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Isn’t it a bit ridiculous for researchers to have to pay a publisher to publish the content that they themselves make money from?
They’re double dipping, and also triple dipping with the peer reviews done on a volunteer basis.
A racket, I say.
Quadruple dipping because they publish both open access journals that authors pay extra for, plus the standard subscription journals where universities need to pay for access too. Subscription obviously never got cheaper, no matter if the amount of open access journals increased (didn’t check that though, but fits well into the scheme)
I’m still not sure, what exactly the journals are actually doing.
Like, in all seriousness, what service do they provide? Just hosting the platform for anonymized reviews and basically a blog for the actual articles? That should cost maybe a few millions each year, yet this sector makes billions in revenue.
I’d say (a couple years ago) the service is also supposed to be access via DOI in perpetuity and presence in all the relevant databases, so that’s gotta cost some money for the reassurance as opposed to a pdf file “hosted” on Google Drive. But after Heterocycles fiasco I am not sure about that anymore.
Well, and some mark that this is likely a valid piece of research if it’s at www.reputablejournal.com as opposed to this likely being half-baked something at www.somerxiv.com or this likely being absolute lunacy at www.anyothersite.com.
Still, yes, billions in revenue vs millions spent essentially on essentially simple tasks like hosting and cataloguing (plus matching authors to reviewers I guess, though with how often I am asked to find them myself it’s doubtful) does not compute indeed.
Oops, all my research keeps getting leaked online.
If you’re looking at publishing it for free, I’d think it should be fine to put a PDF download in an ordinary blog post with the title and abstract?
Or are there people who won’t allow that?
You will transfer the economic copyright to most journals upon publication of the typeset manuscript meaning that you’re not allowed to publish that particular PDF anywhere. However, a lot of journals are okay with you publishing the pre-peer reviewed article or even sometimes the peer-reviewed, but NOT typeset article (sometimes called post-print article). Scientific publishing is weird :-)
The last couple journals I published in let you put the post-print PDF on your web page after an “embargo period”. I’ve never personally seen a journal forbid you from submitting articles whose preprints had been posted in sites like arxiv.org.
But I think scientific publishing isn’t “weird”, more like “predatory”, “exploitative”, or at least “antiquated.”
Obviously scientists don’t want to work any more and eat avocado toast too much.
Have they tried getting a college degree to increase their job prospects?
Chiming in with barely any knowledge on the topic.
Universities are massive institutions, with serious cash behind them. What the hell is stopping, say, all the public Australian universities just setting up their own journal, running it at cost for all the universities in Australia?
Make it make sense.
C.R.E.A.M.
“Have a cup of coffee every morning? Maybe switch to every other day to offset the costs!”
Find a new job.
