Apr 28, 2022 01:29 AM
(This post was last modified: Apr 28, 2022 04:08 PM by C C.)
Risk aversion is ruining science + Woke MIT brings back standardized tests
https://www.scivillage.com/thread-12148-...l#pid50443
Scientific publishing is a scam fed by the government
https://www.realclearscience.com/article...29132.html
EXCERPTS (J Scott Turner): . . . OUP is more than an academic publisher: it is one of a group of four mega-publishing houses which together dominate scientific journals. The others include Elsevier, Nature Springer (the publisher and owner of Nature), and Taylor Francis. One of these, Elsevier, manages about 2,500 scientific journals.
It is a very profitable business: in FY 2018, Elsevier raked in about $3.3 billion in revenue, at remarkable profit margins (35%-50%). The revenues come largely from page charges that are assessed for a paper to appear in one of Elsevier’s journals. These range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, depending upon the journal. Authors do not pay out of pocket, but usually from a research grant to one of the authors.
[...] There is fierce competition among the scientific publishing firms to capture as much of that revenue stream as possible. Like a war of competing cartels, there are casualties, and these have been piling up ... To solidify their hold, the scientific publishers tightly restrict access to the content of their journals...
[...] You might expect scientists would oppose monopolistic behaviors like this, but scientists have been totally sucked into the publishers’ games. Why? The modern profession of science has come to be dominated by an ethic of production: advancement and rewards are assessed, not by discovery, but by how “productive” a scientist is. This enforces a kind of social credit scheme, built around publication. A publication in a so-called “high impact” journal will earn a scientist more social credits toward promotion and tenure compared to publishing in journals not considered high impact. Scientists are therefore strongly motivated to place their work in high impact journals.
The scientific publishers rig impact figures as well. [...] Open Access (OA) publishing emerged in the early 2000s as a reaction to these trends. At first, the concern was fairness. Why should the public, who largely pays for the research, face obstacles in seeing the results of public largesse? There was also a general discontent that scientists, by being forced to surrender their copyrights, were losing control over the discourse of science.
Open Access was supposed to solve that, by making content freely available to the public, and allowing authors to retain their copyrights. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) became the principal repository for Open Access publications. There were still page charges to authors, which ran typically $3,000-$5,000 per publication. This began to cut into the revenue streams of the science publishing houses, leading them to begin offering their own Open Access options to authors. This would bring papers out from behind the publishers’ paywalls, as long as authors were willing to pay higher page charges. All good and virtuous, but the main outcome was to add to the scientific publishers’ already enormous revenue streams, at the expense of repositories like PLoS.
At this point, national funding agencies began to step in, with good intentions naturally, and with the predictable result that the road to perdition was not blocked but graded and smoothed. Several government research organizations formulated a plan to bring order to the Open Access publishing marketplace. The result was Plan S, which mandated that any researcher funded by their research bodies could only publish in journals that offered Open Access. Thus were the big scientific publishers brought fully into the Big Science cartel, organized no longer around the pursuit of discovery, but around the relentless pursuit of government research money, that is to say, by productivity.
The money flowing through the Big Science cartel to support productivity is already immense, and it is growing exponentially. The result has been a commensurably increasing number of scientific publications, which bear only a tenuous relationship to discovery; the whole point of the enterprise, really. This money-driven transformation of the culture of science is the cause of various well-publicized problems with the scientific literature – the “irreproducibility crisis” being one, and the disturbing claim that a substantial proportion of the published scientific literature is never read.
[...] This raises the question no one wants to ask: Of what use is the scientific literature anymore? Is it to promote intellectual conversation among like-minded peers? Is it to benefit science, and the society that so generously supports it?
[...] So, the question: would science be better off if government got out of the science game altogether? In so many ways, their support has proven to be a poison pill. Perhaps we should strive to return the science ecosystem to what it was before governments decided to “help?” It’s worth considering.
Scientists are waking up to this scam, and are turning more frequently to independent platforms... (MORE - missing details)
https://www.scivillage.com/thread-12148-...l#pid50443
Scientific publishing is a scam fed by the government
https://www.realclearscience.com/article...29132.html
EXCERPTS (J Scott Turner): . . . OUP is more than an academic publisher: it is one of a group of four mega-publishing houses which together dominate scientific journals. The others include Elsevier, Nature Springer (the publisher and owner of Nature), and Taylor Francis. One of these, Elsevier, manages about 2,500 scientific journals.
It is a very profitable business: in FY 2018, Elsevier raked in about $3.3 billion in revenue, at remarkable profit margins (35%-50%). The revenues come largely from page charges that are assessed for a paper to appear in one of Elsevier’s journals. These range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, depending upon the journal. Authors do not pay out of pocket, but usually from a research grant to one of the authors.
[...] There is fierce competition among the scientific publishing firms to capture as much of that revenue stream as possible. Like a war of competing cartels, there are casualties, and these have been piling up ... To solidify their hold, the scientific publishers tightly restrict access to the content of their journals...
[...] You might expect scientists would oppose monopolistic behaviors like this, but scientists have been totally sucked into the publishers’ games. Why? The modern profession of science has come to be dominated by an ethic of production: advancement and rewards are assessed, not by discovery, but by how “productive” a scientist is. This enforces a kind of social credit scheme, built around publication. A publication in a so-called “high impact” journal will earn a scientist more social credits toward promotion and tenure compared to publishing in journals not considered high impact. Scientists are therefore strongly motivated to place their work in high impact journals.
The scientific publishers rig impact figures as well. [...] Open Access (OA) publishing emerged in the early 2000s as a reaction to these trends. At first, the concern was fairness. Why should the public, who largely pays for the research, face obstacles in seeing the results of public largesse? There was also a general discontent that scientists, by being forced to surrender their copyrights, were losing control over the discourse of science.
Open Access was supposed to solve that, by making content freely available to the public, and allowing authors to retain their copyrights. The Public Library of Science (PLoS) became the principal repository for Open Access publications. There were still page charges to authors, which ran typically $3,000-$5,000 per publication. This began to cut into the revenue streams of the science publishing houses, leading them to begin offering their own Open Access options to authors. This would bring papers out from behind the publishers’ paywalls, as long as authors were willing to pay higher page charges. All good and virtuous, but the main outcome was to add to the scientific publishers’ already enormous revenue streams, at the expense of repositories like PLoS.
At this point, national funding agencies began to step in, with good intentions naturally, and with the predictable result that the road to perdition was not blocked but graded and smoothed. Several government research organizations formulated a plan to bring order to the Open Access publishing marketplace. The result was Plan S, which mandated that any researcher funded by their research bodies could only publish in journals that offered Open Access. Thus were the big scientific publishers brought fully into the Big Science cartel, organized no longer around the pursuit of discovery, but around the relentless pursuit of government research money, that is to say, by productivity.
The money flowing through the Big Science cartel to support productivity is already immense, and it is growing exponentially. The result has been a commensurably increasing number of scientific publications, which bear only a tenuous relationship to discovery; the whole point of the enterprise, really. This money-driven transformation of the culture of science is the cause of various well-publicized problems with the scientific literature – the “irreproducibility crisis” being one, and the disturbing claim that a substantial proportion of the published scientific literature is never read.
[...] This raises the question no one wants to ask: Of what use is the scientific literature anymore? Is it to promote intellectual conversation among like-minded peers? Is it to benefit science, and the society that so generously supports it?
[...] So, the question: would science be better off if government got out of the science game altogether? In so many ways, their support has proven to be a poison pill. Perhaps we should strive to return the science ecosystem to what it was before governments decided to “help?” It’s worth considering.
Scientists are waking up to this scam, and are turning more frequently to independent platforms... (MORE - missing details)