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?
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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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I do not think the record-keeping, certification, and signaling functions — all of which, in any other context, scream “overpriced consultant” — can possibly override the value lost to pay-to-play capture of public research. I do not think this is an oversight. Incentives matter.
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Replying to @webdevMason @visakanv
Here's another place where the distinction between research and publication thereof is important.
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I’m not sure why you think I’m failing to make that distinction. Acknowledging the symbiotic relationship between publishers & institutions that constrains both the nature of the work that gets done & which people have access to it is not conflating the players.
6:28 PM - 1 Mar 2019
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