Timeline for Why does academia still use scientific journals and not peer-reviewed government funded alternatives?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
12 events
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| Apr 16, 2021 at 16:31 | comment | added | Trusly | @Jakob Just because your customers happen to be universities doesn't make it non-free. My university buys pens from staples too, does that make staples a state industry? "The government" doesn't decide to support journals, there are no laws about journals. Individual university admins decide which service to pay for on their own initiative. Not all universities are public btw. | |
| Apr 16, 2021 at 16:26 | history | edited | Trusly | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Mar 12, 2021 at 10:14 | comment | added | Jakob | Claiming that scientific publishing is as it is "because of free market" seems a bit odd. The publishers make their money mostly not because individuals decide to pay for a service, but because publicly funded bodies (funding agencies, libraries, universities) pay for them. The gouverment could well decide that it does not want to waste its money on this, but support arxiv or whatever instead, which would make the whole thing neither more nor less socialist than it is now. (Whether it would be a good decision is another question.) | |
| May 8, 2019 at 2:02 | comment | added | Trusly | As for getting into politics, OP is asking why the government does not provide a service that currently provided by free enterprise. The question is necessarily about politics. To ignore politics in answering this would quite literally be assuming an academic point of view. | |
| May 8, 2019 at 2:01 | comment | added | Trusly | @cag51 We can interpret the question as either (1) "why have for-profit journals not been replaced by any other system?" or (2) "why have they not been replaced by a government service?". I chose 2, because OP specifically worded it that way, and because if I chose 1 the correct answer is no answer at all, but a a duplicate flag. As I said, I favor 2 and do not believe this is a duplicate. | |
| Apr 27, 2019 at 23:10 | comment | added | cag51♦ | My point was that your answer spends a lot of words discussing different philosophies of government, whereas there are solutions (like funding arXiv to score papers) that would be compatible with the US's version of capitalism (it's an extension of our existing research expenditures, and could actually save money for the reasons OP describes). But again, this is getting into politics -- from an academic point of view, the answer is that we don't use such a system because it doesn't exist (as you say in your second paragraph) | |
| Apr 27, 2019 at 22:58 | comment | added | user71659 | Editors getting paid full-time by journals are an exception. Cell, Nature, Science yes, but not for lesser journals. Those that do have some sort of part-time pay for the chief editor, but the tasks you describe are delegated to unpaid associate editors. | |
| Apr 27, 2019 at 22:01 | comment | added | Trusly | In fact a lot of private companies now do publish research on their blogs, and it gets a lot of attention. But the format isn't always quite what you would expect in a paper, for better or for worse. I do like your idea of rating arxiv, while arxiv doesn't do it yet bioarxiv does allow comments on submissions. But people don't seem to like commenting much (unless a very high profile submission), they prefer to email the author. | |
| Apr 27, 2019 at 21:56 | comment | added | Trusly | @cag51 I was actually going to say, but decided not to digress, that you don't need any fancy government system, you can just write posts on your blog, and the peers (or anyone else really) can just write comments with their name, or write a response post on their own blog. But then I realize OP specifically says a government-run system, which I think is basically a socialist thing to do so if your government doesn't like socialism, they wouldn't do it. | |
| Apr 27, 2019 at 21:50 | comment | added | cag51♦ | Nice analysis. I don't think adopting a solution like this would necessarily lead to socialism -- it could be as simple as funding reviewers to rate arXiv articles 1-9...if an "arXiv 9" is widely known to be equivalent to a "nature" paper, that could be a painless way to wean us off of journals. But this is leading to a political answer rather than an academic one. | |
| Apr 27, 2019 at 21:37 | history | edited | Trusly | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Apr 27, 2019 at 20:47 | history | answered | Trusly | CC BY-SA 4.0 |