Let’s be clear: taxpayers & students fund the research that happens at universities. Peer review is generally provided by volunteers funded the same way. Journals aggregate & sell researchers’ work back to their own taxpayer-funded institutions.
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It’s insane that journals publishing publicly-funded work are able to price the public out of ever seeing it. IMO this likely has 2 prereqs: (a) universities are highly price-insensitive; (b) universities benefit from limiting expertise in the public domain.
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This is probably the most concise takedown of the industry, which explicitly makes its profits by limiting the spread of new research to institutions that themselves generate income by credentialing presumably hard-to-obtain expertise. Nothing about this is controversial.pic.twitter.com/EKQc65tl2e
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Replying to @webdevMason @visakanv
Reality has a surprising amount of detail (1), a thread. Funders, researchers, publishers, & universities are interdependent. People say they hate the subscription model, but rank open access 8/10 in their list of priorities. 1. http://johnsalvatier.org/blog/2017/reality-has-a-surprising-amount-of-detail …
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Funders, the biggest of which get budget allocated from the government, fund research. They need to allocate their funds to the people who will do the best work, but they can't know that apriori, so they tend to rely on experts.
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If you're wondering why they don't just give the money to those experts to begin with, thank you for paying attention. It would be circular without external input, which journals provide through their registration & certification functions:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4473415/ …
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By selecting the best manuscripts & producing them to a high standard, they provide a signal to funding organizations & institutions that the work done was a good use of the funding they received. Here is a hundred other things publishers do:https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2018/02/06/focusing-value-102-things-journal-publishers-2018-update/ …
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There is, as you note, a wide variation in the degree to which one should believe a given research finding. Journals not only improve the work through policies and standards, but also help people arrive at reasonable priors on how much to believe a study.https://www.elsevier.com/connect/how-elsevier-is-breaking-down-barriers-to-reproducibility …
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Journals essentially sell a service that looks like content. Looking at the current & vigorous negotiations between the UC & Elsevier is evidence that price insensitivity doesn't exist (but if it did, it would be at the consortial level). https://liswiki.org/wiki/Alphabetical_List_of_Library_Consortia …
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So I don't expect you to fully understand all the above complexity the first time you hear about it; I'm sharing it to make the case that it's not as simple as you seem to think. Maybe it's irrelevant, though, because your main concern seems to be gatekeeping? /end
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“I don’t expect you to fully understand”

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Replying to @webdevMason @visakanv
I shared literally thousands of pages of dense material. I wouldn't expect anyone to have read it all, much less understand how it all fits together.
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