Biden administration apparently already moved to an open access mandate, but without closing the "gold open access" AKA pay2publish loophole. Effective 2025. Great timing.
Mandating open access is the first step. The only other thing the federal government needs to do is disallow federal funds from paying open access fees. Yes, in theory the money for those fees could be sourced from somewhere else, but in practice they mostly won’t be; as someone who has done federally funded research, when the feds are paying for something it’s treated as free, but when they’re not it’s heavily scrutinized.
The most obvious thing the federal government can do to reduce journal costs is to stop making research grants. The point of publishing in an expensive journal is to look good in front of third parties. Specifically, in front of granting agencies.
I've finished a string of research that could potentially shake up Economics forever. Journals have not been kind to say the least. A fren of an acquaintance is even trying to squeeze money out of me to let me attach his name so the journals will revere his name (and profit reputation wise I guess too from my work, so scummy of him).
It took me learning Rosicrucian magic to get even to the review stage. Only one journal has completely rejected a work so far (Finance Research Letters; the reviewer told me to "write a real paper" instead of 7 pages of theorems which "should be in the appendix"; meanwhile the desk reject in Review of Financial Markets adored the work but could not incorporate it because of topic inappropriateness)
when I get the John Bates Clark medal (maybe even the Fields with my more theoretical stochastic processes work) there *will* be a reckoning
All these proposals strike me as needling around the edges, while avoiding the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that the academic promotion system is broken.
The journal Cartel is merely one symptom of the problem.
Since we're dreaming...... a few of the people involved in those "Best College" rankings getting randomly chosen for public execution. Thomas SoSowell has some great writing about the subject that could be used in announcing the program.😊
This is such a stupid coordination problem I'm amazed the government is needed to solve it. Why can't the leadership of the top universities, labs, etc. in a field just get together and make an agreement to just post research online for free, or at least to set a rule that they *cannot* pay more than X for publication? If enough of the top research isn't in the journal anymore, the system very quickly breaks down.
Hey could I ask you about something I saw this organization called the liberal project and they made a bunch of claims and about immigration could I ask you to take a look and see if they're valid or not
As a Scientific Editor for a major academic journal, I can say that we are operating at basically break-even... no significant profits as such. As for your "Government Journal" suggestion... Yes, that's a horrible idea.
Yes, but is that necessary? It was in a time of limited space, when everything had to be printed on paper exactly once and then physically transported to many people. Why not just have research papers posted online by their institutions without any of that? There's no need for filtering - anything that someone thinks is worth writing a paper about can be made available. Sloppiness and academic dishonesty can be dealt with by the researchers' institutions; even if they don't care about actually producing useful research, your people's papers being full of nonsense is bad for prestige. Editing can be done in real time in response to feedback from readers; with the ability to instantly edit online documents, there's no reason you can't go through 20 versions while the thing is live. The other two are already done by the institutions which generate the research. I can believe that your ledger profits aren't large, but that may be obscuring the fact that your services are fundamentally unnecessary.
Biden administration apparently already moved to an open access mandate, but without closing the "gold open access" AKA pay2publish loophole. Effective 2025. Great timing.
https://www.science.org/content/article/white-house-requires-immediate-public-access-all-u-s--funded-research-papers-2025
Mandating open access is the first step. The only other thing the federal government needs to do is disallow federal funds from paying open access fees. Yes, in theory the money for those fees could be sourced from somewhere else, but in practice they mostly won’t be; as someone who has done federally funded research, when the feds are paying for something it’s treated as free, but when they’re not it’s heavily scrutinized.
China, the research leader, is already hard at work on this, with the world's #3 journal run by young volunteer scientists.
The most obvious thing the federal government can do to reduce journal costs is to stop making research grants. The point of publishing in an expensive journal is to look good in front of third parties. Specifically, in front of granting agencies.
I've finished a string of research that could potentially shake up Economics forever. Journals have not been kind to say the least. A fren of an acquaintance is even trying to squeeze money out of me to let me attach his name so the journals will revere his name (and profit reputation wise I guess too from my work, so scummy of him).
It took me learning Rosicrucian magic to get even to the review stage. Only one journal has completely rejected a work so far (Finance Research Letters; the reviewer told me to "write a real paper" instead of 7 pages of theorems which "should be in the appendix"; meanwhile the desk reject in Review of Financial Markets adored the work but could not incorporate it because of topic inappropriateness)
when I get the John Bates Clark medal (maybe even the Fields with my more theoretical stochastic processes work) there *will* be a reckoning
All these proposals strike me as needling around the edges, while avoiding the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is that the academic promotion system is broken.
The journal Cartel is merely one symptom of the problem.
Since we're dreaming...... a few of the people involved in those "Best College" rankings getting randomly chosen for public execution. Thomas SoSowell has some great writing about the subject that could be used in announcing the program.😊
Note that the US government is taking some hesitant steps in this direction:
https://www.nsf.gov/public-access
https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/pubs/2023/nsf23104/nsf23104.pdf
If I understand correctly, all NSF-funded research must soon be accessible without fee and without an embargo at https://par.nsf.gov/
This is such a stupid coordination problem I'm amazed the government is needed to solve it. Why can't the leadership of the top universities, labs, etc. in a field just get together and make an agreement to just post research online for free, or at least to set a rule that they *cannot* pay more than X for publication? If enough of the top research isn't in the journal anymore, the system very quickly breaks down.
Hey could I ask you about something I saw this organization called the liberal project and they made a bunch of claims and about immigration could I ask you to take a look and see if they're valid or not
As a Scientific Editor for a major academic journal, I can say that we are operating at basically break-even... no significant profits as such. As for your "Government Journal" suggestion... Yes, that's a horrible idea.
What are your costs?
Editorial staff, copyediting, data archival, online journal production.
Yes, but is that necessary? It was in a time of limited space, when everything had to be printed on paper exactly once and then physically transported to many people. Why not just have research papers posted online by their institutions without any of that? There's no need for filtering - anything that someone thinks is worth writing a paper about can be made available. Sloppiness and academic dishonesty can be dealt with by the researchers' institutions; even if they don't care about actually producing useful research, your people's papers being full of nonsense is bad for prestige. Editing can be done in real time in response to feedback from readers; with the ability to instantly edit online documents, there's no reason you can't go through 20 versions while the thing is live. The other two are already done by the institutions which generate the research. I can believe that your ledger profits aren't large, but that may be obscuring the fact that your services are fundamentally unnecessary.
Thanks for explaining the process. It currently sounds like it was designed and executed by the Deep State. I think your stated solutions have merit,