Academic Journal Publishers Antitrust Litigation
On September 12, 2024, Lieff Cabraser and co-counsel at Justice Catalyst Law filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against six commercial publishers of academic journals, including Elsevier, Springer Nature, Taylor and Francis, Sage, Wiley, and Wolters Kluwer, on behalf of a proposed class of scientists and scholars
America’s a plutocracy, so there’s like a 90% chance nothing will come of it.
What the scientific community needs to do is make publishers irrelevant by creating a series of FOSS projects similar to the fediverse — architected, coded, owned, and operated by the scientific community — with the explicit goal of making a universal scientific journal where peer review is open, transparent, and at cost.
There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for a handful of publishers to gate-keep peer-review in 2024. All of the problems are technically solved, and inexpensive. The only thing that’s necessary is the will.
They’re scientists, not programmers. They may do programming as part of their job, but that’s generally not what they’re interested in. In other words, you (or someone else) will have to make it for them because it’s unlikely they’ll do it themselves unless shit gets really bad.
I do think that there are Scientists who like programming. What I would see as a hurdle is that this would be a rather big project, so you will have to ask a lot of people. And generally many people would have to be convinced to use this system. A little bit like social Networks: If noone uses it, it is not interesting.
Within at least physics, there is still a lot of importance placed on “prestigious” journals like Phys Rev. So it’s not so simple. Why would authors trust something published in the “Journal for Comradely Science”? It makes it very difficult to start something just due to the scientific cultural inertia.
Realistically it is 100% possible. But it’s the same issue the rest of the working class runs into: insufficient organization. The push for open source in its current form is just a way to make science open without affecting the profits of these huge journals. It costs the author to publish in a journal (which usually means the government allocates x-dollars within grants to pay for publishing). So it’s a farce tbh.
The reality is that this idea wouldn’t really fix any of the actual issues in academia. The only thing that would fix the problems with science is the end of capitalism.
America’s a plutocracy, so there’s like a 90% chance nothing will come of it.
What the scientific community needs to do is make publishers irrelevant by creating a series of FOSS projects similar to the fediverse — architected, coded, owned, and operated by the scientific community — with the explicit goal of making a universal scientific journal where peer review is open, transparent, and at cost.
There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for a handful of publishers to gate-keep peer-review in 2024. All of the problems are technically solved, and inexpensive. The only thing that’s necessary is the will.
That already exists. It’s called arXiv, and is used by mathematicians, physicists and computer scientists. Everyone else has to pay up.
arXiv doesn’t have peer review as far as I know
They’re scientists, not programmers. They may do programming as part of their job, but that’s generally not what they’re interested in. In other words, you (or someone else) will have to make it for them because it’s unlikely they’ll do it themselves unless shit gets really bad.
I do think that there are Scientists who like programming. What I would see as a hurdle is that this would be a rather big project, so you will have to ask a lot of people. And generally many people would have to be convinced to use this system. A little bit like social Networks: If noone uses it, it is not interesting.
Within at least physics, there is still a lot of importance placed on “prestigious” journals like Phys Rev. So it’s not so simple. Why would authors trust something published in the “Journal for Comradely Science”? It makes it very difficult to start something just due to the scientific cultural inertia.
Realistically it is 100% possible. But it’s the same issue the rest of the working class runs into: insufficient organization. The push for open source in its current form is just a way to make science open without affecting the profits of these huge journals. It costs the author to publish in a journal (which usually means the government allocates x-dollars within grants to pay for publishing). So it’s a farce tbh.
The reality is that this idea wouldn’t really fix any of the actual issues in academia. The only thing that would fix the problems with science is the end of capitalism.