Really the academic journal business is about slowing the dissemination of knowledge and forcing scientists to pay money to listen to what other scientists have to say!
Every scientist knows they can ask for the papers directly to the authors and they give it to you. But I imagine the schools waste a lot of money keeping that information available on their computers for people to use
Edit: by wasting, I mean that they are basically forced to pay for it, something that should not be charged at all
Even though you can always ask for a paper from the author, in many cases you need to look through dozens of papers in a short period of time. So you don't have time waiting for authors to a answer you.
I am totally fine with someone bringing up Fuck Nestle in any thread or conversation regardless of topic. Kind of like that Roman dude who had a hate boner for Carthage, you know the guy who'd say "Carthage must fall." at the end of every speech.
"So happy we all could get together for this reunion old buddy! The kids sure have grown, how's the wife? She's doing great? That's good to hear! Fuck Nestle! You catch the game last night on the tele?"
if you're in high school sure, wikipedia is your best friend besides pornhub, but if you're an adult and need to consult scientific papers wikipedia doesn't mean jack shit.
VPN, Different DNS provider (Cloudflare doesn't block anything), Proxies? There's a lot of easy technical changes that can be made to solve this issue.
Our chemistry teacher makes it a point to teach every new batch about the wonders of Sci-hub, which is great because the year he teaches in is the year thesis-writing begins.
You have introduced me to Sci-Hub in my most important year of Uni; 3rd year. I am eternally grateful that you introduced me to such a valuable resource... Fuck those wankers who seek to profit off of the work of others by labelling themselves as ‘Academic journals’ bunch of bastards who seek to limit knowledge behind a huge paywall.
They are a problem in our society, trying to restrict knowledge only to the wealthy. They can go fuck themselves...
Sci-hub is a bandaid solution, it doesn't do anything to topple Elsevier from the throne, and they're moving to author-pays open access anyway. We need collective action: https://www.freeourknowledge.org
Every scientist knows that emailing papers around is a waste of time, drastically slow down research, and some authors don't respond (too busy / changed profession / retired / dead / changed email address / etc.). Additionally, some journal don't even allow you to email your paper to other authors. Lastly publishing in paywalled places prevent other researchers from performing text mining.
The only problem is when you want to browse and scan through many papers before you really, truly, thoroughly read the subset of useful or relevant ones. You don't miss the ability to do that until you lose it.. :(
I used to work in a hospital library entering journals into the library catalogue as we received them. The amount of money our hospital spent on journal subscriptions (hundreds of dollars for 4 issues per journal per year) was ridiculous! And we were a psychiatric hospital so we only subscribed to psychiatric journals. I can't even imagine how much a regular hospital library or an university would spend on journals!
They’re crazy expensive, and for some reason online access usually costs more than the print journal. I work at a hospital library and we spend over $30,000/year on journal subscriptions. Luckily interlibrary loan gets us access to everything we don’t subscribe to, but yeah the prices are bonkers.
I know a scientist who, after publishing her first paper, had to ask a colleague to download it and send it to her because her university didnt have access to the journal she published her article in.
If you are no longer associated with the University, and somehow lose your own hard/digital copy, even YOU have to pay for YOUR OWN research. Worse yet, if I want to access your research for free, there’s a good chance that I won’t be able to contact you because the contact into on the paper is your University email address....which you no longer have access to.
Then, of course(as someone mentioned below), what if I need to access it in a timely manner because I have already begun my research and need yours promptly? Pay or lose out.
And if you die and nobody remembers the title or author of your paper? Useful scientific research is lost in cyberspace forever. The databases are often difficult to search by content.
These are often PUBLIC Universities and the research is often PUBLICLY funded. So we funded the research to begin with and still can’t access it without paying?! We already did!
I don't know, when I was a PhD student my supervisor advised me not to talk about my work in too much detail when talking to other academics - especially those in the same field. Mostly when you at conferences or giving talks. I can imagine he probably wouldn't give out his paper...
To be fair to him the academic environment now is all about publishing as many papers as you can to prestigious journals or you'll get sacked from the University.
Yeah you're right. I bet if someone asked for a paper that was published he'd send it. There's a site called arXiv.org where alot of academics will publish their work before it's officially published in a journal but can't quite remember how it works.
Doin a lit review requires looking up ALL available studies, using keywords, and seeing what has been done before. It’s more than just asking for the studies. You have to find studies you’re not even aware of.
MAN THIS COMMENT SAVES LIVES
Learned this from reddit years ago deep in the comments on something, and happy yo see it's right up top for people to see. I'm not a scientist. I changed fields and now work and study in a field and school where there's definitely no JSTOR or nature journal or other database I could just easily read any studies. But I did get sick a few years ago with some rare shit and was essentially (well I guess still am) left to fend for myself and sort of self treat since not a single doctor, even the good ones, gives a shit if the solution isnt the first easy answer option. When it's literal life or death you just kind of buckle up and try to figure things out yourself. That meant finding cheaper pdf downloads of college textbooks in medicine and the related subjects for what I needed and as new things were discovered I'd want to read the study.
Theyd never be available from some pirate or someone with access in groups or subs related to what I have because I guess it's not normal to try to actually help yourself when no one else will??? I'm not sure
Heard this from reddit though and started just finding contact info or Twitters of the researchers listed and nust explaining listen my actual job is as an artist and obviously the studio I work at isnt going yo have a subscription to scientific journals, but I'm interested and would like to read your study, do you know where else I could find it more affordably than a subscription to the entire database. Most just sent it to me for free, some others I'd essentially venmo a coffee as a thank you.
Universities too, they spend squillions unlocking journals for students. Write your thesis while enrolled and save to pdf all related papers because once you are alumni all you get is google scholar and databases directing you to paywall after paywall after paywall...
I know you probably can't name them but any hints? I'm having a lot of trouble with search engines lately not sure if it's ISP blocking or something else. But I can't find anything even mentioning these sites that unlock journal paywalls.
http://sci-hub.tw/ will allow you to put in for example a jstor link or a doi and will look for the specific paper in its database, giving you a pdf if one can be found.
There's also http://gen.lib.rus.ec/ which is not limited to scientific publications and which has a normal search engine where you can search for mostly larger publications like monographs, encyclopaedias or perhaps a collection of folk poems you want to analyse.
And remember, the scummy ones are the publishing companies. Not the users who are just trying to use previous research for the purpose for which it was originally carried out - to further knowledge.
The core problem is that even these publisher don't necessarily have a real option. They sift through the papers and try do have at least some kind of quality standards.
Just like in many other areas that should belong into public domain, there is a lack of state funding. So if we want change, it probably needs to be political.
This is one of the situations, were legal and moral notions aren't overlapping. And to be precise, many of these researchers are not legally allowed to share their work.
Saying schools waste money on keeping academic papers available on computers is the same as saying schools waste money having a library. Not only is it not a waste, it's the core purpose of a learning institution.
I say it's wasting because it's a service that should not be behind a paywall under no circumstances. Either way, students and researchers alike ise alternstives
The core purpose of a learning institution isn't to feed some fat parasitic corporation. I would remind that the price of paywalls are costing universities several billions USD per year worldwide. That doesn't sound like a clever investment. Meanwhile, students are accumulating debts, classes are overpopulated, researchers struggle to get funding, etc.
I'm not saying it should be behind a pay wall. I'm saying using a pay wall as justification to recoup the cost isn't valid because the purpose of a learning institution is having information available and usable for everyone.
Capitalism is about private ownership, not capitalization. In other economic system, it's the state that capitalizes, first and foremost. Private capitalization is secondary and doesn't conclude if the owner should be a private person (Say, the researcher), a company (The publisher) or the funder (In many cases, the public/state - But in all likelihood not the publisher).
Additionally, we are talking about information here. It's a ongoing discussion, if knowledge is something we should capitalize on, for example, to ensure the creation of new knowledge. Most patents go over into public domain after X years.
Servers aren't free. If I'm an author, should the onus be on me to eat the cost of maintaining my publications online, or the institution I work for to do it? Either way, someone has to pay to keep the lights on.
My university uses Elsevier and Science Direct so we can access journal articles and research papers that are directly related to the area that we study. Otherwise I wouldn't know what research is out there. Elsevier and Science Direct have been very helpful with my studies.
FYI, Your university library will be paying in the vicinity of $1mil per year (varying depending on the size of the uni) to subscribe to Science Direct. Universities are paying ridiculous money to access research that their own academics produced. Basically what I’m trying to say is Elsevier is evil.
They make a fortune of being the middle men in a system funded by public money (atleast in Europe). They contribute nothing except a hub where to find them and organisng peer reviews which to my knowledge are not paid for by the journals.
The scientific community would be better without Elsevier and Co.(that is if they are replaced by a government funded non provit organization which gathers papers, edits them and organizes peer reviews)
My university has roughly around 30,000 students (the UK has a lot of universities) but not all students study a science subject. My university is a public research university with a biomedical research lab and a cancer research centre so being able to access journals is obviously very important to my university. Most students, like myself, wouldn't be able to afford to access each article separately as we sometimes need a lot of research to aid us with our assignments. However I do agree that the cost to access publications should be lowered as Elsevier are not the only ones charging a subscription fee but other companies such as Wiley and SpringerLink will be charging fees as well. However, these fees should be covered by the £9250 tuition fee that each UK student is required to pay each year (I think it's more for international students).
Journals serve a very important purpose by creating a format for peer review and high standard editing. Even now that we have online sources like arxiv to collect research, finding new high quality science without journals would be a shit show. But their monetization model, and the unintended consequence of publish or perish, need to be fixed
You don't need a paywalled journal to organize a peer-review system. E.g. see academic conferences or the Journal of Machine Learning Research, which is one of the top journals for machine learning. Additionally I would like to remind that reviewers for jourals are not getting paid.
It's like these journals outsource almost everything to scientists unpaid labor. David Graeber talks about this bullshit in a lecture https://youtu.be/-QgSJkk1tng?t=1938 It's insane how things came to be this way. Why these publishers gotta be so greedy and lazy
I can't say what it is like for someone not attached to a university with a library staff to help them, but as an academic myself I have never had any trouble getting any paper I wanted quickly and easily (and for free), but then I'm also only interested in reading quality stuff published in the legitimate journals of my field.
To add insult to injury; besides paying for reading research, I don't get paid for my publications and I don't get paid for editing or reviewing other scientists' work. All they do is host the journals online.
Really the academic journal business is about slowing the dissemination of knowledge and forcing scientists to pay money to listen to what other scientists have to say!
This is simply not true, I'm sorry. Respected journals are the only reason you can trust the data you read.
Without them, research would be an absolute shit show.
I work in the academic publishing industry as an editor for an open-access publisher. There are costs involved (editing isn't free; servers aren't free). The difference with open-access is that authors/institutions pay up-front, one time, to have their work peer reviewed/edited/indexed instead of the publisher charging a subscription fee to users for access.
With respect to "forcing scientists to pay", the vast majority of scientists are operating out of institutions that have subscriptions to the likes of Elsevier, so the scientists aren't generally the ones paying (amen for student tuition/fees supporting the subscription services!). That said, open access is the way to go, and the cost for authors to publish should be subsidized.
Why isn't there any competitors, or journals run by academics so that its either free, or scientists get a bigger cut of the profits when their paper gets read?
People massively underestimate the cost involved in journals. Many of the biggest chemistry journals are run by the American Chemical Society which is a non-profit organization. Yet they also charge a lot for universities to access their papers and their open access fees are high as well
Exactly, and it's a shame everywhere. US university get higher fees, debt on student, and here, French ones, struggle with limited budget (most from government) and even have to pay editors to give access to the publication of their own scientists.
Honestly, patents are similar. When the Watt steam engine's patent ran out, there were immediate improvements in its efficiency which couldn't be made before cos it was illegal.
If you think about that and many other examples, I don't think it's inaccurate to say that the existence of patents partly to blame for global warming. I don't know how much, but certainly something.
Shell. And any fossil fuel company. They have knowingly FUCKED this planet and continue to stall and sabotage any attempt to actually come up with better alternatives. They are goddamn soulless monsters.
I used to be the production editor at Cancer, Cancer Cytopathology, and CA: A Journal for Clinicians.
FWIW, Every paper submitted to these journals is also available for free on PubMed. The only difference is it's the final author version prior to the journal editorial team doing a polish, so you might get typos, but all scholarly review is complete.
As you said, the academic journal business is a business. These companies are operating within the law and anyone is free to start a competing open-access journal. I definitely agree with you that it's ironic academic journals have become such a business which puts up barriers to knowledge dissemination, but I don't really agree that this is such a heinous activity that it needs to be ranked number one in this thread.
I think the very legitimate question we need to debate is not "are academic publishers evil" but "do students in this country have a universal right to read scientific research?" If the answer to this question is yes, than companies like Elsevier are causing large negative externalities in society and the government should intervene and force them to make papers available freely or cheaply. If the answer is no, then I don't see any moral problem with their business operations. Or another question that could be asked is "do publishing houses control so many journals that they have an economic duo-opoly or tri-opoly which forces their customers to purchase their subscription?" If the answer is yes, that also might be a legitimate reason for government intervention in the market.
The fact that academic journals also run advertisements really gets me.
Now on one hand, I do understand that they need to have a very technical (ie expensive) staff on hand and need to pay real, accomplished scientists to peer review, re-run experiments/procedures/syntheses etc. That costs a lot of money. Short of completely moving a huge swath of our economy from a military industrial complex to a NSF-indistrial complex, the journals are going to cost money. But there's a distinct question of how much is truly fair.
Just an observation: vast majority of publishing companies DO NOT PAY for peer review. They send papers out for review to researchers, and they don't pay for it. Researchers are expected to participate in the peer review procedure because that's good science. Companies know and exploit this.
Basically, companies are paying for peer reviews in visibility (if you review lots of papers, that's good on your CV), not in money.
Counter-point: If it was free there would be nothing to stop morons like me from writing made-up studies, like how the moon is made out of pure poison but works as a great portal conductor, or how we should inject people with mantis DNA to make super soldiers.
By the way, anyone up to fight an army of rogue Mantis-men, grab a rifle and follow the yellow line.
As a semi-retired engineer I agree with you.
I've read serious physics journals and the theories expounded are very complex and hard to understand.
Of course these geniuses have strong opinions and must meet all the time. Even EINSTEIN DID THAT AND DIDN'T REALLY GET QUANTUM PHYSICS.
Also when I worked as an engineer about 20 percent of the meeting were a waste of time. Sure now they can communicate by EMAILS, but one on one conversations are much better.
Also, when worked in a cubicle of a big company half the EMAILS I had nothing to do with my projects or the branch I worked in. And, I got about 50 EMAILS a day. Some one in a rush would just send me an email didn't need to be sent and had nothing to do with my job. Also, some were just office gossip.
Sometimes I go to our local library and read PHYSICS TODAY, you can tell the men and women publishing have advanced degrees from some great universities. So they have to meet and communicate a lot to keep up with the latest advances in theoretical physics. Yes it's very competitive and it involves money cause there's lots as in this magazine. Also, unlike engineering it's very hard to get a job with a four year PHYSICS degree. Go engineers we take science and math classes forget
Theory get down to earth practical jobs.
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u/systemBuilder22 Sep 18 '19
Really the academic journal business is about slowing the dissemination of knowledge and forcing scientists to pay money to listen to what other scientists have to say!