Of all the crazy parts of our crazy system, the craziest part is where taxpayers pay for the research, then pay private companies to publish it, and then pay again so scientists can read it. We may not agree on much, but we can all agree on this: it is time, finally and forever, to get rid of for-profit scientific publishers.
Here’s a bit of how it got started.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-scienceFather of Ghislaine Maxwell, yes the Epstein one, had quite a lot to do with it, which sure bears mentioning!
Fuck “The Guardian” (no shade to you, commenter), Behind The Bastards did a competent 4-piece or something (for those who enjoy such a format) on the guy, and to a degree, the topic. Interesting - mostly, but oddly not all - bad stuff.
Fun fact Robert Maxwell established the for profit scientific publishing companies. If that name seems familiar he is the father of Ghislaine.
Agreed. Honestly can’t believe how this is even still a thing at this point.
That was one of the biggest cultural shocks when I did my PhD. What do you mean I need a super expensive subscription (it was paid by university luckily) to access other publications? what do you also mean I have to pay a large fee to also publish? if I want others to access my publications for free I need to pay even more? oh and you don’t pay reviewers, they do it for free all? then where all this money of charging both ways goes? your block storage is probably costing you 0.01 usd per year for my paper…
The entire thing seemed like an aggressive business model making some people super rich at the expense of poor students for the most time who are required to publish.
“Economics” need a re-write too. They have elevated “profits” higher than “Truth-seeking”, and their field are swamped in non-scientific claims and processes that cause ‘Truth’ to become second fiddle to “profits”.
The profit motive compromises Scientific thinking/behavior on ALL levels of the Scientific system, is orthogonal to the truth incentive so only align/overlap in rare cases. Capitalism/free markets is a combative ideology - a belief-system - that generates a perpetual need for profits and kills good Science behavior.
That’s just the ones on TV.
I’m an economist and many of us don’t have much to do with currency economies and could be better described as “find the root cause experts.”
Hell, I use my skills in the IT field.
