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Comment by ethanbond | Hacker News Reader

Yes we agree that a few people at the top of the premier publishing orgs hold lots of power.

And once they climb that ladder, academics who reach prestigious journal positions very consistently choose not to rock the boat, even though they hold all the cards. I think that says a lot about academia at large.

Yeah, in the same way that the existence of Murdochs, Sacklers, and Kochs says “a lot” about every person working in the retail or service industries.

What you’re seeing is simply incentives and human beings’ universal responsiveness to them.

Indeed, it says precisely what I said in the original post.

It's hard to overstate how tired the entire argument is.

Doctorow feels like tweetstorms are an acceptable means of getting communication across (yikes), so maybe some things are just unbridgable.

HN sounds like cranks about this. In my podunk region 2 school I have access to all the journals I want, always have as a student. I rarely need that because it's easier to Google Scholar and then just grab the paper off of someone's site, which pretty mch everyone does these days.

Some of the commenters here could have written a phd in the last decade about this topic but I don't think it's the massive stopper of progress that people think it is.

Billions of dollars! Wish we didn't have to bust my ass to get a portion of that, but keep beating up on the academics.

Some fields have good preprint representation while others don't. Talk to academics outside your field and you'll quickly learn this.

Could you provide examples?

Large swaths of the humanities and social sciences, biology, chemistry...

There are exceptions of course. The preprinters tend to be the more CS/quantitative subfields of these disciplines.

I work in the social sciences where we have lots of overlap with other social sciences, stats, and data science, machine learning.

Those are the domains I know and in those domains anyone born after 1970 knows that if they want to distribute their work they put it on their site or a number of free archives.

As I said, you're probably in a more quant-oriented subfield like economics. Ask your colleagues in field biology, or physical chemistry, or anything less quant/CS/stats/data/tech-flavored.

> HN sounds like cranks about this. In my podunk region 2 school I have access to all the journals I want, always have as a student.

Perhaps you are in computer science. As long as we're trading anecdotes, I went to one of the top universities in my country. I regularly came across articles that were not accessible from large professional societies such as IEEE, ACS, and SPIE. Now I work in a hospital, and they don't have subscriptions to anything non-medical! I have to go through sci-hub for access to my own papers!

It sounds like to me to advance this debate, people could provide examples of journals that are regularly cited and their papers aren't easily accessible in some way.

[censored]

I could go on.

All of these journals' articles are sometimes available, especially for very highly cited articles, but not consistently.

Medical research is often found on some NIH website though. The NIH has their shit together. I think they make everyone publish open access in addition to whatever journal they submit to.

I went to Google Scholar and googled for articles from the top journal this year, picked a random article, the entire text is available.

https://en.x-mol.com/paper/article/1429645420640583680

I know that is a single article and I get your larger point. It's very much a field by field issue, in my field (I've been told it isn't a real science by HN, so no thanks sharing), I can't imagine me or the profs I know taking people seriously if they aren't making their stff available.

You deleted your examples, but the Astrophysical Journal will be 100% gold open access starting in January: https://journals.aas.org/oa/

The NSF also requires that all the work it funds be deposited in a public archive: https://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/public_access/about...

All of my Twitter threads also appear as blog posts:

Here's this one: https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/28/clintons-ghost/#cornucopi...

It's also available as a Mastodon thread: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/107179959514393968

And an ad-free, tracker-free, libre newsletter: https://mail.flarn.com/pipermail/plura-list/2021-October/000...

It's also mirrored to Medium: https://doctorow.medium.com/all-of-science-gets-a-general-in...

And Tumblr: https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/post/666303506776...

There's also fulltext RSS: https://pluralistic.net/feed/

The text itself is licensed CC BY, so if none of those formats suit your taste, you can reformat it and republish it, and even charge money for it.

ETA: Here's the methodology behind this: https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd

and here's the rubric for it: https://doctorow.medium.com/dead-letters-73924aa19f9d

(also available as a podcast:) https://ia601408.us.archive.org/16/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podca...

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