The link to “open science” doesn’t work for me - guessing it blocks VPNs which is hilarious for a supposed open discussion / decentralization thing
As a scientist, we desperately need it. Corporate ownership of publishing platforms is driving science down extremely badly, while exploiting all parties besides themselves.
Many folks at our institution, including myself, simply cannot afford to publish high-rank open-access articles, and with paid articles, our reach will be minimized, especially now that Sci-Hub does not automatically scrape articles after 2021.
The latter also strikes the other way, as many recent articles are simply unavailable if your institution is not shilling millions to subscribe to all possible publishers. So often a seemingly great article addressing exactly the specific part required is behind a paywall by the unavailable publisher.
Finally, plenty of older articles are lost to time and cannot be found because the hosting platforms have gone down and pirates didn’t step in timely.
All in all, fuck publishers and let’s go fix that shit ASAP. Science is absolutely destroyed by greed nowadays.
Are you familiar with nostr? It seems like a good place to publish scientific papers, but maybe there’s a reason no one has done so. Maybe the nostr protocol needs to add a new spec for scientific papers or something
For all I know, Nostr is a kind of social network with distributed identity.
The problem with publishing elsewhere is not that it’s hard or can’t give you reach.
It’s the scientific metrics dictating your readership, job prospects and essentially your entire scientific career. Not only your ratings are affected, but also ones of your institution, so you have to play by the rules to have a job.
For your publication to count, it needs to be published in journals listed in certain international indexes such as Scopus and Web of Science. These indexes are, in turn, corporate-owned (by Elsevier and Clarivate, respectively) and the respective boards are free to reject (and certainly will reject) your independent publishing source.
Sounds hard to solve. Maybe we need hobbyist scientists who get their income in a different way and just publish studies wherever they feel like, or something
I’d say a noncommercial, maybe UN-backed index that is widely recognized would help.
Also, journal format is extremely outdated. We need to reform the way we store scientific data, and create an international standard.
Honestly, if my career didn’t rely on it, I would entirely skip the publishing part of science. It takes so much more work to communicate your findings than to make them. Of course, that doesn’t help the cause since no one else will be able to build off of my work if I don’t share it.
DaVinci notebooks style science work 🔥
I agree, and they desperately need science communicators. Every department of every university needs people who are qualified scientists who can also speak to the public about what they do.
Decentralization is the protection, but the remedy is education. Having freely available information isn’t enough on its own.
since the only way to get experience is in universities its usually unavailable to people who cant get thier foot in the door. definitely someway around this. and most jobs are asking from said university labs as experience.
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