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To mention the obvious, it’s the same network effect that keeps people on X and Reddit.
Where there’s a platform, there’s enshitification.
To stay obvious, what’s fascinating is that those networks are small, its members the most intelligent people available and they meet each other regularly in person at conferences.
Why do they accept the lock-in?
Not every community does it this way. For example, computational linguistics put most of their conference proceedings online for free: https://aclanthology.org/. Deep learning researchers just publish a lot of stuff to arxiv.
Academic publishers like Elsevier are predatory scammers.
They may be intelligent in their fields but that doesn’t mean they think thing through in every aspect of their lives. The status quo is the easiest thing to deal with they can devote more time to their careers/research
Unless their field is in social engineering, then yeah why are they going along with it?
Because they need funding. Research projects take a lot of capital. And you’d need a lot of money to set up an independent journal, facilities, labs, staff, etc.
Like the other response to this said, it’s a little more complicated than “the status quo is easier” or “intelligent doesn’t mean smart.” This is a deeply ingrained system that’s existed for a long time, and if you don’t operate within it, you don’t get to work in academia. You won’t get to conduct your research to begin with, much less will you get to the point of publishing it without cooperating with these institutions. There are also powerful regulatory bodies like the APA and AMA who control just about everything in their field. You pretty much have to work for a university, and US universities are of course greedy and corrupt in their own right.
It would be like unseating the DNC, ending the electoral college, and expanding the two party system in America, but on a smaller scale. Plenty of Americans know that these things need to happen, but it’s not something where you can just wake up one day and make the decision to overthrow the system as long as you just try real hard.
It’s human nature to defend a walled garden that you are already inside of. Change is scary and might not end up better for you.
Sunk cost fallacy.
In my discipline we only pay if we want the article to be open access. Are there journals that charge $1000 and still put articles behind a paywall?
As far as I know, the big ones charge very high processing fees
“Processing fees”
Ensuring the Docx file shows up right in PDF format.
Well except a lot of the time it’s LaTeX, and the journal already makes the authors check their tex files work with the journal’s article class.
Depends entirely on the field. None of the (psych/behavior) journals I’m familiar with ask for things besides DOCX.
I also don’t know how they come up with that BS
I think in computer science it’s normal to have to attend a conference to present your paper if it’s accepted. And they charge a higher fee to presenters than to regular attendees.
So the people providing the content that everyone shows up for get charged more, man that’s a weird business model. Like running a cable network that charges channels to be on it.
I think it all comes around to how the funds are distributed.
Researcher gets grants from the federal government to enable their work. They do the work, write the paper, get it accepted to a conference. They’re required to attend and present to get it published. So they have an excuse to buy flights, hotels, expense food all on government dime. And the conference is put on, in part, by other researchers, who aren’t going to use their own funds to put on the event. So they charge people to attend, and those who want to get published have the largest incentive to attend, so they can be charged the most.
I only did 2 years of graduate research and attended a handful of conferences (unpublished unfortunately)… I could have this wrong, but I’m pretty sure this is the way, at least in the computer science field.
It’s $3000 for Association of Horticultural Scientists
Yes
High impact factor journal are among those that ask fees depending on number of pages and figures. Or at least they used to when I used to do academic research
Like all of the humanities
Yup, I’ve got a paper that’s just about ready for submission, and if the journal accepts it for publication, we pay ~3k USD, so about $4k CAD.
i wonder if that keeps researchers from developing economies from becoming impactful, because $3k is like 15 months of a minimum wage in brazilian reais, and more than entire month’s wages for 99.9% of our professors
edit: for the humanities this seems especially bad, it kind of makes it sure that western social thought remains dominant since only you guys can actually pay for it
Oh absolutely. It’s a huge issue, especially in humanities and social sciences, where the barrier of entry makes it so that almost all published research is conducted by certain populations on themselves. Some people call it “WEIRD” populations, meaning western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (though that “weird” terminology is a bit stinky… I’m looking at the “E” and “D”). Interestingly, China has now overtaken the US in publishing the most highly cited research of any country, though I think their advances are mostly in natural sciences and engineering.
There are also issues with how we qualify good quality or *academic * research. Again, this is especially the case in social sciences and humanities where the standards have been set by colonial researchers who had the means to run expensive studies on large samples. As a result, a lot of research methodologies and ways of knowing that don’t align with the western colonial standards (e.g., qualitative research, narrative analysis) get discounted or written off entirely
Can confirm, I cannot even imagine paying for papers. Like why do you endure such an issue?
…Predatory journals?
Don’t forget that sometimes you also do work for that journal, telling them if a paper is good enough or not for them, and also basically don’t get payed.
don’t think you wanna get payed, unless you are a ship, but getting paid would be nice for them
Publish or perish.
Academic publishing is in a very weird place and is very, very political. Its true that authors have to pay to have their papers published in most journals or conferences after they’ve been accepted, but like all things academic, this is highly dependent on the field. Some universities will reimburse professors publishing costs, others need to pay out of pocket or with grant/public funding.
While its true that there are open-access journals and conferences without such costs, I would wager that most well known researchers would avoid such avenues of publication due to prestige. The larger journals and conferences have review boards where the top scientists in the world sit on them. As a potential published author with such an outlet, its a great honor to even be considered. Most researchers don’t want to take the risk of going with a less prestigious outlet if it will run the risk of smearing their image or damaging their ability to publish in better outlets in the future.
Source: Was a Doctoral candidate that ran the whole ringer besides the dissertation.
While its true that there are open-access journals and conferences without such costs
To publish open access normally costs upwards of $3k USD as well. There’s practically no point in the publishing chain where academics aren’t getting screwed.
Let’s also not forget that you have to review other people’s papers for the journal for free.
Y’all are getting fucked
Cake or death?
Death… No! I mean cake! Ahhhhhh!
And all those reasons are why I don’t want to go into academia. It really feels like a the competition/politics/pissing contest of who you know is more valued than people coming together to push the boundaries of what we know and how we understand things. What are the upsides?
Besides myself, I have two other friends that also stopped at a Masters or dropped down to a Masters for similar reasons.
I’ll try to keep it in mind that masters is more than enough (if I ever want to go back in the first place)
So here is the funny thing, with most research you’re expected to get the funding, which includes wages, before you even begin the research.
Meaning you’re not paying to let other people make money off your research, you’re just paying for services needed for fulfilling your end of the bargain which you had previously agreed upon from the very beginning.
The cool part of all of this is that in many places when you get public funding the research can be made available to others for free after it’s peer reviewed.
Honestly, if you could trust individuals in every industry with this much credit, then it is how the entire world would work. But you can’t trust everyone that much.
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I’m surprised that some of the large research universities don’t just band together and create their own journal.
It’s called ArXiv.
not peer reviewed, so doesn’t really count.
That’s why scihub is so popular
And Arxiv.
"I just proved unified field theory. Upvotes to the left!
(Please, I need to keep my job)"
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This guy, Dr. Glaucomflecken also does a ton of skits, some funny, some critical. For his most recent ones he did a satirical set, 30 days of US Healthcare, and they were both funny and depressing. I did not know some of the stuff he mentioned in those. Worth the watch.
The getting to keep your job bit is not quite right. Often, one also has to go find their own funding. Sort of based on the publications, but not necessarily.
I think the implication is the whole “publish or perish” mindset in academia.
If you don’t constantly publish something then your career and work is considered stagnant. At which point you lose out to other researchers, and effectively can’t get paid for your work. Aka: you lose your job
At least that’s how I understand it.
The academic system is a tiered system. Publish or perish is a term that mostly applies to early to mid career researchers, who are pracitcally all employed on fixed term contracts.You don’t lose your job if you don’t publish, you just can’t get (or are less competitive for) your next job.
Tenured academics (professors/A. Prof.) are on ongoing employment by the university. Their job is never really under threat. Although if they wanted to move jobs and be successful in grants then they want a productive group (many publications) to prove they are leading cutting edge research.
Universities care directly around how much grant funding their professors can pull into the university. However, in many countries it’s difficult to remove long serving academics. It’s not uncommon for ‘retired’ proffs to die at their desk, even though they checked out decade’s ago.
Thanks for explaining that
Yes, this is correct. Also, if you want to publish your dissertation, you’ll need to do all editing and indexing yourself and wait like 3 years to publish it and receive about 1% of all sales
Wouldn’t matter if I made 1% or 100%, it’s still 0 sales :P
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Yup… Somehow, being able to suffer financially is somehow a sign of your academic commitment. Post-docs are rare enough and most professors dont even get tenure anymore. The result is an insular community of hyper-competitive credit-chasing asshats looking to put their name on your work because you needed their signature for something once.
No thank you.
A friend of mine chased a PhD instead of looking towards industry for jobs. He kinda found out roughly how much a few of us were paid compared to him with a lot less years in education and he was NOT happy. He spent the rest of the night trying to belittle people until people called him out on his bullshit.
EXPOSURE
Kinda fucked up that it’s not only about being smart or having the tenacity to acquire these kind of jobs but that it’s also depending on the altruistic mindset and resiliency of people. The pool of people having most if these traits is quite slim…
What‽ I’ve published around 5 articles, and I’ve never paid anything. Is this something new?
It’s possible that the university paid your publication fees so that they didn’t end up on your desk. The university paid for mine, but there for sure were fees.
Or the PI via the grant
It highly depends on the field and journals. In my field, most society-run journals are without fees unless you want Open Access.
And, posted an hour ago:
https://kbin.social/m/technology@lemmy.world/t/504112/Publisher-Wants-2-500-To-Allow-Academics-To-Post-Their-Own
This system looks like it has such a great opportunity to be overtaken by free journals. Universities are in a great position to make this happen if they can weed out their political corruption through a system of rules and transparency. However, having worked in academia, I can see how this would be really hard to pull off. All of those egos competing to be the top ego and cliques can catastrophically toxify a project without resolve.
Varies from field to field. But many journals that ask for money from authors without providing open access are scams.
Yea they do seem like predatory/scammy.
