Open Papers Please
(midwest.social)
tristynalxander
LabRatsYeah, capitalism has been "corporatizing" the fun out of science and I hate it very much. There is this tendency to force scientific work toward yielding some economic utility instead of it being a means for humans to explore nature.
There are efforts against it though. I remember SciHub came up with an open journal, I think it was called "Open Science", but I don't know what became of it.
Research MTX with prestige currency.
If you message the authors of research papers, 9 times out of 10, they'll be more than happy to share their papers with you for free.
They're just happy someone is taking an interest in their work, and they're not being paid to distribute it anyway.
A lot of authors also post archive versions of their papers just before they submit it for review too.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/business-scientific-publishing
Crazy we're still dealing with the same grifter class.
As for publishing, I don't know what the value of scientific societies are if they're not managing their own journals. Build up an Endowment use tech to keep prices low (there are already editorial pipelines - make them opensource), host the papers on a torrent network that university libraries participate in, and when you ask for free reviewers at least they'll know they're not being exploited. Publishing just isn't that expensive of a business.
Also, you want to know what keeps fraud down? Having reviewer names at the bottom of the paper. It's not like we don't actually know the reviewers anyway. Make people take mutual responsibility for the most egregious stuff and risk your reviewers taking it personally if you try to slip something by. Maybe we can add some rules like not having them all at the same university and/or having an outsider reviewer to prevent cultures from persisting.
Publishing just isn’t that expensive of a business.
Back in the day when it involved correspondence by mail and shipping out physical printed journals, maybe it was.
But, yes, in the era of the internet, scientific publishing does not need to be expensive.
... Come to think of it, what's to stop me from making my own free, open-source independent scientific journal right now? It would take time to build the reputation, of course ... but what would actually prevent such a thing?
I'm waiting until I'm more established in my career. While starting early is good, being known by your community and associated with particular societies or organizations is important for credibility and early buy-in, otherwise you're just slowly posting your own papers online and it looks a little silly. That said, if you're a professor (especially a tenured professor) it's just a matter of hunting down the right software as far as I'm aware.
otherwise you're just slowly posting your own papers online and it looks a little silly.
Looking silly is fine, though.
I can't point to exactly when I crossed the line from some nobody who self publishes everything for easy sharing, to respected professional with a deep useful online archive of work.
Maybe that line is still upcoming, actually...lol.
I'm not even a scientist, lol. And I've only got a bachelor's degree ... in English literature.
But I know how to build a website. ... I could start a website that accepts scientific article submissions and try to recruit experts to submit papers and peer review them... Definitely won't be very prestigious at first, but I think that over time and with careful control to avoid publishing bullshit, that prestige and respect could grow. And, of course, being both free to publish and free to read would be quite a draw, compared to the extortionate expense of other journals.
I think it'd be challenging to convince excellent scientists to publish with an unknown and challenging for someone without a scientific background to identify the more sophisticated forms of automated fraud we currently face.
I think it’d be challenging to convince excellent scientists to publish with an unknown
True. Do existing journals have exclusivity agreements preventing scientists from publishing the same article in more than one journal?
and challenging for someone without a scientific background to identify the more sophisticated forms of automated fraud we currently face
Hopefully, in theory, that's where the peer review comes in. But ... maybe volunteer peer reviewers can't really be trusted to put in the effort to see beyond superficial 'correct-looking' papers? I know some whoppers of obviously AI-generated slop have already made it past the reviewers of even established, prestigious journals.
The publishers, ofc.
If you leave out the "funding" stage, nothing makes sense...
And I hope they're just confused about paying for peer review, but that's something the publisher should pay
