The university should be the place demonstrating socioecological change, serving as a site of experimentation and praxis (see Dunlap et al., 2023). This, however, could not be further from the truth. Beside advancing technologies of digital, political and military control (Chatterjee & Maira, 2014), not to mention genetic dissection and animal vivisection—or some degree of this (Pellow, 2014)—universities fail to enact real examples of socioecological of renewability and sustainability. How come universities are not overflowing with agroecology, permaculture and forest gardens on and inside universities? How come universities are not self-generating their own electricity needs through wind, solar and other lower-carbon infrastructures? We, unfortunately, are witnessing the opposite at university campuses around the world.
This is also a big reason why I’m few weeks from submitting my masters for inspection, and 90% of my references/sources are from Annas Archive / Zlib. Our uni library, in supposedly rich nordic country Finland, just cant afford all the licenses. Luckily all our professors and researchers are in on the “secret”, but its just a fucking joke.
Most of the world economy is on the same fucking joke. Just leeches upon leeches upon leeches… And so few people giving anything usefull to the world. I fucking try, but god damn these useless money leeches in the middle try to make it hard as possible. Fuck. So fucking angry, but what can I do but try to minimize the damages I do on my personal part.
Keep screaming. People are not informed on this.
They are but until “apes together strong” takes peoples minds nothing will change. People feel powerless to do anything so companies just get away with it
That’s why we can’t shut up. :)
Good luck on this final push; take care of yourself where possible and stay angry at the things that deserve it
“OSF is a free, open platform to support your research and enable collaboration.”
Core has also been quite helpfull in open access science.
Such a young person and already so realistic and cynical?
If the research was conducted with public money, it should be freely accessible by the public, change my mind…
Very cool. I know someone, in a fairly small but funded field, who had this sort of requirement — Elsevier had the relevant publication, but they couldn’t publish there due to access policies (or it was going to be painful to do so at any rate). So they started their own publication!
I forgot the specifics, but it essentially uses arXiv as the backend, and there’s a (commercially available?) frontend that lets editors and reviewers do their thing. “Publishing” in this journal is essentially just endorsing an arXiv paper; so it’s open access by design.
Really cool stuff. Their field is small enough that iirc they could kinda get critical mass to give Elsevier the finger and adopt this new platform. Warm fuzzy feeling thinking about it!
You forgot the part where this resulted in giving even more money to the publishers for the “Open access”. World is fucked.
Haha, PeNAS
Buncha dix.
so back in the day we needed publishers for distribution. now with the Internet, distribution is easy. but prices only went up
associate editors and referees are unpaid volunteers. typesetting is also mainly done by the authors. but prices are high because the publisher wants to profit.
there are quite a few high quality journals that are fairly priced and published by non profit publishers. these are the only journals authors should publish in …
Given the times I’ve seen news articles and screenshots of poorly vetted published journals. Surely a free open source publisher managed by the academic community can’t be much worse? I also don’t know shit about the requirements to actually publish so this is probably a naive take
How I sleep after downloading my research papers illegally
is the meme that you’re sleeping well, you’re sleeping in prison or that you’re sleeping well in prison?
science is meant to be pirated.
Fuck publishers.
also a lot of research work in brazil disallows you to get a second job. you are forced to live with the little money they pay you.
its almost like they don’t want there to be research here.
And sci-hub paused adding more papers 😞
What? When? Why? Fuck!
One should do a study about much these supposedly open access journals are profiting and who are their shareholders and what not
I would like to see this written up for a wider context because it’s not just a science problem. The Humanities, Arts, and pretty much the whole campus is the same in this way. It’s why I left academia. Universities are set up wrong because employee incentives make it a sort of feudalistic system. All you have to do is work as a professor for a few years and discover it’s pretty much the same as grad school. You don’t really collaborate with the people you work with every day in person. All your contacts are outside your home campus. Nothing useful for the world happens on the campus. You do that outside of the campus to gain “reknown” and your outside brand gets you cred on campus. Meanwhile, on your home campus, your so-called colleagues do everything they can to block any cross-listing of courses they can because the administration counts the beans. The department needs to generate credit hours. Cross-listing is viewed as bean subtraction.
Peep the link I shared, it’s from the Journal of Politcal Ecology. The author has more bits I’m meaning to dive into.
I think (another reason I left academia) you missed my point. You posted to a science place. My point is that it should be cross posted to many places.
Ha, we agree. I did misunderstand, forgive me. I don’t know honestly if I’m going to stay in this game either after this. Going to be a bit of a dice roll.
Well if you’re a scientist you have better paying options than i did when i left. I was in the Humanities. Still greener pastures and less bullshit for me. I guess I’ll try to be helpful: reprogram your career brain. In the real world, it isn’t all about you and your abilities or how smart you are. It’s just about what you already know from life and your special abilities you gained from work experience, plus your educational background. It was hard for me at first now it’s super easy plus im actually compensated for my work as i think is fair.
I’m an older PhD. I’ve already worked outside of it but found more of the same shit on the inside lol.
Well, im considered quite old myself. I’m no spring chicken. Please do consider posting a little wider when you find the time. I’m sure you have plenty if you’ve been promoted to full. All your little assistant profs are busier than you no doubt.
sighs from Eastern Europe
You’d think that they’re using the money for prizes for reviewers or as scholarship prizes. What are they doing with all that money? Hosting a journal can’t be that expensive.
It all goes to the C-Suits and any investors.
Please don’t give the overlords ideas. “Minimum wage” as a currency? Talk about dystopian present, damn.
Libgen and Scihub exist for this exact reason. How is it we’ve arrived at a situation where capitalists are deciding how knowledge is propagated?
Academic publishing seems like a problem that should be easy to solve. It’s a situation where greed is outright making the service worse for everyone, so it seems like a new journal that does things differently (e.g. by not charging researchers) could become wildly successful… So why doesn’t that happen? Are there barriers to creating new journals?
