this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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We need to ban the publishing business from academic stuff. Have the Universities host a site that's free access. They can also better run the peer review system and the journals would also also no longer control what research sees the light of day even behind a paywall.
How would you publish if you're not a part of a major research institution? Los Alamos National Lab could host its own papers just fine, but what about small-time labs? I know of at least one person who doesn't even officially work in science but publishes original research they do in their free time.
The journal system still provides a service, even if they over-charge for access. The peer review system has value. Imagine if there was zero barrier to publish. As a reader, you'd have to wade through piles of trash to find decent science.
Where would you find it all? Currently we use journal aggregators, whose service also has value and costs money. Are you really going to go to every university's website looking for research relevant to your area? We could do that again, but with everyone responsibile for publishing their own work, well, who gets indexed with the aggregators?
You get published with a university instead of a for profit publishing system. And universities would get a good or bad reputation for their peer review, just like journals. The aggregator could easily be run by a coalition of universities with government grants to make the maintenance and upkeep free to the users and universities.
We do not have to lock research behind paywalls.
The problem isn’t just publishing though, it’s academia as well. Scientists are incentivized to publish in “prestigious” closed access journals such as Nature. They are led to believe it’s better for their career than publishing in open access journals such as PLOS One. As such, groundbreaking papers often get paywalled. Universities then feel obligated to pay outrageous subscription fees to access them.
Yup. And this would change that, giving universities more influence.
Like https://doaj.org/