Banning citations goes wayyyy to far. The journals are bad, but the science published in them is not. To ban citations would require either plagarizing or leaving swathes of subjects untouched.
It's the same idea as how public companies' earliest issuance of any potentially-stock-affecting news, has to be through equal-access public channels that investors can subscribe to for equal-timeliness reaction to news (rather than, y'know, Elon Musk's Twitter feed, where Twitter gets to control who sees what when.)
People should be able to follow a citation from one paper to another, without having to pay to do that. Not being able to doesn't just discourage reading papers, it discourages ad-hoc peer review—the precise point of having journals in the first place. (Specifically, it discourages the part of ad-hoc peer-review where you check a paper's citations to see if the claims you find hard to believe, but which are cited, are actually backed up by something you can believe in the cited paper.) When the citation is to a closed-access journal, you have to happen to coincidentally have a subscription to that journal in order to be able to find out what the citation really says. If the citation's source journal is both for-profit and obscure, then you probably don't have that subscription—so the given citation could have been entirely made-up, and you'll never know.
† Journals being aggregators of content also implies that a paper should be able to be published in as many journals as want to carry it, because none of them "own" the resulting content anyway. In that sense, scientific papers would be a lot like news-wire releases: something that any distributor can pay for the right to print a copy of.
> People should be able to follow a citation from one paper to another, without having to pay to do that.
I really like that, but what about citing books? It seems like sources that are paid for should still be used. We shouldn't hamstring science / scientists. Similarly, we shouldn't just pass of ideas from payed sources as our own ideas. Instead I would propose the slightly weaker rule:
'Where available, cite the free version'
This obviously needs to be complemented with strong reasons for people to create free versions.
I see another issue though. Sometimes, there are significant differences between the ArxiV version and the journal version. I've seen stuff where the journal had better figures, etc. In that case, a reader would be better of reading the journal article than the ArxiV version.
> This obviously needs to be complemented with strong reasons for people to create free versions.
And that's the problem, your weaker version removes all incentive for authors to actually change their behaviour. If that wasn't needed then we wouldn't be discussing this now.
Public libraries! Good enough to cite, good enough to ask your library system to carry.
The exception is textbooks, but these are 1. frequently also considered secondary sources, and 2. have their own weird economics that are just as bad as that of paid journals, and so need a separate fix.
> Sometimes, there are significant differences between the ArxiV version and the journal version. I've seen stuff where the journal had better figures, etc. In that case, a reader would be better of reading the journal article than the ArxiV version.
Yes, in fact, there are always at least minor differences; this is because, right now, the IP of a journal paper belongs to the publishing journal, so you can't publish exactly the same version of the paper anywhere else. (Just like a freelance writer who sells a short story to a magazine can't also publish that short story on their own website.) Paper authors get around this by publishing pre-prints—literally, the final-minus-one draft of the paper, rather than the final draft. Sometimes the changes between versions N-1 and N are trivial, but sometimes they're substantive and change the citability of the work.
In a world where journals didn't own, but rather licensed, the IP of the papers they "carry", this wouldn't be a problem, and paper authors would be publishing final prints of their papers in arXiv, because they'd have no reason not to. (Specifically, they'd likely publish the pre-print, and then—if there are substantive changes—they'd publish an updated version as well, and modify the metadata for the preprint so the paper's web-indexed DOI-metadata page would mention, and link to, the updated version, as well as the previous version.)
It's worth pointing out that running a preprint server isn't exactly cheap, either: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/04/biorxiv-preprint-ser...
Banning citations means either changing the above practice, or banning certain sources from being used by academics. That is sacrificing science for the sake of ideology. We ought to consider sources for their inherent quality, not whether we like their publisher.
That sounds fine to me. The only people harmed would be the for profit journals.
In the academic world, people building on your work is essentially how you get evaluated. If people build of your work without saying so, they are doing two bad things.
- They get recognition for things they did not come up with - The person who did come up with the thing does not get that recognition
Consider the argument between Newton and Leibniz about who invented calculus first. That wasn't about copyright, it was purely about credit and plagiarism.
If commercial journals are categorically no longer cited then people whose performance reviews rely on citations will switch to other outlets.
Indeed they would be hurt. If your research is only in the paid for journals, then you would get screwed.
I just don't think this is a bad thing. The only people harmed would be the journal and the scientist who chose to lock up his research behind a paywall.
It sounds like a win to me to screw over people who lock up their research.