Azhir Mahmood  🚀 🤖 🧬 🧠 🪐

How come many of the same people who complain about elitism in science, insane profit making in scientific publishing, and perverseness of impact factors also proudly celebrate BIG papers in Nature & Co? This pride is why the system is so hard to change...

The publishing system and its failures can't be fixed by individual action, only collective action. Getting a glam journal paper can be career defining. That's wrong of course but I'm not sure it's reasonable to ask people to throw that away when doing so won't achieve much.

Yes re collective action. If we all vowed not to submit papers to the big publishing houses, then that would lead to change, no?

Yes. But it won't happen.

Possibly you could have a vow not to submit to those journals conditional on 90% of the field making the same vow. That might work. Still unlikely though.

It's basically a group prisoner's dilemma. Brutally hard to escape without strong incentives.

This.