How covid-19 bolstered an already perverse publishing system
Link: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.p689
Ross Upshur, pandemic governance expert at the University of
Toronto, Canada, who also teaches research integrity, says that all
this opportunism is nothing new. To him, what happened during
the pandemic reflects an already perverse system of academic
reward that has little motive to change: the gold rush to publish
was simply an extension of the usual “publish or perish” culture.
It’s therefore unsurprising that “people had to become a covid expert
to survive, or at least a self-appointed expert.”
‘Too greedy’: mass walkout at global science journal over ‘unethical’ fees
Link: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/may/07/too-greedy-mass-walkout-at-global-science-journal-over-unethical-fees
Neuroimage, the leading publication globally for brain-imaging research, is one of many journals that are now “open access” rather than sitting behind a subscription paywall. But its charges to authors reflect its prestige, and academics now pay over £2,700 for a research paper to be published. The former editors say this is “unethical” and bears no relation to the costs involved.
Open Access of COVID-19-related publications in the first quarter of 2020: a preliminary study based in PubMed
Link: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9548429/
Regarding the levels of openness, 97.4% of the SARS CoV-2 papers are freely available; similar rates were found for the other coronaviruses. Deeper analysis showed that (i) 68.3% of articles belong to an undefined Bronze category; (ii) 72.1% of all OA papers don’t carry a specific license and in all cases where there is, half of them do not meet Open Access standards; (iii) there is a large proportion that present a copy in a repository, in most cases in PMC, where this trend is also observed. These patterns were found to be repeated in most frequent publishers: Elsevier, Springer and Wiley.
Financial Times: How academic publishers profit from the publish-or-perish culture (Opinion, may be paywalled)
Link: https://www.ft.com/content/575f72a8-4eb2-4538-87a8-7652d67d499e
Financial Times: How academic publishers profit from the publish-or-perish culture (Opinion, may be paywalled)
Journal editors are resigning en masse: what do these group exits achieve? (Behind Paywall)
Link: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-00887-y
Predatory journals: how to avoid being prey? (Royal Society blog post)
Link: https://royalsociety.org/blog/2022/09/research-integrity/
Links to: https://www2.cabells.com/about-predatory
The second link is a company (Cabell) that does "Journal Analytics"
Link to cabells criteria to determine if a journal is predatory: https://cabells.com/predatory-criteria-v1.1
My2Cent: If it is necessary to have private enterprise just to figure out where to publish, maybe the system is suboptimal.
COVID‑19 and the scientific publishing system: growth, open access and scientific fields
Link: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-022-04536-x
How will these differences evolve over time will depend on developing a deeper understanding of the attention of both scientists and attentive publics shift as the pandemic progresses, as well as how scholarly publishers continue to respond the expectations of scientists under pressure to provide new knowledge and, as a consequence, greater certainty about the impacts and duration of the pandemic
How COVID-19 affected academic publishing: a 3-year study of 17 million research papers
Link: https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/dyaf058
A well-functioning information ecosystem is vital in a public health crisis; this study investigates how well the scientific information-generation and -consumption ecosystem worked under the acute stress of the COVID-19 pandemic.
We describe a large wave of COVID-19-related publications and preprints, and a corresponding spike in academic and public consumption of these papers; COVID-19 preprints received more public attention than peer-reviewed papers, on average, and were less likely to be published in peer-reviewed journals than non-COVID-19 preprints. The findings shed light on the functioning of the quality-control mechanisms of science under the stress of a public health crisis and
underline the need for guidelines on public and media engagement with non-peer-reviewed research
Universities Step Up the Fight for Open-Access Research (wired.com, news article)
Link: https://www.wired.com/story/universities-step-up-the-fight-for-open-access-research/
Five years ago, when Jeffrey MacKie-Mason first joined the University of California team that negotiates with academic publishers, he asked a colleague what would happen if he failed to strike a deal. What if, instead, he simply canceled their subscription? “I was told I would be fired the next day,” the UC Berkeley librarian says. Last year, he tested out the theory. The university system had been trying to negotiate a deal to make all of its research open-access—outside of a paywall—with Elsevier, the world’s largest academic publisher. But they were too far apart on what that would cost. So MacKie-Mason’s team walked away. To his surprise, the army of UC researchers who depended on that subscription were willing to go along with it. They’d lose the ability to read new articles in thousands of Elsevier journals, sure, but there were ways to get by without a subscription. They could email researchers directly for copies. The university would pay for individual articles. And yes, unofficially, some would just probably download from Sci-Hub, the illicit repository where virtually every scientific article can be found. To MacKie-Mason, it was clarifying: The conventional wisdom that had weakened his negotiating hand was thoroughly dispelled.
Increasingly, researchers at those places want their work to be accessible to anybody—for the good of scientific inquiry, to be sure, but also because they increasingly receive grants from funders that require it. (Plus, it doesn’t hurt that open-access work is more likely to be seen and cited by other scientists—an important measure of status and influence.)
My2Cent: If it is your prerogative to do science for the sake of status and influence, so be it. However, if this leads to those who do it for the joy of scientific discovery to have to compromise on their own integrity and play along/against with the political games that inevitably arise when status and influence are added to the equation, you are no longer working towards the goals of scientific discovery or the advancement of humanity, but instead working against these in order to satisfy the needs of your ego.
My conclusion:
Let us consider the definition of "Academia":
Merriam Webster:
the life, community, or world of teachers, schools, and education
Cambridge
the part of society, especially universities, that is connected with studying and thinking, or the activity or job of studying:
Oxford
The definition cannot be provided for, as the definition is locked behind a paywall.
Wiktionary:
Borrowed from New Latin acadēmīa, from Ancient Greek Ἀκαδημία (Akadēmía), a grove of trees and gymnasium outside of Athens where Plato taught; from the name of the supposed former owner of that estate, the Attica hero Akademos. Doublet of academy and Akademeia; see also academe. Modern sense of “the world of universities and scholarship” recorded from 1956.
Merriam Webster
Now let us consider the definition of "Science":
1a: knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method
b: such knowledge or such a system of knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena : natural science
2a: a department of systematized knowledge as an object of study
the science of theology
b: something (such as a sport or technique) that may be studied or learned like systematized knowledge
have it down to a science
3: a system or method reconciling practical ends with scientific laws
cooking is both a science and an art
4 capitalized : christian science
5: the state of knowing : knowledge as distinguished from ignorance or misunderstanding
Cambridge
(knowledge from) the careful study of the structure and behaviour of the physical world, especially by watching, measuring, and doing experiments, and the development of theories to describe the results of these activities:
Oxford
Paywalled.