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Comment by patall | Hacker News Reader

I never understood why university libraries are not making the journals themselves instead of having them done by companies and paying for the subscription. Every university would have like 5 or 6 journals and pay everything for those and all the scientific articles would be free. I mean elife does it and it is great.

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The problem is not starting new journals, the problem is having researchers submit their work there. And the problem with that is that the name/reputation of existing journals are currently used as a proxy to judge the quality of applicants for e.g. tenure tracks. As long as that's not changed, researchers are incentivised to submit their work to the traditional, "reputable" journals.

(Disclaimer: I'm part of a project that aims to provide an alternative measure of quality.)

Some universities require their researchers to publish and follow reference journals, the majority of which has been managed/hijacked by for-profit editors. As researchers are forced to meet publishing quotas, there's a negative feedback loop that forces research groups to have no alternative other than following and publishing on these journals.

It wouldn't cost that much to just self publish the articles on the Internet. This is literally the whole reason for the Internet.

They do: http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Library_published_journals

eLife doesn't do that anymore: https://submit.elifesciences.org/html/elife_author_instructi...

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