this publicly funded work are forced to pay back into the system at a proportional rate. No more 0% corporate taxes, which cause money to pool at the top.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It has been well said that academia is “show business for ugly people”.
Of the same vibe: "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low."
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Nothing wrong with having an opinion, but having a strong opinion ("the solution is so obvious, i can solve this in 5 minutes") about an industry of which you known nothing of the inner workings come across as rather ignorant. Your example of "I can tell when my food is burnt" is a poor one. Can you tell a quality scientific paper? Do you know what's required to get tenure? To get scientific funding? All of those are…
Your argument makes no sense. Journal publishers don’t weigh in on tenure or grant decisions. While they provide a conduit for materials that impact such things (the researchers papers), they have no say in anything (including, incidentally, sometimes what gets published) A publisher provided distribution. That’s it. They aren’t even the chef in this analogy: they’re FOH staff. Journal editors are faculty at academic…
throwawaaarrgh argues that they provide prestige, too.
I agree. Certainly, I can’t see that publishers only provide distribution, as that should be almost trivial to replicate, and lead to a race to the bottom, price-wise, and the entire process would long have been “replaced by a CMS solution hosted in the cloud”.
Elsevier is far from the only offender in the academic publishing space. This price gouging is rampant, and it affects everyone you could call a "customer." The only variable is who gets stuck with the bill. When I was in grad school, I easily went through 1000+ articles via my institution's library, most of which were dead ends. My school even had to drop the subscription of a journal I was actively using because th…
Honestly if even $1 of public money goes toward research, the work, data, journal, etc should all be public domain. End of story. That should be a basic requirement of taking public funds.
Why do so many commenters on HN always sound so confident, yet none of them work in publishing? First off, if the only publisher you have a problem with is Elsevier, you have already shown your hand. A half dozen other publishers are more expensive, but you can only name Elsevier. That means you're just repeating a meme that started on forums like this one. So take a moment and ask yourself why any of these publisher…
The analogy you made using Louis Vuitton handbags is fairly weak. Louis Vouitton handbags are prestigious because they're expensive. If the time comes where Louis Vuitton handbags are given free of charge to any Tom, Dick, or Harry, Louis Vuitton loses its prestige. On the other hand, successfully publishing in a prestigious journal, would still be prestigious even if it was done for free.
As long as the prestigious journal doesn't balloon to a million pages per issue.