[FRIAM] How Prestige Journals Remain Elite, Exclusive And Exclusionary | beSpacific

[Marcus Daniels]

There's another side to this, which is that people who sell things often try as hard as they can to make those things seem essential and otherwise out-of-reach.   To lead potential customers into thinking there is energy barrier where there really isn't.   I find I sometimes buy software or a (text)book when I just want to know if there is any there, there.   If I really need it, invariably I end up using open source software.   For example, I can't imagine going back to ArcGIS as now there are QGIS an various geotools for R (the latter two which are free).  This luxury of being able to a bit of lookahead by, well, wasting some money, is what LMIC scientists can't do.   Likewise one could carefully engineer some code to do run quickly, or just slam down some slow scripts on a cluster and waste some energy and get the same answer.  It's not so clear to me that the academic publishing industry really adds a whole lot of value.  Heck, it's not so clear to me that recording ideas forever is really all that useful either, but that's another story. 

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From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of u?l? ???
Sent: Thursday, December 3, 2020 10:34 AM
To: friam at redfish.com
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] How Prestige Journals Remain Elite, Exclusive And Exclusionary | beSpacific

> “Nature might as well post a sign that says "LMICs scientists not welcome here", said Catherine Kyobutungi, Executive Director at the African Population and Health Research Center. “Nature is out of touch with reality. It is a daily struggle for institutions like ours to financially support our researchers to pay open access fees. A few funders pay these fees but only for papers coming out of projects they have funded. I don't know in which world Nature thinks it's okay to charge fees equal to or more than the small grants many LMICs researchers can access,” she added.

It's not well-summed-up by "prestige". This topic came up in FriAM, recently, wherein I objected to purchasing a proprietary tool to replicate the research of another group, preferring a tool that *is* more available to LMIC researchers like R. It was amazing to me that I had to make this argument at all, much less the privileged counter-arguments being made, e.g. that ~$1000/yr for that software wasn't significant compared to what I was being paid. I'd much rather donate $1000/yr to the R Foundation than propagate the pay-to-play game being offered.

There's bound to be a similar model for publications.

On 12/3/20 9:42 AM, Tom Johnson wrote:
> https://www.bespacific.com/how-prestige-journals-remain-elite-exclusiv
> e-and-exclusionary/ 
> <https://www.bespacific.com/how-prestige-journals-remain-elite-exclusi
> ve-and-exclusionary/>



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