My reply is that people want to live in a capitalist country, but don't want to live with the consequences of that. This is one of the consequences.
People want to live in free and democratic countries and in that respect capitalism is the least bad of the totalitarian regimes that exists…
If you truly believe that capitalism is the best way to "live in free and democratic countries", then you should welcome what Elsevier and others are doing, because that is a direct consequence of their "freedom" to pursue profits.
Based on what OP is saying, if capitalism was really working here then Springer would be out of business - because they don't provide any value. It seems what we have here is a cultural problem.
Honestly, you have an idealized view on capitalism. It's still the most productive system humanity has ever used at scale, but capitalism favors monopolies, cartels and every other anti-competitive behavior you can think of. That's why we have regulations against such behavior. Even if - as it turns out- these regulations can still be weaponized by bad acteurs to ultimately strengthen their hold on markets
He did say "if capitalism was really working". I at least read that as "working as intended", i.e. as the capitalistic ideal.
Honestly, you have an idealized view on capitalism. It's still the most productive system humanity has ever used at scale, but capitalism favors monopolies, cartels and every other anti-competitive behavior you can think of. That's why we have regulations against such behavior. Even if - as it turns out- these regulations can still be weaponized by bad acteurs to ultimately strengthen their hold on markets
He did say "if capitalism was really working". I at least read that as "working as intended", i.e. as the capitalistic ideal.
Yes, and my point was that the capitalistic ideal does not mean fair competition.
Because capitalism inherently favours anti-competitive behavior. If it didn't, we wouldn't have had to pass legislation to outlaw it.
Quoting "not real capitalism" as am argument is at the same level as saying "we just didn't try real socialism yet". That's technically true, too. And we likely never will.
To be fair, the Last-Modified header is very sketchy. I use it as one of the heuristics for determining the age of a website in my search engine. It's not great. It's frequently found incorrect, both older and younger than the actual age of the document. It's a bit of a relic from back in ye olden days when websites were static .htm files in a folder, which is so rarely the case today. It doesn't help it's also got o…
Plenty of websites also play with the user-visible dates on websites to game search engines - most dates shown in Google results seem to be complete garbage. I don't think Modified-Since is really worse, and it at least gives you a chance to maybe get a date for static pages. But you are right that If-Modified-Since forces it to be a date for the complete document rather than the content, which might not be as useful…
Yeah, my takeaway after having attempted to do so is that properly dating websites is a very hard problem. You can get Google-level-accuracy decent guesstimates relatively easily, but going beyond that is hard.
People want to live in free and democratic countries and in that respect capitalism is the least bad of the totalitarian regimes that exists…
If you truly believe that capitalism is the best way to "live in free and democratic countries", then you should welcome what Elsevier and others are doing, because that is a direct consequence of their "freedom" to pursue profits.
I never said it's the best, it's actually pretty bad at it (and if you re-read what I've written, you'd see that I consider Capitalism to be a form of totalitarianism). It's just arguably miles ahead of the alternatives that currently exist…
> Publishing in Academia is a scam Relatively soon after starting work on my PhD, one of my more-experienced colleagues explained the affect of "impact factor" on academic publishing. Back then I was young and naive, and assumed that at least impact factor itself would be some kind of open system based on freely-available data. Many years later, I read up on this and discovered Web of Science/Clarivate :( How is it p…
My reply is that people want to live in a capitalist country, but don't want to live with the consequences of that. This is one of the consequences.
No it is not. There's nothing in the capitalist model that mandates academic community to maintain a zero-valued-add gatekeepers. It's just an extremely lazy dunk, which happens each time somebody discusses any rent-seeker setup - somebody comes out of the woodwork and proclaims "oh, it's because of capitalism!". In a very very very dumb sense it is - like the reason of crime is that people are breathing. If they didn't they'd be dead, and there were no possibility of them to be criminal. It is this level of lazy and useless logic. Yes, capitalism allows rent-seekers to exist. But it in no way mandates their existence - a model without rent-seekers is as compatible - I would say even more compatible - with capitalism as one with them. Just don't make this kind of lazy dunks anymore, it really adds nothing to the problem.
People want to live in free and democratic countries and in that respect capitalism is the least bad of the totalitarian regimes that exists…
If you truly believe that capitalism is the best way to "live in free and democratic countries", then you should welcome what Elsevier and others are doing, because that is a direct consequence of their "freedom" to pursue profits.
No I should not. That's like saying if I support free speech, I must welcome lying and insulting others. Supporting free speech means allowing people to speak without being persecuted, but that does not mean I must value all speech equally. Both myself and the society still can pass value judgement and value different kinds of speech differently. Same with business conduct - the fact that this conduct is not explicitly criminal does not in any way mean everybody should "welcome" it. There is a wide area between criminal conduct and welcome conduct, and the society and the culture has appropriate means to regulate it. If the academic institutions and the scientists would not value publication is Elsevier journals so much, and would not buy their subscriptions, Elsevier would not exist. It is not because Elsevier is doing something criminal, it is because people decided to behave in ways that allow Elsevier to rent-seek. They can change this behavior, and they absolutely do not need to join the Communist party for that or welcome Elsevier. Those aren't the only choices.
My reply is that people want to live in a capitalist country, but don't want to live with the consequences of that. This is one of the consequences.
No it is not. There's nothing in the capitalist model that mandates academic community to maintain a zero-valued-add gatekeepers. It's just an extremely lazy dunk, which happens each time somebody discusses any rent-seeker setup - somebody comes out of the woodwork and proclaims "oh, it's because of capitalism!". In a very very very dumb sense it is - like the reason of crime is that people are breathing. If they did…
To avoid the rent seeking you need a state that will enforce laws that prohibit the rent seeking process and revert it when it has formed. This is not compatible with free market capitalism in abstract (being against the freedom of capitalist agents), and in practice it cannot be done because the capitalists will use political power to stop it.
My reply is that people want to live in a capitalist country, but don't want to live with the consequences of that. This is one of the consequences.
Based on what OP is saying, if capitalism was really working here then Springer would be out of business - because they don't provide any value. It seems what we have here is a cultural problem.
In this case, it seems close to a prisoner's dilemma.
That would make the researchers the prisoners and Springer the jailer in this analogy.
All researchers are incentivized to defect to the jailer(s)/private publishers until they know that there is a critical mass of prisoners willing to make a prison break/switch to open access journals.
Gather together and begin publishing your own journals (even just in the form of a website)? If it's you who made the existing journals great, you probably can do it again?
This is a coordination problem. There are some efforts in this direction; for example, the researchers who led the Elsevier boycott http://thecostofknowledge.com/ started a free open-access journal https://discreteanalysisjournal.com/about in which I'm proud to have a paper accepted. But it's difficult to dislodge the existing system quickly, even if everyone involved wants to.
That's one good news!
Yes, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were some kicbacks involved, at some universities