@zorangrbic
Ironic, isn't it!?
An argument for public ownership in one of the powerhouse private publishing outlets, behind a paywall. Written for free by the authors.
(It's only a short correspondence, reading the whole wouldn't add much more.)
Twitter is in turmoil and the scholarly community on the platform is once again starting to migrate. As with the early internet, scholarly organizations are at the forefront of developing and implementing a decentralized alternative to Twitter, Mastodon. Both historically and conceptually, this is not a new situation for the scholarly community. Historically, scholars were forced to leave social media platform FriendFeed after it was bought by Facebook in 2006. Conceptually, the problems associated with public scholarly discourse subjected to the whims of corporate owners are not unlike those of scholarly journals owned by monopolistic corporations: in both cases the perils associated with a public good in private hands are palpable. For both short form (Twitter/Mastodon) and longer form (journals) scholarly discourse, decentralized solutions exist, some of which are already enjoying some institutional support. Here we argue that scholarly organizations, in particular learned societies, are now facing a golden opportunity to rethink their hesitations towards such alternatives and support the migration of the scholarly community from Twitter to Mastodon by hosting Mastodon instances. Demonstrating that the scholarly community is capable of creating a truly public square for scholarly discourse, impervious to private takeover, might renew confidence and inspire the community to focus on analogous solutions for the remaining scholarly record – encompassing text, data and code – to safeguard all publicly owned scholarly knowledge.
@perseus @W_Lucht So, this is part from a series of toots about... well, you'll have to read it yourself.
But it's an extremely good example of corporate arrogance and why #OSS and #fediverse are important.
*corrected a typo.
Not only free, but mostly paid by public money. The very high majority of authors are paid by public money at Universities.
@OldHound @W_Lucht What bugs me most is that they're able to perpetuate this scam without anybody higher up complaining and doing something about it.
Public money goes into science, then the scientist write for free and the publishers ask a shit load of money to access it.
If I did the same thing, I would end up in prison before I said "sci-hub". 😁
Twitter is in turmoil and the scholarly community on the platform is once again starting to migrate. As with the early internet, scholarly organizations are at the forefront of developing and implementing a decentralized alternative to Twitter, Mastodon. Both historically and conceptually, this is not a new situation for the scholarly community. Historically, scholars were forced to leave social media platform FriendFeed after it was bought by Facebook in 2006. Conceptually, the problems associated with public scholarly discourse subjected to the whims of corporate owners are not unlike those of scholarly journals owned by monopolistic corporations: in both cases the perils associated with a public good in private hands are palpable. For both short form (Twitter/Mastodon) and longer form (journals) scholarly discourse, decentralized solutions exist, some of which are already enjoying some institutional support. Here we argue that scholarly organizations, in particular learned societies, are now facing a golden opportunity to rethink their hesitations towards such alternatives and support the migration of the scholarly community from Twitter to Mastodon by hosting Mastodon instances. Demonstrating that the scholarly community is capable of creating a truly public square for scholarly discourse, impervious to private takeover, might renew confidence and inspire the community to focus on analogous solutions for the remaining scholarly record – encompassing text, data and code – to safeguard all publicly owned scholarly knowledge.
@W_Lucht The irony: it's paywalled and I can't read it.
That said, at the NASEM Misinformation meeting yesterday. frequently the "business model" problem of social media engagement came up.
I thought if influencers move to Mastodon, that solves that....
@W_Lucht @BrendanDN legitimatizing arXiv would go a helluva way.
Scholarly work isn't considered "published" until it goes thru a farcical review and listed by some "official" mag where you have to pay $32 to read it
@Downes @TheFerridge @olavf @W_Lucht @BrendanDN
It must depend upon area. In maths an unreviewed preprint remains, well, a preprint. A refereed paper is almost always better.
almost - because:
1) referees make mistakes too
2) corruption
I had a preprint with an error online for few years, nobody bothered to read it in detail, despite me giving a number of talks about it. 🤦
I found the error myself, while preparing a journal submission... And many times referees picked up small and big bugs in my journal submissions.
The only erroneous paper I have published was in a CS conference - where the refereeing is too quick and sketchy to pick up all the bugs...
Twitter is in turmoil and the scholarly community on the platform is once again starting to migrate. As with the early internet, scholarly organizations are at the forefront of developing and implementing a decentralized alternative to Twitter, Mastodon. Both historically and conceptually, this is not a new situation for the scholarly community. Historically, scholars were forced to leave social media platform FriendFeed after it was bought by Facebook in 2006. Conceptually, the problems associated with public scholarly discourse subjected to the whims of corporate owners are not unlike those of scholarly journals owned by monopolistic corporations: in both cases the perils associated with a public good in private hands are palpable. For both short form (Twitter/Mastodon) and longer form (journals) scholarly discourse, decentralized solutions exist, some of which are already enjoying some institutional support. Here we argue that scholarly organizations, in particular learned societies, are now facing a golden opportunity to rethink their hesitations towards such alternatives and support the migration of the scholarly community from Twitter to Mastodon by hosting Mastodon instances. Demonstrating that the scholarly community is capable of creating a truly public square for scholarly discourse, impervious to private takeover, might renew confidence and inspire the community to focus on analogous solutions for the remaining scholarly record – encompassing text, data and code – to safeguard all publicly owned scholarly knowledge.
@W_Lucht this article is PayWalled ($32 to license it).
Talking of "perils of a public good in private hands" . ironic or something.
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