From time to time I find a dive into the Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy useful for refreshing my memory on some ideas and concepts.
Also the MDN Learning Area is really useful for getting a handle on some web development details.
What others are you fond of, whether esoteric or exoteric*?
*
one of my other favorites is any sort of thesaurus that provides antonyms, 'cause some antonyms just aren’t as commonly used!
🤞 this federates properly this time (sorry if the old post eventually emerges, I initially posted this shortly after the Lemmy update kinda threw a wrench in things across instances)
But surely the journals provide some sort of service for the researchers, right? Like paying for experts to review their scientific claims, or fact checking their citations, or even basic grammatical proofreading, right? If the journals are earning so much from research, then conducting academic research must be a lucrative field with so many publishers competing to be the first ones to publish a paper.
I see what you are asking: Why doesn’t market competition drive down prices?
People have to publish in prestigious journals to make a career in science. So, that’s the “service”. Their position in the system lets them extract payment for something that other people deliver.
Even if someone opens up a competing journal, they are not likely to get quality submissions, because publishing in some unknown journal does not help the CV.
At the same time, the cost is mostly born by other people. Librarians pay for the subscriptions. I’m not sure why there is not more pushback from that angle. Eventually, institutions need access to these journals.
The cost to scientific research is spread over all society. No one person feels it. No one can even be sure how much better things would be under a reformed system.
Progress happens only when someone goes too far and causes outrage in the academic community. There has been some progress to move to a better model. But all that money can pay for a lot of PR.
ETA: On second thought, I’m probably simply not aware of the efforts of librarians, etc.
I was being sarcastic. Many journals don’t provide any of those services. Some journals even charge researchers for the “prestige” of publishing a paper. Peer review is mostly unpaid work, and some reviewers act as gatekeepers.
I thought you might be, but I’m sure it’s not common knowledge that it doesn’t work that way.
For some reason, Lemmy has a tendency to go all in on trickle-down on copyright. Some threads feel like they are overrun by right-wing libertarians, with their faith in absolute property rights. Except that even the more doctrinaire among those libertarians tend to be conflicted on intellectual property.
Let’s trace it back. Why do academics need to get published in order for their career to succeed? Why wouldn’t a paper published in a no-name journal carry any weight?
Does it boil down to whoever would be hiring them not having the time to read their research, so they rely on someone else’s judgment?
Start here for more reputable commentary -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publish_or_perish
One problem is that one wants an objective way to judge someone’s productivity. You cannot truly judge the quality of a paper unless you are an expert in that same field. Your institution may not have such an expert. Besides, in science you really don’t want to rely on personal judgment, if possible. Maybe there’s also marketing efforts going on that encourage doing things in away that allows extracting monopoly rents but I don’t have evidence.
IMHO the overarching problem is that the whole of academic publishing has not arrived in the internet age. You have all the usual problems with reforming social systems and, on top of that, there’s a lot of money at stake for some people.
