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I do not understand how this system has existed this long.
Network effect with a hint of extortion.
Well for the first several hundred years they actually produced a product that they mailed to people and that took employees and infra that the various unis didn’t care to have (with some exceptions for university presses like Oxford and Cambridge). Now it’s 100% momentum and branding. You publish in Science because that’s the impressive one for Science.
Hmm. How prevalent are actual paper journals now? It wouldn’t surprise me if certain researchers were slow to adopt the digital version.
I figured there must be something keeping it going. There is no free lunch.
American copyright law? Basically every research institution in America pays them lots of money for electronic subscriptions in order to not get sued. Like academics don’t give a fuck and will use scihub or email a friend or whatever but their institution will just subscribe to a plausible number of things to avoid drawing the attention of the publishers. For profit research like pharma or industrial chem are even more buttoned up because they are much juicier targets for potential IP suits.
It’s even worse than the music distribution industry.
I’m so happy that in my field, most of the papers I read are open access and some of the most important journals are not from large publishers.
Found this https://arxiv.org/
arXiv is a free distribution service and an open-access archive for nearly 2.4 million scholarly articles in the fields of physics, mathematics, computer science, quantitative biology, quantitative finance, statistics, electrical engineering and systems science, and economics. Materials on this site are not peer-reviewed by arXiv.
There’s also Sci Hub
But yea time for shit to change and drop the parasites
There are a bunch of field-specific preprint services like arXiv: PsyArXiv, SocARXIV, engrXiV, AgriXiv, etc. The OSF also hosts preprints for various disciplines.
The important thing to remember is that preprints are not peer-reviewed and have not been vetted in any way. A paper may change a lot (or just a little) between preprint submission and final publication. A recent paper of mine had a few sections added for clarity, which wouldn’t appear in a preprint.
arXiv is standard in cs. We use this on conjunction with peer reviewed venues (also all free and volunteer run) and it’s been working out decently well for us. Other fields need to follow suit.
I think it’s wild how much job security professors often have and yet they let themselves get dicked around like this constantly
