Please let’s just get rid of for profit in general, like what has profit even done for us?
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Won't happen. US science thrives on gatekeeping and stealing IP in the closed peer review system.
Fun fact Robert Maxwell established the for profit scientific publishing companies. If that name seems familiar he is the father of Ghislaine.
Agreed. Honestly can't believe how this is even still a thing at this point.
I think it’s a great lesson in hiw good people can create and tolerate bad systems …
… how a bunch of clever and thoughtful people (academics) can walk into creating a dumb system which they simultaneously hate or disagree with, and don’t know how to effectively change or fix.
Worth studying IMO as a case study on these general problems. My understanding is that it was a manipulative capitalist that kicked it off by appealing to academics’ egos by creating increasingly specialised and likely redundant Journals (IE more subscriptions). And of course most academics know it’s dumb, but have no sense of collective action. And so humanity just stumbles along doing dumb shit.
Here's a bit of how it got started.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
Father of Ghislaine Maxwell, yes the Epstein one, had quite a lot to do with it, which sure bears mentioning!
Fuck "The Guardian" (no shade to you, commenter), Behind The Bastards did a competent 4-piece or something (for those who enjoy such a format) on the guy, and to a degree, the topic. Interesting - mostly, but oddly not all - bad stuff.
Good luck at P&T with only Publications in open journals. BTW, they are not "free". They still have page charges.
"Economics" need a re-write too. They have elevated "profits" higher than "Truth-seeking", and their field are swamped in non-scientific claims and processes that cause 'Truth' to become second fiddle to "profits".
The profit motive compromises Scientific thinking/behavior on ALL levels of the Scientific system, is orthogonal to the truth incentive so only align/overlap in rare cases. Capitalism/free markets is a combative ideology - a belief-system - that generates a perpetual need for profits and kills good Science behavior.
We need more profit in science, like we need to reward the most the greedy and unscrupulous people in capitalism.
This seems like it would be an easy thing for some doo gooders to set up for free. Maybe with a few ads to fund it.
"Publishing" isn't necessary in 2026.
Anyone can put information out there for free. If it's genuinely worth reading, people will read it.
I think this is already done in most part of computer science. In my field, Springer has very little shares left, and is actively being replaced by ACM and Schloss Dagstuhl, which are not only both non-profit but all open access.
I am also glad after 20 something years, our field has finally moved away from IEEE, which is not open access even til this day.
There are some university presses that have started their own journals in response to these issues. It's a broken system, but no one is stopping anyone from creating new journals. All it takes is to eat away at the margins of for-profit journals by publishing fewer papers in them for them to eventually lose interest in the sector.
True Science IS Journalism: true Journalism IS Science.
This principle is true in BOTH domains.
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Hey, just curious, what's the _/_ for ?
It might happen thanks to Trump ending the NIH. The concept of journal impact factor as a measure of science is frankly stupid. If Einstein rode a Schwinn, everyone who rides a Schwinn is Einstein.
But, the biggest problem at those journals was the gatekeeping and theft of IP by large US lab heads reviewing the work, who can typically delay publication for over a year while they duplicate the data.
But, the most insane thing about these billion dollar publishers is that they rely on slave labor peer review, while then asking as much as $10,000 for open access publication.
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