A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
Plenty of people here saying: "But the scientists were paid by a public university!", yeah whatever. If I'm financing a scientist with my taxes, they should have their work published publicly, not be incentivised to publish in private journals that will profit from their work while adding pretty little.
I've never seen this meme format! Exciting!
Love that new meme smell
Is there a reason reasearch pdf:s isnt published on github or simillar instead?
Peer reviews. For the results to be acceptable around the scientific community, their methods and conclusions need to be validated by at least 2 other scientists familiar with that subject. Like someone said, there is axiv.org, that lets you upload your paper without this review, but it's more of a method to claim precedence if someone else publishes a similar work. It's usually not a scitation source that is taken seriously. This could, of course, be improved! There are open access journals that charge the scientists instead of the readers, but there are several scam journals popping up every day that will usually publish anything without reviews.
Open access fees are generally like $4000 per article. Now find a grad student or postdoc (the people actually writing these articles) who has that kind of money to spend because they "believe in free and open access to information."
arxiv.org is a thing
Well, I am sure there is a scam, because there's money involved and it's happening in this day and age, but talking is free, listening is free, yet the phone company makes both sides pay so they can talk and listen, and I wouldn't consider that a scam.
It's about the margins. If your phone contract was "100€/minute" that would be a scam. Also journals do have a lot more power than phone companies. Journals aren't a network of providers where you can choose whichever is cheapest.
Like I said I was expecting some sort of borderline legal scam. It's just that the meme only mentions that you have to pay them which in itself is not a scam.
The meme leaves out the very important detail that most of the researchers working "for free" in the first panel are definitely getting paid, and usually by public funding (public universities and/or grants from taxpayer-funded institutions like NIH, NSF, etc.). That's a big part of what makes it a scam.
Extorting you out of your money via unfair prices by misusing your power is borderline legal. There are consumer protections against this kind of stuff.
Publish on a public university or institute
But mah points...
What points?
Points for the scientific metrics. You get more points for publishing in higher impact journals.
People downvoting cause they have no idea how this shit works
Elsevier business model or exploitation business model as I prefer to say
shadow libraries. hate that they need to exist, but its up there with 'gay furry hackers' for setting specific coolness
Oprah's just thinking about how to get her own publishing company into that business.
She knows a good scam when she sees it.
Spez already had it figured out.
Fuck /u/spez
Fuck /u/spez
The new model is actually to charge the author a shitton of money (think thousands of dollars) after the paper has been accepted. After it should be accessible through