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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."
Scientific Publishing is, largely, about brownie points, rather than communication.
We get forced to use publishers because that's how we are judged; it's not a question of whether the publishers are doing anything actually useful.
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.)
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.