The exploitative character of academic publishing in a single cartoon.
#publishing #universities #research #academics
h/t Alexandra Kupferberg/LinkedIn
original illustration: Thailand by Tawan Chuntra.
https://www.irancartoon.com/site/artists/tawan-chuntra#&gid=1&pid=30 #TawanChuntra #Thailand
that too....
That's why Hal was created! ;) It doesn't have to be like that anymore, go to Hal:
I'm sorry Dave, I cannot allow you to do that....
@ChrisMayLA6 this is not the full picture. Academics are paid to write and review said papers since you are supposed to do it as part of your job. The problem is we overcommit and end up bringing that work outside of working hours and therefore feel that we should be getting extra for doing that. Publishers are bloodsuckers and your university should host and publish freely said papers as mandated by increasingly more funding bodies. Google Scholar will index those. You can also host your own prior to release version legally. Avoid shady publisher avenues and stick to reputable ones.
I've been there. Publishers should disappear and publications federated across multiple institutions.
@ChrisMayLA6 Source of the original illustration: Thailand by Tawan Chuntra.
https://www.irancartoon.com/site/artists/tawan-chuntra#&gid=1&pid=30 #TawanChuntra #Thailand
No the key is cost-cutting; reviewing is out-sourced to the 'community' of academics - peer review is a key aspect of academic research & the publishers have utilised that norm to cut costs
some do... but they also get offered nice deal by publishers seeking to eliminate effective competition
@AzureArmageddon @ChrisMayLA6 because only publishing in top-ranked journals or IEEE publications is what counts.
Open access alternatives? Oh no, those papers might be miserable, they don’t count when you request additional funding.
The whole thing is so bad that editors sometimes even ignore their reviewers because of dunno what club the author and editor belong together.
in a nutshell... yes!
That's an excellent Q.; there's much blame to go round but if I was to pick one group (other than the publishers themselves, of course) I would say university managers who made publication the key metric for career advance thereby incentivising academics to subsidise the system to try and get promotion
Is that a question which is relevant for the solution, beside to learn how yo avoid this in future?
An amazing system indeed… it also works like that for international standardization.
@ChrisMayLA6
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.
@ChrisMayLA6 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.
@ChrisMayLA6 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.
So, I think the Q. is where does that added value come from; academics provide the content, review the content, often acts in editorial roles.... the publisher sets the content & publishes its (nowadays mostly virtually).... the academic publishing industry rivals big pharma in profitability, and as I've mentioned before, university managers still see publication in these places (journals) as indicative of quality, dismissing web-publication as 'self-publication'.... 1/2
So the Q. is does the support for promotions in universities justify the level of profitability gained by the publishers.
Open source alternatives are available (as you suggest) but at them moment they remain largely under-valued by funders (who use publications as one metric of quality of applicants) and managers in universities.
the widespread criticism is this relation between value-added to the university sector, the costs to the universities & the profitability
2/2
Not if they want promotion or are applying for jobs.... there is only a very small group whose self-publication would be regarded as acceptable, and mostly they're likely retired or so established that it would be fine (but this is not as extensive a group as your remarks might imply)
There are still lots of good journals with a no-fee green open access route, though, and it looks like REF2029 will continue to accept green open access as open enough.
I don't think much of a portion of that revenue finds its way to publishers' employees.
I should say I think academic book publishing is not the nest of horrors that the journal publishers are (even if some do both).... I was published for some years Edward Elgar & I had a lot of time for them, good people
@ChrisMayLA6
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.
@ChrisMayLA6 light be interesting für @TIBopenpub
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?
A commons technology for reviewing accrediting and publishing academic papers.
Kind of like when
> The first website at CERN – and in the world – was dedicated to the World Wide Web project itself
> On 30 April 1993, CERN put the World Wide Web software in the public domain. Later, CERN made a release available with an open licence, a more sure way to maximise its dissemination.
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
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