This is like driving through a decent neighborhood and being like “The mob rules this neighborhood? Why don’t people just tell them to leave?”.
Academic publishers are just very specialized gangs, there is no functional difference between the business model of Elsevier and the business model of a local crimelord.
This isn’t hyperbole, it is a joke, but it is also just basically the truth of it.
Scientists are hamsters that are put onto specific hamster wheels that they must spin for a certain amount of time each day lest they be fired, one of those hamster wheels is doing free labor (peer reviewing) for academic journals like Elsevier. Like a good mafia system, academic publishers don’t have to openly threaten to hurt scientists to compel them to do free labor as the system is set up to simply grind them to dust if they don’t excitedly jump on the hamster wheel of providing free value to said academic publishers.
Imagine for a minute academic publishing was like the music industry except it paid musicians shit and all the profits, of which there were major profits, never went to the musicians but instead to a bunch of vacuous middlemen who condescendingly took the musicians money while telling them their labor is next to worthless. Lol (I am crying inside right now) now imagine that unlike the real music industry this hypothetical music industry was heavily subsidized by tax payers but still SOMEHOW those musicians still had all the profits of their labor transferred to the ownership of a small number of rich people even though taxpayers had paid for it and thus like the musicians deserved to own it themselves.
I am not in academia but did participate in published research both in college and in a job as a lab assistant afterward. I don’t really think your analogy holds up. There is literally no cost to such a change; scientists just need to start READING and CITING papers from free, alternative journals for them to be legitimized. The profit incentives of the universities, private industry, and government that fund the majority of research are not affected by the choice of the medium of exchange of ideas. Only the journals’ pockets.
You aren’t wrong, there isn’t actually a lot holding the system back from changing, which is exactly why I compare it to a mafia model.
The mafia is only ever just one jerk at the top who makes every chump underneath them sacred enough not to look to their neighbor and go “do we really need this asshole?”. Just understanding the current conditions as a pure product of individual agents agreeing to consent or not to is not a complete picture, you have to include in the context the ways in which a culture of consent both in what is necessary and what is possible is created that is essential to the suffocating power of the system to preclude other possibilities.
This is like driving through a decent neighborhood and being like “The mob rules this neighborhood? Why don’t people just tell them to leave?”.
Academic publishers are just very specialized gangs, there is no functional difference between the business model of Elsevier and the business model of a local crimelord.
This isn’t hyperbole, it is a joke, but it is also just basically the truth of it.
Scientists are hamsters that are put onto specific hamster wheels that they must spin for a certain amount of time each day lest they be fired, one of those hamster wheels is doing free labor (peer reviewing) for academic journals like Elsevier. Like a good mafia system, academic publishers don’t have to openly threaten to hurt scientists to compel them to do free labor as the system is set up to simply grind them to dust if they don’t excitedly jump on the hamster wheel of providing free value to said academic publishers.
Imagine for a minute academic publishing was like the music industry except it paid musicians shit and all the profits, of which there were major profits, never went to the musicians but instead to a bunch of vacuous middlemen who condescendingly took the musicians money while telling them their labor is next to worthless. Lol (I am crying inside right now) now imagine that unlike the real music industry this hypothetical music industry was heavily subsidized by tax payers but still SOMEHOW those musicians still had all the profits of their labor transferred to the ownership of a small number of rich people even though taxpayers had paid for it and thus like the musicians deserved to own it themselves.
I am not in academia but did participate in published research both in college and in a job as a lab assistant afterward. I don’t really think your analogy holds up. There is literally no cost to such a change; scientists just need to start READING and CITING papers from free, alternative journals for them to be legitimized. The profit incentives of the universities, private industry, and government that fund the majority of research are not affected by the choice of the medium of exchange of ideas. Only the journals’ pockets.
You aren’t wrong, there isn’t actually a lot holding the system back from changing, which is exactly why I compare it to a mafia model.
The mafia is only ever just one jerk at the top who makes every chump underneath them sacred enough not to look to their neighbor and go “do we really need this asshole?”. Just understanding the current conditions as a pure product of individual agents agreeing to consent or not to is not a complete picture, you have to include in the context the ways in which a culture of consent both in what is necessary and what is possible is created that is essential to the suffocating power of the system to preclude other possibilities.