Context (for those who might not be in academia): many academic publishing companies (like Elsevier) charge exorbitant prices for researchers to get their papers published as open access. Meanwhile, none of these researchers actually get anything in return for it (except for major street cred if their papers get highly cited)

    • NeilNuggetstrong@lemmy.worldEnglish
      44·
      13 days ago

      Are you fucking kidding me? Why the hell do we even allow this shit.

      You have to pay them money to publish your work so they can sell it to your peers. Oh and you have to work for free reviewing other potential work. It’s the most broken business model ever.

      • AnarchistArtificer@slrpnk.netEnglish
        9·
        13 days ago

        And what’s worse, when there were some big negotiations on open access a few years back, the agreements were wholly insufficient and still disproportionately enriched the journals at the expense of researchers; “Gold Open Access” journals will publish the research unpaywalled, so anyone can read them, but will charge absurd “article processing charges” that are often thousands of dollars, shutting out researchers with less financial means (such as those in the global South or independent researchers).

        Fortunately there is a growing movement who gives a fuck about actual open access; Diamond Open Access research involves no fees to either the author or the reader. This is how it should be.

        ‘The diamond model has been especially successful in Latin America-based journals (95% of OA journals[1]) following the emergence of large publicly supported platforms, such as SciELO and Redalyc. However, Diamond OA journals are under-represented in the major scholarly databases, such as Web of Science and Scopus. It is also noteworthy, that high-income countries “have the highest share of authorship in every domain and type of journal, except for diamond journals in the social sciences and humanities”.’[1]

        The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed

        [1]: Source: the linked Wikipedia page

        1. 1 ↩︎

      • RagingRobot@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        13 days ago

        It’s pretty impressive that they managed to trick a whole field of the smartest people into doing it too. What kind of crazy con artist thought this up? Lol

    • RagingRobot@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      13 days ago

      I feel like in the age of the Internet people should just publish their own stuff. The problem then is being able to find it though. I think a site for only research papers where you can vote links to them up or down and submit peer reviews would be awesome. I’m looking in from the outside though so maybe that already exists?