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.

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[–] maegul@lemmy.ml 3 points 7 hours ago

I think it’s a great lesson in hiw good people can create and tolerate bad systems …

… how a bunch of clever and thoughtful people (academics) can walk into creating a dumb system which they simultaneously hate or disagree with, and don’t know how to effectively change or fix.

Worth studying IMO as a case study on these general problems. My understanding is that it was a manipulative capitalist that kicked it off by appealing to academics’ egos by creating increasingly specialised and likely redundant Journals (IE more subscriptions). And of course most academics know it’s dumb, but have no sense of collective action. And so humanity just stumbles along doing dumb shit.