YSK: That publishers do not fund or incentivize academic research.
Authors of scientific papers do not receive money for publishing them (sometimes they have to pay). The peer reviewers work for free. The high prices of scientific journals simply turn into obscenely huge profit margins for the publishers. Publishers harm research by siphoning off money from research budgets and also by preventing better ways of sharing research. Their obscene profits depend on doing things a certain way.
Funny story: Traditionally, researchers have transferred the copyrights to their papers to the journal. When the internet had become a thing, authors made their own papers available directly for download. Publishers then went after the authors for sharing their own research.
I see what you are asking: Why doesn’t market competition drive down prices?
People have to publish in prestigious journals to make a career in science. So, that’s the “service”. Their position in the system lets them extract payment for something that other people deliver.
Even if someone opens up a competing journal, they are not likely to get quality submissions, because publishing in some unknown journal does not help the CV.
At the same time, the cost is mostly born by other people. Librarians pay for the subscriptions. I’m not sure why there is not more pushback from that angle. Eventually, institutions need access to these journals.
The cost to scientific research is spread over all society. No one person feels it. No one can even be sure how much better things would be under a reformed system.
Progress happens only when someone goes too far and causes outrage in the academic community. There has been some progress to move to a better model. But all that money can pay for a lot of PR.
ETA: On second thought, I’m probably simply not aware of the efforts of librarians, etc.
He actually wrote 2 of those. For the sake of education, let’s provide the complete text of one (via deepl.com):
spoilerLick my a… right already, lick it nice and clean, lick it clean, lick my a… That’s a greasy desire, only well lubricated with butter, the licking of the roast my daily do. Three lick more than two, go ahead, take the test and lick, lick, lick. Everyone licks his own a…
The phrase, aka the Swabian Salute, had been popularized a few years earlier in Goethe’s quite successful play Götz von Berlichingen. It is the knight’s reply to a demand for surrender. Götz may be more famous for his “iron fist/iron hand”, a prosthetic hand (at least, I saw a post about it trending on reddit a few years back). Two prosthetics that are thought to have belonged to him, may be seen in a museum. He lived ~1480-1562 and lost his hand, according to his autobiography, in 1504 to a field artillery shell when he besieged a Bavarian town.
I think it’s fair I should also share where I stand on this. In my OP I wanted to avoid soap-boxing and shaping the replies.
I, (german/elder millennial) used to think of it as right wing. That is partly because the social democrats who define (center-) left for me reject it. And partly because of Milton Friedman and his UBI proposal. Friedman was a noted right-wing economist of the Chicago school and was advisor to both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher.
Nowadays, I think of it as more liberal than either left or right. Like a number of people here said, I see it depending on what other policies surround it.
The reason I asked is, because I have seen a number of posts on this server proposing a UBI as a solution for some social ills; especially feared future mass unemployment. To me, looking to improve existing unemployment benefits and other programs would be a more obvious solution (not least, because it’s more politically achievable).
Lemmy is supposed to be left-wing. Which made me wonder if this indicated a right-ward shift in economic policy preference. So I tried to get at this in a slightly subtle way.
One problem is that one wants an objective way to judge someone’s productivity. You cannot truly judge the quality of a paper unless you are an expert in that same field. Your institution may not have such an expert. Besides, in science you really don’t want to rely on personal judgment, if possible. Maybe there’s also marketing efforts going on that encourage doing things in away that allows extracting monopoly rents but I don’t have evidence.
IMHO the overarching problem is that the whole of academic publishing has not arrived in the internet age. You have all the usual problems with reforming social systems and, on top of that, there’s a lot of money at stake for some people.