Comment on They got us by the balls
queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone 1 day ago
Why do academic journals still exist? I’m not trying to be “journals bad” glib here, even though they are awful and have been as long as I can remember. What technical or academic hurdles are preventing researchers from publishing their work to free outlets like, say, a university’s public website? I genuinely don’t understand why they haven’t collapsed with the rise of the internet. Is it really all street cred?
Because in a lot of hiring processes the worth of the researchers is based on this streer cred. It’s a messed up system.
Even more messed up is that journals that do try to be more open about their procedures and that don’t try to make a profit are marginalized or in some cases even not indexed. For example, eLife no longer has an impact factor calculated because it’s experimenting with a publishing model that disincentivises profit and some other undesirable things in academic publishing.
In academia, promotion, tenure, funding, and pretty much everything someone needs to keep their job is tied to publishing in peer-reviewed journals. If I self publish I won’t keep my job. If a university ran a website for publishing, they would have to reimplement the peer review process, and often there may be ~a dozen people worldwide qualified to review a particular paper so it’s not just that others from within the university could review work. If a university is implementing all that, they have basically become a publisher and likely have costs they’ll want to try and recoup and could foreseeably implement a fee to publish.
Don’t get me wrong - the journals have a predatory and exclusive model that should be dismantled. But until we fix promotion, tenure, and funding pathways in academia that have enabled the publishers to become what they are there will always be these problems – any other system that pops up will not get widely used because academics will be disincentivized from using it (as discussed in some other comments here).
In math most people publish their papers on arxiv regardless of whether they get published in a journal. Arxiv has its own moderation structure, but theoretically published peer reviewed articles should be more trustworthy because they’re reviewed by your peers. In reality reviewers don’t have time to read papers super closely so some shoddy research gets through even when no blatant corruption is involved. In pure math this isn’t a huge issue because the work usually speaks for itself, but for some areas, especially applied statistics, it’s not so obvious whether an argument is actually well supported or statistically cherrypicked.
Would be cool to see a decentralized journal or something. No idea how it would work actually work, but since research is supposed to be peer reviewed, why not just let the whole structure of it become open and decentralized?
Before cryptocurrencies really went to shit and became so toxic/scammy, I used to believe crypto could help decentralize it by democraticing the process and making it fully transparent, while also rewarding authors and peer reviewers for their work. But alas
I am somewhat familar with ERIC’s CLARIN (or ERIC CLARIN? or just CLARIN? I’m not sure how the two names are supposed to be used together). from the linked site:
CLARIN stands for Common Language Resources and Technology Infrastructure and ERIC stands for European Research Infrastructure Consortium.
I don’t fully understand how to operate it because it’s complicated but it does seem like a distributed scientific repository. It seems to focus on language but it’s not clear to me why it can’t, or doesn’t (or maybe it does IDK) function as a general datashare. I’m not sure if it’s a model for a full replacement of for-profit publishing houses but it seems like a promising direction for research to go.
I like the idea, but how to handle authentication in a decentralized system?
There are services like ORCID exist for uniquely attributing papers to an author. I think a federated review / publishing service could just provide a number of integrations for credential linking.
I was thinking about how such a tool might work over activity pub and I think it could work.
i’ve been thinking the same too, a decentralized place to upload / review papers with proper authorization with ORCID and the like would be nice
Obligatory sci-hub plug. When I went to uni, our teachers literally told us, that the school doesn’t have the money to pay for access to everything, so here’s a site you can use
Sci-hub needs support though, it does not have all of the most recent papers, which are often the ones we’re looking for :(
I too would like to know this
AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.net 12 hours ago
Because the journals existed as massive, financially powerful entities. There were negotiations over open access arrangements a few years back which led to things like “gold open access”, which involves papers being free to read, but costing a heckton for the researcher’s in “Article Processing Charges”. This happened because the journals effectively argued that “even though we’re functionally useless in the modern day, and don’t even provide services like copyediting or typesetting support for researchers, you can’t just make research actually be fully open, because then we would no longer be able to be absurdly profitable. Won’t someone think of the profits?!”. And then their influence meant the open access agreements were half baked and insufficient.
However, there is a continuing movement that is pushing for actual open access — “Diamond Open Access” doesn’t charge either the researchers or the readers of papers. It’s still small, relatively, but it’s growing, especially in the global South or amongst independent researchers who can’t afford absurd Article Processing Charges. Profit driven journals have prestige on their side, but I reckon that Diamond Open Access will continue to grow as research funding becomes more scarce relative to the amount of research being done.
(Source: the linked Wikipedia page)