Scientific Publishing Is a Scam Fed by the Government, and I have no choice but to play along. Publish, or perish
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Hmmm. he makes some good points, and also some bogus ones.
i know all about this costly dilemma, having served on our university Library Committee for 10 years or so, and at previous universities too. but it’s not quite ‘the govt is promoting the publishing scam’ he puts it as. there’s a lot more going on there.
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That’s a terribly written article to be honest. There is no embargo against uk funded scientists publishing at Nature or their research journals. UKRI decided in their OA policy they would not allow researchers to use their grants to pay APCs, but since you don’t have to pay an APC to publish at Nature or the Nature research journals if you don’t want to, it’s all irrelevant.
It’s full of other incorrect information too. For example, RELX do not decide impact factors, Clarivate calculate them.
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I mostly skimmed it at the end of lunch before i ran to a class. The basic premise is difficult to disagree with
There’s also a growing movement to use preregistration and open science
I don’t know about other sciences, but social psychology in Particular has been moving to using the OSF open science framework after a lot scrutiny in the science profession over issues with publishing, p-hacking, data manipulation, ECT…
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Open science, registered reports, transformative journals and agreements and more are being applied across the boards as scholarly publishing is moving forward, and they are being implemented by the big publishers.
There’s some way to go, but the article seems to be bit all over the place. It also fails to mention that in reality publishing costs account for less than 1% of research funding spend. Obviously a fair chunk of change, but some perspective is needed.
Still, the big four are rapacious bastards, and deserve to have their legs cut off. Financially, of course. Never one to advocate violence here…
and to a point, yes, it is government money (by and large) that is used to pay these excessive print charges. but it’s not that the governments are actively supporting a scam. rather, they are being held unwittingly hostage, until they stop and say: no funding money can be used to pay for publication costs. Open Access publishing has changed the shape of the playing field quite a bit, but there are still plenty of scientists who prefer to pay these costs and get into the higher impact journals, thus perpetuating the system by keeping those top journals on the top. a self perpetuating cycle. who’s going to take the hit for the team and refuse to play along, at a risk to both their own career advancement prospects and further grant recognition?
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100%. Well, 99%. The government isnt “unwittingly”. They certainly are extremely “wittingly”! Academia is fairly handicapped, probably mostly by ego. Not sure anyone has a full fix a of yet, including this author. But it certainly needs to change. How to do that without even more idiot scientists claiming they are practicing science is going to prove pretty hard. Especially now a days.