SciHub is a beacon of light.
The scientific publishing industry is corrupt and needs to burn.
The scientific publishing industry is corrupt and needs to burn.
But you can't be a scientist without obtaining grant money. And publishing - particularly in top journals - is the major way to accomplish that.
Fine example: Newton needed an angel to get Principia Mathematica published. It was edited, paid-for and seen through press by Edmond Halley. (Halley was not rich. He was lucky that it sold.)
https://web.archive.org/web/20120512123330/http://www-groups...
Technically, of course, you can be a scientist without involving yourself with all that, if you're independently wealthy and/or doing it as a hobby in addition to your main job. Science used to be done that way (e.g. by bored educated aristocrats), but I think we have a strong consensus that the world would be worse than the current situation if there would be a de facto limitation to doing science only by those who can self-fund it.
Clearly there are pros and cons to the current system as you’ve pointed out.
The problem is the likes of Elsevier and their outrageous profit margins.
We just need a better system for QA in general.
But editors surely are needed for purposes like, well, editing, and all the administrative tasks? They are at least as useful as the secretaries at your companies (i.e. very).
- The purpose of these nonprofit groups is to select submissions for peer review and acceptance to their "journal".
- The "journal" can be simply a website with a list of links to the arXiv. Hosting and serving the articles is optional.
Versions of this plan have already been successfully executed by academics, perhaps most famously in the editorial revolts against Elsevier's topology journals [1]. The associated nonprofits continue to operate the new open access journals successfully [2,3]. These organizations don't just outsource to arXiv, but you could if you were a group of busy academics who wanted to keep it as simple and lightweight as possible.
[1] https://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=442
[2] https://msp.org/
What's stopping scientists from just not publishing in those for-profit journals? I mean, it's their paper.
Journals also often require that you assign copyright to them and restrict your ability to publish in more accessible places.
I mean, of course none of us like them, and everyone hates the pressure that you have to publish papers to keep your job or to be promoted. But all these are independent to how the industry makes money and especially very irrelevant to the fact that most of journals aren't open-access.
Almost all universities/institutions have subscriptions of majority of journals. And most "proper" journals don't charge you (the authors) a fee to publish. Yes, they usually don't pay you when they asked you to review, which sucks. But the whole thing isn't as bad from a practical perspective. Again it's still a annoyance from time to time, just not that bad.
Furthermore, unfortunately, a way to judge how good you're at research would be needed anyway. If the journal publishing industry died overnight, there would be other metric coming up and as toxic.
TL;DR: scientific publishing industry is a leech but they leech on the fact scientists/researchers needing a way to build their prestige. Not on them directly. That's why most don't have a too strong opinion or act on it.
I've not noticed this in biology. Most journals charge a couple thousand to publish. The only exception I can think of are the plos journals. And they also never ever pay you to review.
In engineering, at least as far as I encountered, only some shady journals would charge you.
If not, how do you reconcile this belief with the right of scientists and publishers to sell their productive labor?
2. In many cases, publicly funded research is gated behind paywalls;
3. In many (most?) cases, peer reviewer are paid nothing or close to it.
4. Most researchers I know either use sci-hub, other so called illegal sources for papers, or ask the authors for a copy.
If you do not, then you atr only concerned about publishers. They dont pay scientists. They dont pay for researchm You support parasites.
I don’t understand copyright existing beyond a few years after publication, and I don’t understand how a “right” to a work can be sold. It seems to be a system designed to facilitate wealth extraction rather than value creation.
The scientists have a right to sell their labour, not to own observed facts.
You can pay people to do science on an hourly basis just fine
A lot of the papers on SciHub are uploaded by the authors, because they aren't doing the research for the paltry royalties they receive.
As many others in the thread have said - the profits from the paper paywalls go to the publishers, reviewing is done by volunteers.
As an aside, it's funny how often defenders of intellectual slavery are so dug in to their beliefs while being completely unaware of the mechanisms of what they're defending. I suppose such ignorance is a necessary precondition to support such injustice.