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Excellent article on the cartels that run the academic information industry. If more students realized that massive amounts of their tuition goes towards paying the insane fees for certain journals and databases I bet they'd spend more time utilizing the library's resources.
Excellent article on the cartels that run the academic information industry. If more students realized that massive amounts of their tuition goes towards paying the insane fees for certain journals and databases I bet they'd spend more time utilizing the library's resources.
And everyone ignores the huge costs to publish these things. Meanwhile, they can accept almost no advertising (due to conflicts with the peer review process). I know I subscribe to both Science and Nature to the whooping tune of 75 a year each. The reason it costs a school so much to license these journals is because so many people are accessing them through the libraries.
So thousands of students access these (at a mid size state college) journals, no advertising to defray costs, and maintaining editors who are PhDs. and you see why it may cost $10,000 a year (what it cost at RU a school with 50,000 students) to get all of the journals Science puts out (20+ when I was there).
And everyone ignores the huge costs to publish these things. Meanwhile, they can accept almost no advertising (due to conflicts with the peer review process). I know I subscribe to both Science and Nature to the whooping tune of 75 a year each. The reason it costs a school so much to license these journals is because so many people are accessing them through the libraries.
So thousands of students access these (at a mid size state college) journals, no advertising to defray costs, and maintaining editors who are PhDs. and you see why it may cost $10,000 a year (what it cost at RU a school with 50,000 students) to get all of the journals Science puts out (20+ when I was there).
Not that bad of a deal? Please explain that one to me.
What exactly do journal publishers produce? Nothing. All of their information comes from tax payer funded projects at universities. What exactly do publishers edit? Next to nothing. All the editing is done through peer review and is done for free. Some journals cost as much as $20k a year for a library. Subscription to databases such as Scifinder can cost companies and schools close to $100,000 dollars. Where do all of those costs go? They go to students who are forced to shell out even more money for tuition. And this is all from taxpayer funded projects that generate information that SHOULD be publicly available.
And everyone ignores the huge costs to publish these things. Meanwhile, they can accept almost no advertising (due to conflicts with the peer review process). I know I subscribe to both Science and Nature to the whooping tune of 75 a year each. The reason it costs a school so much to license these journals is because so many people are accessing them through the libraries.
So thousands of students access these (at a mid size state college) journals, no advertising to defray costs, and maintaining editors who are PhDs. and you see why it may cost $10,000 a year (what it cost at RU a school with 50,000 students) to get all of the journals Science puts out (20+ when I was there).
I've began working on my masters thesis, most of the 'Articles' are people reviewing people's reviews, of people's reviews of someone who did ACTUAL work!
Waste of trees or dinosaurs depending on format.
The only reason they are being accessed is because of class requirements, which honestly, I don't think much of... (As I said, it is as stated above)
I'm sure I'll get flamed for butchering the sacred cow, but there it is.
I have an instrument in my lab that is rare enough that if I put just about any material in it and analyzed it for a few days I could produce enough data that a journal somewhere would accept it. My field is so specialized that the majority of journals would not be able to find someone qualified to review my work and point out that it is pointless. The new result would be that I could publish garbage in a mid to low tier journal and no one would ever know.
The high tier journals like science and nature are the filters. Nearly all of the research presented there is very high quality. The cost of filtering through all of the garbage requires thousands of hours of the most specialized experts in the field's time. There are plenty of free journals. Scientists are hesitant to publish quality research there because there is so much worthless research being spammed through and you can't find the appropriate specialized editors for free. I used to review articles for a mid-tier journal (for free) and it is a very difficult job. Once I got a tenure track position I no longer had time to do it.
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