I got lucky in that my publication was through a journal that doesn't charge money for access or submissions. It's part of our professional organization and our annual membership fees cover the journal's expenses.

Really needs to be a wikipedia style service for academic papers.

Without independent wealth and deep personal connections it’s incredibly difficult to succeed in academia, regardless of the quality of your research.

Always has been, why do you think he's called SIR Isaac Newton?

EDIT : Turns out his knighthood was afterwards, but he did have connections. There are several examples of science being the domain of already rich people.

Uuhh, beyond the fucked up publishing system, your advisor was a self destructive dick. It was his job to pay that. His lab and career benefit and hes the one that gets funding for research operations.

In grad school your institution should be paying for fees like that. If the school itself isn't paying, then doesn't the supervisor have a grant they can file it under?

thats why its so gatekeeped, cant get a career in biotech, research you have to be published at some point, very few get it at undergrad let alone trying to get lab experience or even an INTERNSHIP. thats why most bio majors are health and not something as convoluted as research. its a cascading problem.

My advisor, who ostensibly understood my background and means, could not understand how such a relatively small fee would be so prohibitive.

No advisor expects a student to pay publication charges. My lab pays about $10,000/yr into this racket.

Without independent wealth and deep personal connections it’s incredibly difficult to succeed in academia, regardless of the quality of your research.

oh bullshit.

There's a behind the bastards about him.

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-robert-maxwell-how-ghislaine-274165028/

Sometimes I feel like everything shit in the world can be traced back to like a dozen people and their parents and grandparents.

If you didn't know this, it'd be weird how many academics are in the Epstein files. Once you do know it, it's obvious.

Oh, and Robert Maxwell was legitimately a badass in WW2. Everything terrible about him starts after that.

But all large presses were doing the same thing. Eslevier, Nature, Etc.

It's like music. There's a lot of value in the back catalogue.

The labor is in the peer review and they pay nothing. Then they setup a system where peer reviewers get "credits" not one cares about.

Fucking wooden nickels.

wonder whats natrues profit margin, they probably one of the most well renowned journal

It is so much worse than that.

I spend my time researching the literature on a topic so that I can spend my time and energy writing a grant. It probably won't get funded.

If it does, I get to do a bunch of work. It might involve travel, where I will do everything at minimum expense to save enough money for the coming lab work.

I will spend significant time getting the samples analyzed, spending most of the grant money. Then I will come up with a logical way to interpret the data.

I will spend more time sending a document around to coauthors. This may take months, or even years if the coauthors fight.

We eventually submit to a journal. It gets rejected.

We rewrite and submit again. A few months later, congratulations, you get to publish. Money please.

I work for the money to do the work, I work for the writeup, I fight for the acceptance, and I have to pay to publish.

It's a stupid system.

They have bonkers profit margins too. 38% in 2023. They're in the same category as Microsoft or Google when it comes to profitability. Absolutely insane for a company that's supposed to disseminate scientific information.

The subscription service/pay-to-play being everywhere has to stop eventually, right?

Like, eventually enough consumers will realize that they are bent over the barrel by their services.

I was darkly joking that Microsoft is like an abuser in another post yesterday, but the more I thought about it, the more the metaphor stuck. They take and take, make decisions on your behalf, cut you off from outsiders and make it increasingly difficult to escape the longer you let them get away with it. And that's not Microsoft's fault...that's capitalism, baby!

any article author will gladly send you a PDF.

when i was in state u, we just used google scholar which the school already pays "subscritions for" so you have acess to articles that arnt gatekeeped behind a paywall. if you were to use it without a faculty or student account, you would not be able to access the full articles.

This article in the Guardian is definitely worth a read if you’re not intimately familiar with just how it got this way… It’s 8 years old so it won’t cover recent history but does give you an idea of how it started.

A very interesting read!

So, what i take form the article, is that Elsevier and other publishers are most similar to a search engine or index: They give you a list of all interesting articles in a field, so you don't have to search through the millions of scientific articles produced each year yourself.

That makes it kinda similar to google, which is also very profitable, which also turns a profit by giving back user-supplied content to the users. Just that Elsevier charges for that "indexlist" functionality directly, while google takes the game one step further and harvests data, which it then uses to display targeted ads.

IHMO: All science should be freely accessible, free as in freedom and price.

Taxpayers pay $13B/yr worldwide to the private publishing industry, for content they cannot read.

Everyone makes mistakes

Except psychopaths who know their claim is garbage but lie through their teeth to get it published. That's not a mistake, that's corruption.

Remember that 80s magazine OMNI?
Science, tech, sci-fi, Mensa-caliber games... by the very same Bob Guccione who published Penthouse!

Every issue had an in-depth interview with a prominent and interesting scientist, figures like Alan Guth or Luc Montagnier or Morris Berman.
One issue was a little more off-beat, the interview was with an anthropologist, whose student life and career went like this:

Attending the University Of Montana in Missoula, this student loved drinking every day, so he asked the question - "What's a relatively easy major with little math, that will interfere the least with my drinking?" - and landed on Anthropology.

After graduation, the next question became - "What will I do my thesis about?" - a friend gave him the vague advice to do it on something he knew or was passionate about, and like a "eureka" moment, it hit him: "I'm gonna research drinking culture, bars!"

And so, he became one of the rarefied few for whom drinking on the job was basically a requirement!

A journal about the science of blackjack and hookers?

Isn't that A's Archive?

It’s a feedback loop. In order to raise your academic profile and potentially get a job, you need a solid CV full of peer reviewed publications. In order to get published in the first place, you often need money and institutional backing.

If you circumvent that cycle by self-publishing (a solidly logical idea btw), then you’ll have an even harder job getting people to take you seriously and will alienate yourself from “mainstream” academia. It’s messed up. Some open access journals have tried to solve this, with some success, but it’s a systemic problem.

20 years ago we relied on printed books and libraries. I've noticed in real time this last decade [nearly] every paper gaining a PDF download button on some website.

its complicated, if yuo try to publish yourself employers might see your research could be biased or fudged results. they want to see a legitimate publication. much like how a certain wealthy billionaire is doing "research" on himself and publishing it, its not legitimate and is considered pseudoscience.

This idea has been around over 20 years. It dies every time because major lab PIs, usually in US, HATE the idea of not being able to gatekeep research publications in journals of "high impact". This impacts how institutions are assessed, because, God forbid people actually have to read the papers. This feeds back to Editors, so the number one factor that influences Editors now is zip code.

If we went to a simple repository archive, with transparent peer review, then no one could imply their research is more important because of where it was published. We would let citations determine impact. Science publishing has always pushed the idea that if Einstein drove a Honda, everyone who drives a Honda is a genius.

Meanhile, The Lancet (JIF 105) took 12 years to retract a paper linking autism to vaccines, when it was clearly fraudulent from day one. Nature, Science, CELL, just stopped retractions, at best, they have "statements of Editorial Concern". This high JIF model is why Alzheimers research has stalled behind a flawed hypothesis only reinforced by fraudulent work not retracted for 25 years. Some people, like the President of Stanford, rose to the top tier on fraud and journal gatekeeping.

2020 saw the world arguing over ivermectin based off a paper "reviewed" overnight, with the journal Editor as an author. The journal 5 years later refuses to prove the paper was peer reviewed at all. 3,400 citations.

Then we have predatory journals that will publish literally anything for page charges. Examples:

Get me off your fucking mailing list.

and

Chicken, chicken chicken chicken, Chicken? chicken. (Cited 35 times)

The difference is the peer-review process. Without a good peer-review process, those journals won't have a strong cite score and so they will be considered unreliable.