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more Open Access non-profit journals please
Elsevier has a 3 billion dollar income, while most of its research is publicly funded. You are paying for the research, then paying again to access the results of the research that you already paid for. The executives can hang.
They have bonkers profit margins too. 38% in 2023. They’re in the same category as Microsoft or Google when it comes to profitability. Absolutely insane for a company that’s supposed to disseminate scientific information.
Behold nothing! >⠀<
It is so much worse than that.
I spend my time researching the literature on a topic so that I can spend my time and energy writing a grant. It probably won’t get funded.
If it does, I get to do a bunch of work. It might involve travel, where I will do everything at minimum expense to save enough money for the coming lab work.
I will spend significant time getting the samples analyzed, spending most of the grant money. Then I will come up with a logical way to interpret the data.
I will spend more time sending a document around to coauthors. This may take months, or even years if the coauthors fight.
We eventually submit to a journal. It gets rejected.
We rewrite and submit again. A few months later, congratulations, you get to publish. Money please.
I work for the money to do the work, I work for the writeup, I fight for the acceptance, and I have to pay to publish.
It’s a stupid system.
as a PI/researcher they are spending thier careers fighting to get published/grants. i can see why alot of them left thier fields.
Not just science. I own a small art business. The magazines in my world all do this. I see my competitors paying hundreds of dollars for “interviews” in them. The entire magazine is an ad masquerading as some type of journalism. I don’t even pay for ads and I’m buried in work. So it’s not needed, at all (who reads this stuff? At least a science journal makes sense).
Honestly it’s shameful across the board. Anyone participating should feel bad about it.
The scientific journal industrial complex is one of the highest profit margins in the world. It’s consistently at like 30-60% pure profit. Obviously not all journals are the same, some are reasonable, but some are insane. LOOKING AT YOU ELSEVIER
The labor is in the peer review and they pay nothing. Then they setup a system where peer reviewers get “credits” not one cares about.
Fucking wooden nickels.
It’s like music. There’s a lot of value in the back catalogue.
wonder whats natrues profit margin, they probably one of the most well renowned journal
Experienced this first hand. Don’t understand why something better has come up. Everyone agrees that this system is broken
I honestly don’t understand this. It’s not that expensive to just host a website where you publish your research to instead of using these scheisters.
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It’s a feedback loop. In order to raise your academic profile and potentially get a job, you need a solid CV full of peer reviewed publications. In order to get published in the first place, you often need money and institutional backing.
If you circumvent that cycle by self-publishing (a solidly logical idea btw), then you’ll have an even harder job getting people to take you seriously and will alienate yourself from “mainstream” academia. It’s messed up. Some open access journals have tried to solve this, with some success, but it’s a systemic problem.
its complicated, if yuo try to publish yourself employers might see your research could be biased or fudged results. they want to see a legitimate publication. much like how a certain wealthy billionaire is doing “research” on himself and publishing it, its not legitimate and is considered pseudoscience.
20 years ago we relied on printed books and libraries. I’ve noticed in real time this last decade [nearly] every paper gaining a PDF download button on some website.
Governments support this nonsense by not attaching publishing requirements to research grants.
“and for the hours of peer review, we pay nothing.”
In my univerity, they just told me how to pirate articles, straigt up, as if it was just normal and legal, very based but it was surprising.
Nobody cares anymore about leech capitalism, almost nobody defends this companies and i’m so so happy it is that way.
any article author will gladly send you a PDF.
when i was in state u, we just used google scholar which the school already pays “subscritions for” so you have acess to articles that arnt gatekeeped behind a paywall. if you were to use it without a faculty or student account, you would not be able to access the full articles.
“Clearly something you want me to do because you keep on paying, lol.”
The subscription service/pay-to-play being everywhere has to stop eventually, right?
Like, eventually enough consumers will realize that they are bent over the barrel by their services.
I was darkly joking that Microsoft is like an abuser in another post yesterday, but the more I thought about it, the more the metaphor stuck. They take and take, make decisions on your behalf, cut you off from outsiders and make it increasingly difficult to escape the longer you let them get away with it. And that’s not Microsoft’s fault…that’s capitalism, baby!
Fun (random shit I heard on the internet): the enshittification of journals mostly started with Pergamon Press which was founded by Ghislaine Maxwell’s father.
But all large presses were doing the same thing. Eslevier, Nature, Etc.
There’s a behind the bastards about him.
Are we sure that current events aren’t just one long behind the bastards episode?
Behind the bastard is just another bastard standing in line
It’s bastards all the way down
ACAB but not ABAC
Bastards… what a bunch of bastards.
You mean a matrix style dystopian nightmare? One can only hope.
Fantastic episode
Sometimes I feel like everything shit in the world can be traced back to like a dozen people and their parents and grandparents.
🌏👨🚀🔫👨🚀🌌
If you told me that dude was Reagan’s nephew, I wouldn’t even bother to check.
If you didn’t know this, it’d be weird how many academics are in the Epstein files. Once you do know it, it’s obvious.
Oh, and Robert Maxwell was legitimately a badass in WW2. Everything terrible about him starts after that.
He was indeed a badass… and a war criminal (although I admit dude was incensed about Germany killing his Jewish family, so I get it) But seriously, a mayor?
People that do well in wartime and during peacetime are different type of people.
hmmm… makes the hanging
suicidemurder of Aaron Swartz look extra funnyAnd a few years later rich folk start mass downloading the same databases to train LLM models using the exact same methods to sell access to those. No FBI.
If you’re ever caught downloading knowledge, just say you’re training a neural network and point at your head.
This comic is partially right. If you pay, you get open access, so no cost for readers. If you go old-school you don’t pay and the article is paywalled. Terrible system either way, but open access is necessary nowadays, as otherwise you will get cited less
i try to look for workaround, sometimes they are freely given on Researchgate, and some on other sites.
The readers are taxpayers, they are paying whether they like it for not. The solution is to post articles on preprint servers, like Arxiv or BioRxiv, which are open and free to read.
I refuse to pay open access fees and use BioRxiv for all my publications.
💯 with you on this.
We also do preprints 100% of the time, but academic incentives are baked AF. Not ‘publishing’ means a large proportion of other academics simply won’t read or cite your work as they don’t believe in preprints. Additionally, funding bodies care about prestige publishing in top ranked journals, so if you don’t do this, the grant pool you have access to will be smaller.
The incentives need to change, where journal venue is irrelevant, or weighted far less than it is.
Behind you, an executive encourages your participation in academia. *plap* *plap* *plap* *plap* get published get published get published
Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives
sorry, not the first time I saw you saying that.
Lmao i love this
I do agree 100%,. rich people should be scared. was just being a bit silly.
IHMO: All science should be freely accessible, free as in freedom and price.
The more eyes can actually see something and find flaws, the better. There is no such thing as institutional credibility. Everyone makes mistakes and it takes everyone to find them, even more so the more complex something is. Leech publishers are not only problematic because they prohibit access, but also because they make real science considerably harder.
Everyone makes mistakes
Except psychopaths who know their claim is garbage but lie through their teeth to get it published. That’s not a mistake, that’s corruption.
Nah, real science starts with a conclusion and then works backwards to find evidence for said conclusion. I think it is a more modern approach. Instead of validating reality, we are validating feelings.
Nah, science has always worked like that. This is what peer review is for.
What’s better than finding evidence that proves your own preconceived notions? Finding evidence that contradicts someone else’s. Schadenfreude is the great engine of scientific progress.
IHMO: All science should be freely accessible, free as in freedom and price.
Taxpayers pay $13B/yr worldwide to the private publishing industry, for content they cannot read.
