That's why Hal was created! ;) It doesn't have to be like that anymore, go to Hal:

hal.science/

@swoonie

Agreed; when an academic I spent quite a but of time arguing for the shift to open source, but didn't get that far....

academia.edu/1937837/the_acade…

the academy's new electronic order? open source journals and publishing political science

For many years, the dissemination of academic research has been controlled by commercial publishers. However, in light of the continuing inflation of subscription prices for scholarly journals, many academics are investigating open access publishing

^{Christopher May (www.academia.edu)}

Source of the original illustration: Thailand by Tawan Chuntra.

irancartoon.com/site/artists/t… #TawanChuntra #Thailand

@swoonie

Indeed, as OP’s article points out, it’s hard to change when those who hire you and fund you have outsourced their knowledge and judgment to impact-factor-weighted citation metrics.

Perhaps the resulting corrupt practices like citation farming and slop journals will force a change; but it might be towards (even) more exclusive networks of trust.

@marcell_o

The key issue is the role of publishing in academic career management....

@swoonie, It got worse when developing countries started following the same practices as developed ones. In Thailand, the Department of Higher Education forces you to publish but offers no funding to do so. As a result, people either take out loans or give up on becoming a professor altogether. (H-index is a hostage, so no axiv doesn't count)

it's like “Your promotion depends on Scopus,” but “We won’t fund your Scopus‑eligible research,

ratchakitcha.soc.go.th/DATA/PD…

Sensitive content Clicca per aprire/chiudere

@marcell_o
Here's a tentative explanation :
(1) Academics are trained to think that publishing our research in certain journals is seen by other academics as "more impactful" and "better". So, when we have some result to publish we tend to submit it to specific, "high reputation" journals.

(2) A lot of these journals (for example: "Nature" or "Cell") belong to for-profit editors like Nature Publishing group, Elsevier etc.

(3) The for-profit editors set up a very profitable system where authors / their university pay to publish AND pay to access the articles, the public also pays to read, while authors provide not only the contents but also the added value of publication - peer-reviewing - for free.

(4) By the way, this has been originally setup by Robert Maxwell, who is, guess what??, the father of Ghislaine Maxwell (source]

(5) Many researchers do not seem to realise that this is an exploitative system based on smokes and mirrors (the quality of an article is unrelated to the "reputation" of the journal it's published in, and that "reputation" is not quantifiable anyway) so they keep publishing in these journals and some of them still use the journal names for hiring and promotion.

(6) Some journals are non-profit and propose good alternatives to the for-profit system (e.g. "eLife"); however many researchers avoid publishing there because they think it won't be useful to their CV. Some universities or funding organisations say that they do not care about the reputation system (DORA agreements) but the researchers still seem fixated on it.

(7) Some other journals are also non-profit (society journals like Journal of Neuroscience) but they still somehow make huge profits and their CEO / employees get paid a lot, so they don't actually seem that different to the for-profit..

(8) in summary, researchers want to publish in the for-profit journals because they think that these journals have better reputation and they increase our chances of getting jobs and funding. Many researchers believe in this "reputation" story and are either not aware of the exploitative aspects or do not really care about it. Alternatives are not perfect and have been mostly neglected...

Disclaimer: this is just my point of view for the field of #Neuroscience

What to do about it? That's probably for another post.. But personally I try not to publish in for-profit journals, and I prioritize reviewing for non-profit ones.

#AcademicChatter #PublicationEthics #Elsevier #Maxwell

Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?

The long read: It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google – and it was created by one of Britain’s most notorious tycoons: Robert Maxwell

^{Stephen Buranyi (The Guardian)}

Almost the same for translators: Translators usually have min. 5 years of technical college or something comparable. Translations are done using server-based translation suites. The translations are stored in so-called TMs; word for word; sentence for sentence.

Translators are paid in cents (word repetitions often nothing); they create entire libraries with their know-how. Today, AI uses word modules and phrases from their libraries.

Translators have made themselves obsolete!

The attention that the paid publishers and the free reviewers are giving articles is evident in the obviously AI-generated papers that Nature and others are publishing and then forced to retract. I suspect some reviewers just login and click "looks good" without reading. I wonder how many papers are just garbage nobody paid attention to and signed off on.

@ml

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@johnlogic @elduvelle @marcell_o

yes, but the IP issues are a little different in the UK

@elduvelle @marcell_o
I've heard that careers in academic research are often described as "publish or perish".

The Baye-Dole Act of 1980 also gave universities the right to own the intellectual property created by their students, which I view as a huge conflict of interests that incentivized their participation in this broken system.

I recall an extreme case in which a Florida university asserted this right to strip an undergraduate of their patent, expel the student, charge the inventor with IP theft, and use that charge to revoke the former student's visa and seek their deportation.

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There is at least one exception:

cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/

to add insult to injury, empirical articles are not fit to purpose: they are insufficient to effective use of the scientific information they purport to contain. And no, citation is not use. Neither is guessing or reading between the lines.

A reminder of the purpose: contribution to a usable, comprehensible and reliable scientific record.

@gregalotl @kkavee @swoonie

The best hope is the open source community; the big stumbling bloc is to get university managers not just to say they count OS publication equally in promotions cases but to clearly demonstrate that in practice (and for funders to do the same)....

I'm not sure I entirely get this.

Academics are free to publish whatever they like for free on their own web sites, and make it available to all for free, and many do.

If they choose to take advantage of the added value that they believe that publishers offer they must surely understand that publishers' employees have children to feed and mortgages to pay just like anybody else.

And then then general public learns about research from a newspaper misinterpreting a press release. Neither the journalist nor the reader of the newspaper looks at the actual paper.

But if you want to "do your own research", the conspiracy theorists make *their* "research" freely available.

@caiocgo

I'd agree with most of this, but its not the authors who accept the argument of the publishers but the university management class... as they are the people who really deploy the bibliometrics that result

light be interesting für @TIBopenpub

#OpenScience
#Knowledge_DataBase

@adrianmorales @swoonie

As noted in earlier replies, the key issue is the role of publishing in academic careers & the views of gatekeepers to academic advance (who undervalue open access publication, and over-value proprietary publication)

It feels like peer review and academic publication is crying out for a distributed, protocol driven, peer review, accreditation and publishing work flow with supporting technology. This seems eminently deliverable, but there are of so many vested interests in keeping all of this stymied and closed and raking in the dollars.
There's little opportunity for lock in platform capture and monitisation (for any useful solution, I think).

It's the opposite of a VC target: a commons?

@bearsong

Indeed, I spent some time with colleagues working on an open access, peer controlled reviewed on-line academic journal a decade ago, but the problem we ended up with was the time allocation (unpaid) that it would require - we thought about grant funding for it (or at least to seed it) but could find no appropriate interested funder (although nowadays that might be different).

yes indeed, just like that.

what you describe sounds like a great activity. if only could have gone somewhere amazing.

i almost wonder if every research ethical department would donate to development, reliability maintenance & support for such an undertaking.

i dream of such a world