At our lab meeting today, I realized how many students still don’t understand the deep flaws in the academic publishing system. Scientific progress is locked behind paywalls, even though researchers do the work (writing, reviewing, editing) for free—only for universities to buy back access at ridiculous prices. Meanwhile, major publishers pull in massive profits while restricting knowledge that should be advancing humanity.
This 2017 Guardian article breaks it down, but things have only gotten worse. Open-access models exist, but they often come with exploitative fees.
So, how do we fix this?
What futuristic solutions could disrupt this outdated model?
The future of scientific publishing—We need a new model
byu/Peer-review-Pro inFuturology
3 Comments
Walk away. Unfortunately, academia has problems in theorizing their social world and in choosing different worlds. There ia too little reflection on how and why they reproduce certain social structures.
It is being fixed, I would even say, has been fixed.
Grants are increasingly on the condition of openness around data and publishing and open access journals have been exploding in numbers and popularity. “Peers” are increasingly getting paid (although problematic in itself). Research is increasingly being double checked. Tools to check validity are getting better.
I don’t think publishing is something beyond the capacity of any academic, to pursue/run.
If you feel a publisher is running things in a way that it shouldn’t, don’t work with them. Lots of scholars have expressed similar sentiments, imagine if they all stood by their convictions and chose not to be abused by the system?
And better yet, don’t just refuse to work with such publishers, create your own and run it how you expect it to.
We all have a responsibility to fix the problems we complain about, otherwise if not us then who? The creator of the problem?