Remember that 80s magazine OMNI?
Science, tech, sci-fi, Mensa-caliber games… by the very same Bob Guccione who published Penthouse!

Every issue had an in-depth interview with a prominent and interesting scientist, figures like Alan Guth or Luc Montagnier or Morris Berman.
One issue was a little more off-beat, the interview was with an anthropologist, whose student life and career went like this:

Attending the University Of Montana in Missoula, this student loved drinking every day, so he asked the question - “What’s a relatively easy major with little math, that will interfere the least with my drinking?” - and landed on Anthropology.

After graduation, the next question became - “What will I do my thesis about?” - a friend gave him the vague advice to do it on something he knew or was passionate about, and like a “eureka” moment, it hit him: “I’m gonna research drinking culture, bars!”

And so, he became one of the rarefied few for whom drinking on the job was basically a requirement!

A journal about the science of blackjack and hookers?

There’s a behind the bastards about him.

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-robert-maxwell-how-ghislaine-274165028/

If you didn’t know this, it’d be weird how many academics are in the Epstein files. Once you do know it, it’s obvious.

Oh, and Robert Maxwell was legitimately a badass in WW2. Everything terrible about him starts after that.

hmmm… makes the hanging suicide murder of Aaron Swartz look extra funny

The subscription service/pay-to-play being everywhere has to stop eventually, right?

Like, eventually enough consumers will realize that they are bent over the barrel by their services.

I was darkly joking that Microsoft is like an abuser in another post yesterday, but the more I thought about it, the more the metaphor stuck. They take and take, make decisions on your behalf, cut you off from outsiders and make it increasingly difficult to escape the longer you let them get away with it. And that’s not Microsoft’s fault…that’s capitalism, baby!

Really needs to be a wikipedia style service for academic papers.

In grad school your institution should be paying for fees like that. If the school itself isn’t paying, then doesn’t the supervisor have a grant they can file it under?

I got lucky in that my publication was through a journal that doesn’t charge money for access or submissions. It’s part of our professional organization and our annual membership fees cover the journal’s expenses.

Without independent wealth and deep personal connections it’s incredibly difficult to succeed in academia, regardless of the quality of your research.

Always has been, why do you think he’s called SIR Isaac Newton?

EDIT : Turns out his knighthood was afterwards, but he did have connections. There are several examples of science being the domain of already rich people.

It’s like music. There’s a lot of value in the back catalogue.

It is as if the New Yorker or the Economist demanded that journalists write and edit each other’s work for free, and asked the government to foot the bill. Outside observers tend to fall into a sort of stunned disbelief when describing this setup. A 2004 parliamentary science and technology committee report on the industry drily observed that “in a traditional market suppliers are paid for the goods they provide”. A 2005 Deutsche Bank report referred to it as a “bizarre” “triple-pay” system, in which “the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product”.

Racket.

Maxwell insisted on grand titles – “International Journal of” was a favourite prefix. Peter Ashby, a former vice president at Pergamon, described this to me as a “PR trick”, but it also reflected a deep understanding of how science, and society’s attitude to science, had changed. Collaborating and getting your work seen on the international stage was becoming a new form of prestige for researchers, and in many cases Maxwell had the market cornered before anyone else realised it existed.

If you explain to any outsider that what we call science is a game of collecting and showing off units of prestige, they will be flabbergasted. Maxwell catered to the most superficial and vain aspects of the human psyche, and traded in a measure of righteousness. This is genius, I will grant him that, but opposite to the objectives of science. He made the worst possible metric about which to measure everything, and created a global system of narcissistic organizations selling their souls to publish to these journals.

And scientists are the least probable to rebel against this status quo. If anything, it will make them appear as big-time asses who are full of themselves. They are bound to project more legitimacy onto the system, similar to doomsday cultists.

Aspesi was not the first person to incorrectly predict the end of the scientific publishing boom, and he is unlikely to be the last. It is hard to believe that what is essentially a for-profit oligopoly functioning within an otherwise heavily regulated, government-funded enterprise can avoid extinction in the long run. But publishing has been deeply enmeshed in the science profession for decades. Today, every scientist knows that their career depends on being published, and professional success is especially determined by getting work into the most prestigious journals.

It is the departments’ choice to cancel subscriptions anytime and start publishing on their own terms. They are equally to blame when they esteem reputation above all, and measure reputation by publishing to these journals. Let’s not pretend that big-shot universities are simply taken hostage by a handful corrupt billionaires. They’re in on it.

This article in the Guardian is definitely worth a read if you’re not intimately familiar with just how it got this way… It’s 8 years old so it won’t cover recent history but does give you an idea of how it started.

A very interesting read!

So, what i take form the article, is that Elsevier and other publishers are most similar to a search engine or index: They give you a list of all interesting articles in a field, so you don’t have to search through the millions of scientific articles produced each year yourself.

That makes it kinda similar to google, which is also very profitable, which also turns a profit by giving back user-supplied content to the users. Just that Elsevier charges for that “indexlist” functionality directly, while google takes the game one step further and harvests data, which it then uses to display targeted ads.

In a roundabout way, yes a researcher does get paid for their publications but not directly. Universities exist on their reputation and their reputation is determined, in part, from the publications their researchers make. So a researcher who publishes a lot of high quality publications has a better chance of being offered a position at an institution with a good reputation, which can offer to pay them more.

Yea and idk about other parts of the world, but in Romania, the publishing fee is paid in full by the university if the researcher is part of a doctorate or masters programme… So it’s just science institutions trading money between each other here…

It’s a feedback loop. In order to raise your academic profile and potentially get a job, you need a solid CV full of peer reviewed publications. In order to get published in the first place, you often need money and institutional backing.

If you circumvent that cycle by self-publishing (a solidly logical idea btw), then you’ll have an even harder job getting people to take you seriously and will alienate yourself from “mainstream” academia. It’s messed up. Some open access journals have tried to solve this, with some success, but it’s a systemic problem.

Well yes but you also need to hassle high profile researchers to give their opinion before you host research, and that can get really expens… wait, no, they do it for free as well.

20 years ago we relied on printed books and libraries. I’ve noticed in real time this last decade [nearly] every paper gaining a PDF download button on some website.