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It's Time For Academics To Take Back Control Of Research Journals (theguardian.com)
Stephen Curry, a professor of structural biology at Imperial College London, has a piece on The Guardian today in which he outlines the history of the relationship between commercial interests, academic prestige and the circulation of research. An excerpt from the article: "Publish or perish" has long been the mantra of seeking to make a success of their research career. Reputations are built on the ability to communicate something new to the world. Increasingly, however, they are determined by numbers, not by words, as universities are caught in a tangle of management targets composed of academic journal impact factors, university rankings and scores in the government's research excellence framework. The chase for metricised success has been further exacerbated by the takeover of scholarly publishing by profit-seeking commercial companies, which pose as partners but no longer seem properly in tune with academia. Evidence of the growing divergence between academic and commercial interests is visible in the secrecy around negotiations on subscription and open access charges. It's also clear from the popularity among academics of the controversial site Sci-Hub, which has made over 60m research articles freely available on the internet. Over-worked researchers could be forgiven for thinking that the time-honoured mantra has morphed to "publish, and perish anyway."
I mean, really, why do they need them? Other than putting stuff onto actual paper, which these days seems somewhat pointless since most of this will actually be consumed digitally anyway. Are you telling me the academic world can't work out a way to coordinate peer review and put out papers without the help of massive commercial academic publishers?
And if they do, how the hell has Amazon not stepped into the field and undercut everyone? About the only thing I can see the publishers have going for them is momentum and legacy at this point.
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
I guess from the perspective of an academic:
1) They got into science presumably because they want to do science, not run a journal.
2) Running a journal is a lot of work for no extra pay
3) The university pays for their Elsevier subscription anyway, so they get access to all the other papers already (and non-PhDs don't do science anyway).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
To get funding (from government or industry) you need to be able to show how good you are. Current metrics are based on number of journal publication and rank of journals published in. Unfortunately for largely historical reasons the high rank journals tend to be the expensive walled gardens. No funding = no job = even less income than the pittance you currently survive off. That's a pretty strong incentive to play nice with the status quo.
Obviously this has to change (and I suspect it will), but it's non-trivial to change it. The people who set the rules (and often make funding choices) are the so-called "leaders in the field" who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and outsiders who seek guidance from same.
The issue here is less about greedy journals and more about the fact that universities are being run like businesses which results in the "publish or perish" expectation. The system has become completely mismanaged into being a capitalist nightmare where you do what they want or you lose what you love. I believe this could be remedied if it became exceptionally difficult to revoke tenure, requiring that colleagues agree to it. The greedy journals problem can easily be done away with by freely releasing the research and only allowing non-profit journals to publish their work.
TL;DR: The problem is the culture of university administrations, not with the researchers themselves.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Sci-Hub is not the solution. The issue is twofold: First, scientists (still) believe they must publish; they don't -- do achieve something in your field of research, and the world will know.
It is the new researchers who need to publish. Yes, once you've established a reputation in your field, people will know who you are. But that very often takes decades. Until then, you need publications to show you have a track record of good work.
(And even then, the reputation is usually phrased in terms of what you published: "e.g., "X published one of the seminal papers on bismith selenide semiconductors." And it will be two decades between when you published your paper and when the rest of the world starts putting bismuth selenide in their high-end devices.)
There seem to be several "open source" journals, but I'm wondering how seriously they are taken, especially to the University Gods that dish out tenure?
Some are, some aren't.
The problem is, the entry barrier to putting up a website and giving it a prestigious journal title is pretty much zero. So there are literally thousands of "open source journals" that have no redeeming merit whatsoever, and the ones which are actually real tend to get buried in the clutter.
But speaking as an actual laboratory scientist: I read. My colleagues read. Conferences presentations are either "work in progress" or "broad summary of everything in our lab for the last 5 years", depending on the venue. There is no way that a half hour talk or a single poster can actually provide the detail necessary to understand and evaluate cutting edge research.
do achieve something in your field of research, and the world will know.
How? Are they psychic? You may not have noticed but most academics (at least in the fields I'm familiar with) would rather pull out their own fingernails than hold a press conference (or network for that matter), and the ones that do enjoy big-noting themselves are not necessarily the ones with anything worth saying.
Second, publications must be controlled by researchers and only stuff that really matters should be published.
We do this already. It's called peer review and impact factor. It's relatively easy to get crap published in a low impact-factor journal that no-one will read or care about. It's really freakin' hard to get anything but work that really matters in a high impact factor journal. Want to read the "stuff that really matters" then go high impact. Want to read work in progress that might turn into something that really matters (or help you come up with something that really matters)? Read medium impact factor and conference proceedings. Want to read any random shit? Congrats, you have way too much spare time on your hands.