A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
Chiming in with barely any knowledge on the topic.
Universities are massive institutions, with serious cash behind them. What the hell is stopping, say, all the public Australian universities just setting up their own journal, running it at cost for all the universities in Australia?
Make it make sense.
C.R.E.A.M.
Isn't it a bit ridiculous for researchers to have to pay a publisher to publish the content that they themselves make money from?
They're double dipping, and also triple dipping with the peer reviews done on a volunteer basis.
A racket, I say.
Quadruple dipping because they publish both open access journals that authors pay extra for, plus the standard subscription journals where universities need to pay for access too. Subscription obviously never got cheaper, no matter if the amount of open access journals increased (didn't check that though, but fits well into the scheme)
The House of Elsevier has been gaming the scientific community since it was still called "natural philosophy".
I'm still not sure, what exactly the journals are actually doing.
Like, in all seriousness, what service do they provide? Just hosting the platform for anonymized reviews and basically a blog for the actual articles? That should cost maybe a few millions each year, yet this sector makes billions in revenue.
I’d say (a couple years ago) the service is also supposed to be access via DOI in perpetuity and presence in all the relevant databases, so that’s gotta cost some money for the reassurance as opposed to a pdf file “hosted” on Google Drive. But after Heterocycles fiasco I am not sure about that anymore.
Well, and some mark that this is likely a valid piece of research if it’s at www.reputablejournal.com as opposed to this likely being half-baked something at www.somerxiv.com or this likely being absolute lunacy at www.anyothersite.com.
Still, yes, billions in revenue vs millions spent essentially on essentially simple tasks like hosting and cataloguing (plus matching authors to reviewers I guess, though with how often I am asked to find them myself it’s doubtful) does not compute indeed.
Name recognition. That's pretty much it.
Gatekeeping As A Service.
Eeeghh. Such parasites.
They offer reputation. Career advancement is highly dependent on publication history and impact. Getting into a prestigious publication means your work will more likely be read and cited. Because highly reputable journals can charge high publication fees (because it's in such high demand), they get to set the industry norm, which other less reputable journals/publishers get to follow. It does cost money to develop and maintain that reputation for rigour and impact (i.e. good science). But yeah it's exploitative AF. There are attempts for less profit-motivated publications... But making those rigorous while still being democratic is hard
Obviously scientists don't want to work any more and eat avocado toast too much.
Have they tried getting a college degree to increase their job prospects?
They should go to a trade school instead to learn actual skills instead if a silly science degree
Oops, all my research keeps getting leaked online.
If you're looking at publishing it for free, I'd think it should be fine to put a PDF download in an ordinary blog post with the title and abstract?
Or are there people who won't allow that?
You will transfer the economic copyright to most journals upon publication of the typeset manuscript meaning that you're not allowed to publish that particular PDF anywhere. However, a lot of journals are okay with you publishing the pre-peer reviewed article or even sometimes the peer-reviewed, but NOT typeset article (sometimes called post-print article). Scientific publishing is weird :-)
The last couple journals I published in let you put the post-print PDF on your web page after an "embargo period". I've never personally seen a journal forbid you from submitting articles whose preprints had been posted in sites like arxiv.org.
But I think scientific publishing isn't "weird", more like "predatory", "exploitative", or at least "antiquated."
or even sometimes the peer-reviewed, but NOT typeset article
What does that mean? The LaTeX source?
The typeset article is what you'd see if you download the .pdf from, e.g., Nature. 
.
It's the manuscript with all the stuff that distinguishes an article from one journal to another (where is the abstract, what font type, is there a divider between some sections, etc.). Articles that have not been typeset yet can be seen from Arxiv, for example this one: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.04391
So basically the article you are allowed to release can have its typesetting - it just can't have the journal's preamble/theme?
If I understand you correctly: Yes, the article can have a typesetting like whatever you get out-of-the-box from Latex and that article can then be published anywhere. What is typically not allowed is to openly publish the article that have been typeset by the journal where you've sent in your article. This is probably what you mean by "preamble/theme"
Yup that's what I mean.
Seems like a reasonable limitation then (not that the entire business model of scientific journals is reasonable in the 21st century is reasonable - just this specific limitation). The journal's theme is proprietary, but the paper's authors still have the LaTeX source so they can just slap a free preamble on it and publish it with that.
Just leak it before publishing it. Also most authors will give you the pdf for free if you just email them and ask for it nicely.
Why publish through a journal at all? What do they do that WordPress doesn't? Are they the source of your credibility? Do they pay the peer reviewers. Or are you all just whipped?
There are several benefits, but compared to WordPress, I guess the biggest one is outreach: no one will actually see an article if it's published by a young researcher that hasn't made a name for themselves yet. It will also not be catalogued and will therefore be more difficult to find when searching for articles.
Also, calling researchers "whipped" is a bit dismissive to the huge inertia there is in the realm of scientific publication. The scientific journal of Nature was founded in 1869, but general open-access publishing has only really taken off in the last decade or so.
So they are the source of your credibility. And you continue to agree to have it that way.
No, that's not what I said. You're right that journals, to some extent, also lends credibility to the publication, but it's not the source of credibility. What I said was that an article published in Nature will have many more views than an article published on a random WordPress blog.
Again, saying that researchers "agree to have it that way" ignores the structural difficulty of changing the system by the individual. The ones who benefit the most from changing the system are also the ones most dependent on external funding - that is, young researchers. Publishing in low-impact journals (ones that has a small outreach such as most open-access journals) makes it much harder to apply for funding
It's not what you wanted to say, but it is what the words you wrote effectively meant.
Nature doesn't lend you credibility. You and your colleagues read Nature because it's how you filter out the trash.
Researchers agree to have it that way. I will not yield on that argument. You do, you agree to it by majority to this day.
By this logic, you and everyone else agree to climate change. Everyone in Venezuela agrees to Maduro.
It has nothing to do with majority, it's a collective action and balance of power.
That's okay. If you view the journals as glorified blogs, I agree that they're unnecessary. They aren't and do more than that even though they're also doing a lot of bad stuff with sky high profit margins. If you're not open for changing your views, I don't see the point of discussing any more. Appreciate the back and forth, tho!
Publications in peer-reviewed journals are how a career in science is built. It's impossible to measure the productivity of a scientist. What is done, is that one looks at their publications. How many publications do they have? How often are they cited? What is the quality of the journal?
This creates very bad incentives, leading to things like publication bias. It also means that you must publish in prestigious journals. You don't have a choice but to accept their terms. Libraries don't have a choice but to stock these journals. It's a straight-forward monopoly racket. These publishers make fantastical profits.
All that money can be used for PR campaigns and lobbying to keep the good times rolling.
“Have a cup of coffee every morning? Maybe switch to every other day to offset the costs!”
You are a monster
just publish an LLM-written article in a trash journal so you can get more funding 👉🧠
if you have any credibility on the line you can even sell co-authorship slots for a little pocket cash!
Find a new job.
Honestly it's crap like this, and the constant need to write grants, worry about funding, and crank out papers like there's no tomorrow is why I ended up just going into industry instead.
Don't get me wrong, I love science and scientific advancement, but the current system of publishing is super broken. What if you're a civilian researcher who doesn't have access to the big name journals? Well then be prepared to pony up $50/article.
What did science and medicine ever do for me?
If you paywall publication and peer-review, you suppress a huge amount of science that doesn't have the kinds of checks that corporate sponsorship and review introduce. This means studies of things like the dangers of CFCs, smoking, microplastics, thalidomide, and countless other things that'll kill you will never see the light of day.