Director, Center for Data Science and Consulting, Loyola University Chicago
this is such a slap in the face. what an absolute joke Elsevier is. Academics write the papers, review the papers, edit the papers, and then publishers sell our work back to the schools where we work. academics should all be working together to put for profit publishers out of business. they offer us nothing, pay is nothing, and exploit our labor for profit. I'm sorry, I said that wrong. they don't pay us any money. but they do give us tote bags. fuck for profit publishers. we. don't. need. them. I hope they all go out of business. #jsm2025
Gregory Matthews, Ph.Dizzle. scientific publishing is probably one of the most exploitative markets in the world. It's long past its sell by date. I have imagined an alternative model. I would love your views. You can read about my model in my article. https://sriramravichandran.com/reimagining-scientific-publishing/
The whole system is designed to siphon money from the taxpayers towards publishers, with academics in the middle who work for free or at best paid by the taxpayers.
whoops, I thought those were free. Anyway, I'm really attached to mine now.
I need one of these to hold the wads of money I have made from peer reviewing over my career. Oh wait…
Stop calling them "publishers". They're, according to their own web page: "a global information analytics company"
Workers of the world, unite!
Actually, any action needs to address three issues - very improbable: 1)a new metric of truth evaluation, for which formal publications in journals serve as a proxy (even Perelman's correct preprint was published (by other people) in a journal as a requirement for its formal acceptance); 2)more importantly, a new metric of prestige is needed, which now is linked to, well, publication in a prestigious journal! Indeed, in limited time for decisions, how exactly should the academic system evaluate the 'excellence' and then reward it? Not everybody is Perelman. 3) any solution will have to compete - and outcompete - the existing scheme. The current publication process is indeed exploitative, but it is stable as the demand for the place in 'prestigious' journals - "we are the first ones to show" - vastly outnumbers the supply. Perhaps AI could help to a degree, but I wonder whether distributed schemes such as Polymarket could bring in the money (people betting on the outcome/claims of the study) ? But those too depend on decisions 'yes' or 'no', which in science is never 100%, and hence back at the points above.
To me, it seems that the problem lies in the dynamic of the business. It could have had better results if it was not so money bounded. Although running an experiment costs a fortune nowadays, the whole point of doing an experiment is solving a problem not gaining a profit. So from one point we have a seller who sells the article for some money which in the end will be divided between parties involved in it and scientists who think the value of their work is not appreciated well.( if you are comparing it based on the real amount of money that a scientist must earn). I am not totally sure, but it seems some of the money goes to the guys who peer review the articles as well. So in general, with this model, the overall price per article must rise. A system also must be in place to check the real value of the paper based on the methods used in it(i.e. flow cytometry, etc in one experiment vs only data analysis or meta analysis in another) I wonder, what will happen if you allow AI to categorise the articles? Some although might argue that just because my research was a simple data analysis, it does not mean it’s not worthy. They are also right, so in this case, it might be better to divide the articles based on the hours of effort.
Research Faculty at the Medical University of South Carolina; Artist and Small Business Owner
1wI want a free bag tho NGL ....