(I think it meant) "If you visualize the monetary flow in the article publishing business, the "sickness" involved («pain») becomes visible: the energy waste becomes so apparent that it suggests replacing money directly with energy". Concept that its author wanted to stress by crafting an energy consuming post. (Joeberon, you never had to extensively decrypt the texts of theoretical philosophers of the latest centuri…
I'm a physicist, and personally have very little interest in philosophy. I haven't read really any philosophy at all
EDIT: actually that is false, I have read a lot of eastern philosophy, but that to me is more of a religious thing
The core issue is that journals offer standard. People don't like to bother with checking every paper's reputability with a magnifying glass, and the reputation of the journal gives a shortcut around that. It's editorial work which gives the competitive edge. Now, of course scientists could run a reputable journal for free or on donations. However, once you have achieved a reputable status with your journal, it becom…
> generally people fail to resist ... temptation
And this is why society defines regulations. Society, which has an interest in open access to knowledge.
The core issue is that journals offer standard. People don't like to bother with checking every paper's reputability with a magnifying glass, and the reputation of the journal gives a shortcut around that. It's editorial work which gives the competitive edge. Now, of course scientists could run a reputable journal for free or on donations. However, once you have achieved a reputable status with your journal, it becom…
The existence of many high quality open access journals would seem to contradict your theory.
These are in an extreme minority, although this may vary from discipline to discipline. In my area you can count fully open access journals on one hand and they play no notable role yet. All top journals are closed access with expensive "open access" publication fees (ca. 3,000 USD per article). Most of them are Springer and Oxford Journals, others are Elsevier.
The core issue is that journals offer standard. People don't like to bother with checking every paper's reputability with a magnifying glass, and the reputation of the journal gives a shortcut around that. It's editorial work which gives the competitive edge. Now, of course scientists could run a reputable journal for free or on donations. However, once you have achieved a reputable status with your journal, it becom…
I think this does more harm than good. If there's anything we should have learned from the replication crisis of 2014, a decent amount of "generated" or "satirical" papers scandals, and an essentially constant stream of retractions, merely being published in a prestigious journal is not a great heuristic for whether a result holds up or the methodology was sound. People who want to seriously assess a paper need to read it, no matter what. Reputation by institution may once have been valuable, but as institutions are corrupted by their incentives and names can be bought and sold as part of the shell game of business, this gets worse and worse as a way of actually assessing information. The benefit you tout is on thin ice if it exists at all, and the harm is enormous, to the point where these institutions have lost the support of the overwhelming majority of people who do the research published in them. In practical terms, most researchers already get most of their papers through sources like Sci-Hub or arXiv, or find out about them through search engines or word of mouth, only dealing with the publisher at the point where they already know what they're looking for. This argument simply has no merit
More than an American might think maybe. The rest of the world sees America as the numero uno threat to democracy, peace, and stability. And when that fact is pointed out to Americans, with evidence and polls and sources, it makes no impression somehow (in my experience). It's simply incompatible with their programming, and the data is rejected. Try it.
Not sure what your agenda is, but you're clearly ignoring the uniquely fashy things China and Russia are doing.
Item A being at index 0 of a list doesn't imply the absence of item B and item C from that list.
The existence of many high quality open access journals would seem to contradict your theory.
These are in an extreme minority, although this may vary from discipline to discipline. In my area you can count fully open access journals on one hand and they play no notable role yet. All top journals are closed access with expensive "open access" publication fees (ca. 3,000 USD per article). Most of them are Springer and Oxford Journals, others are Elsevier.
Can I guess, your area is experimental science/engineering? I notice that in the more theoretical fields (theoretical physics,math,CS,stats) the open access channels are on par with the paywalled ones. Curious as to why. Perhaps its more expensive to replicate results, perhaps the fees are nothing compared to what you pay for the labour and equipment..
The main issue is that currently there's no way around publishing at the established journals and conferences, because of the reputation they've built up. Funding and career advancement hinge on publications in these venues. If we accept that publishers don't offer much at all in return for the publication fees/library subscription costs (barely any editing, reviewers work pro bono, hosting PDFs is very cheap nowaday…
I volunteer for a project [1] where the idea of "cutting out the middle man" is taken even further: removing the journal from the reputation transfer. So rather than a reviewer lending their reputation to a journal, and that journal then conferring a stamp of trustworthiness onto an academic work, reviewers lend their reputation directly to the works they review. The works themselves can still be shared far and wide,…
This is looks like a horrible idea. The system violates anonymous peer reviewing standards. These are sometimes even mandated by law, e.g. our funding institution would not allow us to count such a publication as "peer reviewed." There are many good reasons why peer review needs to be anonymous on both ends (the reviewer is anonymous and the manuscript is anonymized). Many reputable journals have even switched to triple blind peer review, i.e., the editor in chief does not know which two peer reviewers are selected.
The biggest problem I see with the proposed system is that it's unfortunately often easy to recognize who wrote a paper (which is bad for ordinary peer review already) and in a personal endorsement system this would lead to collusion among researchers with low integrity. You wink through my papers, I wink through your papers. Also, imagine you don't endorse the paper of the senior researcher in charge of your postdoc funding...
I think this, like healthcare, is a place where the world needs to reckon with the limits on the usefulness of profit motive. There are a lot of benefits to capitalism, and it has produced both societal wealth and innovation in a lot of contexts. But there are some clear cases where the most profitable way to use a resource is a net harm to humanity, and organizing it in a way that removes that motive is the most parsimonious solution. Nationalizing and then freeing scientific information, as this article proposes, is a solution that has widespread support among the experts generating the actual knowledge that would be shared, has obvious compounding benefits, and only harms a business model. I think so many people have become disillusioned with the promise of capitalism and profit motive precisely because we keep insisting that it needs to be our only tool in every situation, with frequently disastrous consequences.