If narcissism is an institution, it's the academic publishing business. They're reason No. 1 I'm becoming closer every day to ditching academia all together.
Agenda based publishing houses make huge profits. Sage and other such publishing houses make around 3000 crores a year. Nobody talks about it. Publishing houses are killing actual perspectives. Finally someone talks. You are awesome.
Based username. How is Scihub with Springer now? My understanding of how Scihub works is that they only failback to trying institutional access proxies if they don't already have the paper in their huge cache, which means that most popular journals/articles are usually available permanently. Plus they use a rotating collection of donated credentials for the actual bypass process and obviously have to constantly update their scripts to get through whatever client (JS) or server (HTTP) level weirdness the publishers try to use to stop them, so their ability to break various publishers changes over time (which is very tough if you're relying on Scihub as your primary point of access).
What do you think is going to happen with the IP for those articles? Are we hoping they'll tank and then go public? It sounds like this trend could also perhaps be reflective of the overall lack of interest by the academic readership. Sure, some of that certainly is due to cost, but I worry it's beyond that. My own anxiety, maybe, with the intellectual market these days. :) (People are more and more willing to invest in convenience tech that makes even your basic news article into easily digestible Cliff-Notes, without having to ruminate and synthesize meaning for themselves.)
@@zacharyfoster7426 Hmm, like normal literary journals do? That would be lovely but might require too much re-branding of the corporate ideology to convince existing publishers... Let's just get a rag-tag group of Post-docs and non-tenured department profs together and do the thing!
Based on similar examples in other industries, it's at least possible that they could (attempt to) take the IP with them to the grave, which would clearly be an absolutely catastrophic disaster. If we look at video games, for example, companies going bankrupt never put their IP into the public domain, which results in scenarios where nobody can even reprint out-of-print games. On the plus side, it's hard to see the government allowing that to happen, and even if it did, a sort of abandonware situation would occur, whereby the material is shared freely and there's no-one around to take legal action. Unfortunately, the most likely scenario is that the remainder of the big five would come in like vultures to snatch up the carcass of their fallen competitor, resulting in a consolidation scenario, similar to the one in mainstream media, in which the last ones left become increasingly corpulent, powerful, and hard to kill. How long it'll take to kill the successively more powerful kings of the hill is anyone's guess.
I think that there will always be a place for subscription journals. Many researchers, particularly in developing countries, cannot pay for their work to be published OA. In addition funding bodies will prioritise particular research, perhaps even with their own agendas, so maintaining subscription journals as an option is important to help these authors and research have a platform. Just like with any non-academic magazines, there is a cost to produce, manage, maintain, and grow the journal, plus theres the added management of peer review which I believe is unique to academic publishing. Academic journals are also very niche and have a limited audience, so it makes sense that that they need a higher price point than other materials in order to be profitable. What absolutley astounds me however, is how long the major publishers have been able to get away with drastically overcharging for this product for so long. Before the tide started to change, Elsevier were reporting higher margins than apple, google and amazon! PLUS it is standard practice to NOT pay authors or peer reviewers for their work. Its insane and disgusting. I'm sure shareholders were lauging their way to the bank. FYI If you haven't seen it I recommend you watch paywall: the business of scholarship.
I don't see _any_ need for academic publishers as they presently exist to continue to exist. Every explanation for their continued existence boils down to inertia, hesitancy, or a lack of the requisite will and/or organisation to change things. As you say, the publishers don't pay the authors or the reviewers, so they don't offer value to or add value to any critical part of the chain. The whole system could be replaced by cooperatives/consortiums of researchers doing everything at (near) cost with small permanent administrative departments. And the entire thing would be open access by nature. The only barrier is organisation: it'd be hard to organise something like that, few would want to try, and they'd face a lot of desperate attacks from wounded publishers in their death throes, but it's hard to see how the publishers could stop it and once the new system was up and running, it'd require no more effort from anyone at the key parts of the chain than it did before. It's only the start-up impetus and the belief that we really can overthrow the corrupt system that's required.
I'll pipe in and say that there's another bloated area in science- equipment. Yes, it is expensive to design and produce to very exact standards, and to create software for it. But not to the absurd levels of how much some things cost...
If narcissism is an institution, it's the academic publishing business. They're reason No. 1 I'm becoming closer every day to ditching academia all together.
Agenda based publishing houses make huge profits. Sage and other such publishing houses make around 3000 crores a year.
Nobody talks about it. Publishing houses are killing actual perspectives.
Finally someone talks. You are awesome.
I started using Sci-hub once I knew that the authors are being gypped.
Im here bc im pissed that sci hub cant break into Springer.
Based username. How is Scihub with Springer now? My understanding of how Scihub works is that they only failback to trying institutional access proxies if they don't already have the paper in their huge cache, which means that most popular journals/articles are usually available permanently. Plus they use a rotating collection of donated credentials for the actual bypass process and obviously have to constantly update their scripts to get through whatever client (JS) or server (HTTP) level weirdness the publishers try to use to stop them, so their ability to break various publishers changes over time (which is very tough if you're relying on Scihub as your primary point of access).
Wow what a research on a very very important academic topic, thank you for making such videos.
What do you think is going to happen with the IP for those articles? Are we hoping they'll tank and then go public?
It sounds like this trend could also perhaps be reflective of the overall lack of interest by the academic readership. Sure, some of that certainly is due to cost, but I worry it's beyond that. My own anxiety, maybe, with the intellectual market these days. :)
(People are more and more willing to invest in convenience tech that makes even your basic news article into easily digestible Cliff-Notes, without having to ruminate and synthesize meaning for themselves.)
I think the publishers should create direct to consumer business models and charge a monthly fee for access directly to consumers
@@zacharyfoster7426 Hmm, like normal literary journals do? That would be lovely but might require too much re-branding of the corporate ideology to convince existing publishers...
Let's just get a rag-tag group of Post-docs and non-tenured department profs together and do the thing!
Based on similar examples in other industries, it's at least possible that they could (attempt to) take the IP with them to the grave, which would clearly be an absolutely catastrophic disaster. If we look at video games, for example, companies going bankrupt never put their IP into the public domain, which results in scenarios where nobody can even reprint out-of-print games. On the plus side, it's hard to see the government allowing that to happen, and even if it did, a sort of abandonware situation would occur, whereby the material is shared freely and there's no-one around to take legal action. Unfortunately, the most likely scenario is that the remainder of the big five would come in like vultures to snatch up the carcass of their fallen competitor, resulting in a consolidation scenario, similar to the one in mainstream media, in which the last ones left become increasingly corpulent, powerful, and hard to kill. How long it'll take to kill the successively more powerful kings of the hill is anyone's guess.
Why nobody talks about this!
I think that there will always be a place for subscription journals. Many researchers, particularly in developing countries, cannot pay for their work to be published OA. In addition funding bodies will prioritise particular research, perhaps even with their own agendas, so maintaining subscription journals as an option is important to help these authors and research have a platform.
Just like with any non-academic magazines, there is a cost to produce, manage, maintain, and grow the journal, plus theres the added management of peer review which I believe is unique to academic publishing. Academic journals are also very niche and have a limited audience, so it makes sense that that they need a higher price point than other materials in order to be profitable.
What absolutley astounds me however, is how long the major publishers have been able to get away with drastically overcharging for this product for so long. Before the tide started to change, Elsevier were reporting higher margins than apple, google and amazon! PLUS it is standard practice to NOT pay authors or peer reviewers for their work. Its insane and disgusting. I'm sure shareholders were lauging their way to the bank.
FYI If you haven't seen it I recommend you watch paywall: the business of scholarship.
I don't see _any_ need for academic publishers as they presently exist to continue to exist. Every explanation for their continued existence boils down to inertia, hesitancy, or a lack of the requisite will and/or organisation to change things. As you say, the publishers don't pay the authors or the reviewers, so they don't offer value to or add value to any critical part of the chain. The whole system could be replaced by cooperatives/consortiums of researchers doing everything at (near) cost with small permanent administrative departments. And the entire thing would be open access by nature. The only barrier is organisation: it'd be hard to organise something like that, few would want to try, and they'd face a lot of desperate attacks from wounded publishers in their death throes, but it's hard to see how the publishers could stop it and once the new system was up and running, it'd require no more effort from anyone at the key parts of the chain than it did before. It's only the start-up impetus and the belief that we really can overthrow the corrupt system that's required.
I'll pipe in and say that there's another bloated area in science- equipment.
Yes, it is expensive to design and produce to very exact standards, and to create software for it.
But not to the absurd levels of how much some things cost...
Everyone can afford Diamond OA
Good