The sheer amount of mummies they have on display at the British Museum genuinely made me uncomfortable. Walking through those exhibits, the main thought in my head was just “hey, you guys think you should put some of these back?”
Surely there has to be a cost to the infrastructure of publishing and curation though. And possibly all the work of setting up and organizing the peer review process. So they probably charge the institutions or authors submitting the paper instead of their readers. But perhaps we should treat scientific journals as a public good, like libraries, or at least have a publicly funded option. Or have universities and institutions fund it for the public good.
But it’s mostly a scam. The costs don’t remotely compare to the revenue. Reviewers time is not paid, and there’s a price to both publish and access. It’s all about the prestige to publish. If you contact the author directly they’ll typically gladly send you the article for free.
Oh absolutely. I agree. I don’t think anyone’s disputing that something about it needs to change. Even given that things cost money to run, for profit journals that can basically act as gatekeepers means there’s also going to be excessive price gouging and profiteering and that needs to change.
The issue is partly that, over time, private entities are going to price gouge or take similar measures (see: “enshittification”) in order to keep growing as profit falls over time. That’s just how the profit motive works, it eventually optimizes everything for profit, not just what you are comfortable with having turned into a vehicle aimed solely at making money.
So yes, this and many other important things should be treated as public goods.
Not to mention that system started about four centuries ago, long before the Internet was invented. I’d assume that back then, the costs and effort of operating a journal really did justify the prices they charged.
I wanna open a beer garden the size of a parking spot next to it that sells cans of Rainier for a dollar out of a cooler and has a boom box and some plastic kiddie furniture. Party on.
Fun Definitely Not Made Up Fact: The sea-stars that you find on the beach are actually the disembodied heads sent out like probes by one mega-mother-sea-star that sits miles away at the bottom of the ocean, biding her time until she can finally resurface and enslave whats left of humanity.
Beer’s similar: Give beer sugars, the yeast generates poison to try and prevent other microorganisms from surviving and eventually the yeast poisons its own environment enough that it can no longer continue living.
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