Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

I eagerly followed this conversation hoping for something more substantial than this. I’m pretty sure any person who seriously cares about dismantling the publishing-industrial complex, cares in part because they recognize that research is important & should be accessible to all

I did go into greater detail, but the thread fractured into several pieces. I agree research is important, but the discussion was about publications of research. Anyone can post their manuscript online, but that doesn't necessarily make it accessible.

The concept of common pool resources is a useful framework here. The knowledge itself is a common good that is neither rivalrous nor excludable, but access to facilities, publishing venues, and grants is very much rivalrous.

Is it? Publishers aren’t financially enabling research. They’re providing the service of controlling its distribution, maintaining institutional exclusivity over respected work, & kingmaking scholars who play the game. Who’s actually funding the work?

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.

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.

I hear what you're saying Mason, but I also think that 99% of people wouldn't understand 99% of scholarship. That includes me: I don't understand most articles in biology, math, physics, etc., even as someone who was well into the 99.9th percentile on standardized tests.

The wild thing about the Internet is that 1%, or even 0.1%, is a Lot Of People And those people can then make the content even more accessible for everyone else