this post was submitted on 23 May 2026
253 points (99.2% liked)
LabRats
72 readers
131 users here now
A space for scientists, researchers, and lab workers to share experiment fails, lab wins, and PI woes. Do you need advice, a place to vent, or just some lab-life humor? Want to share your big successes, your awesome protocols, and tricks of the trade? Join your fellow labrats.
founded 1 week ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Back in the day when it involved correspondence by mail and shipping out physical printed journals, maybe it was.
But, yes, in the era of the internet, scientific publishing does not need to be expensive.
... Come to think of it, what's to stop me from making my own free, open-source independent scientific journal right now? It would take time to build the reputation, of course ... but what would actually prevent such a thing?
Technically, nothing. Practically, way more than you imagine. First and most important, you almost certainly wouldn't be indexed by large databases. These provide easy metrics for papers and journals that can be easily evauatrd by funding agencies. If you don't have an impact factor, sciencists cannot use a paper published with you to prove to the funders they produced results.
As for other issues you mention later, you usually confirm that the results shown in your published paper was not used in another paper, so exclusivity definitely exists (preprint servers are usually excluded from this).
Good luck finding reviewers in the age of AI. Nobody wants to do it and there are TONS of papers everywhere. Also, you'd need an editor to choose what is even worth sending for review.
Also, I'm not sure issuing DOIs is free, and you must have DOIs.
I'm waiting until I'm more established in my career. While starting early is good, being known by your community and associated with particular societies or organizations is important for credibility and early buy-in, otherwise you're just slowly posting your own papers online and it looks a little silly. That said, if you're a professor (especially a tenured professor) it's just a matter of hunting down the right software as far as I'm aware.
I'm not even a scientist, lol. And I've only got a bachelor's degree ... in English literature.
But I know how to build a website. ... I could start a website that accepts scientific article submissions and try to recruit experts to submit papers and peer review them... Definitely won't be very prestigious at first, but I think that over time and with careful control to avoid publishing bullshit, that prestige and respect could grow. And, of course, being both free to publish and free to read would be quite a draw, compared to the extortionate expense of other journals.
I think it'd be challenging to convince excellent scientists to publish with an unknown and challenging for someone without a scientific background to identify the more sophisticated forms of automated fraud we currently face.
True. Do existing journals have exclusivity agreements preventing scientists from publishing the same article in more than one journal?
Hopefully, in theory, that's where the peer review comes in. But ... maybe volunteer peer reviewers can't really be trusted to put in the effort to see beyond superficial 'correct-looking' papers? I know some whoppers of obviously AI-generated slop have already made it past the reviewers of even established, prestigious journals.
No, there are no exclusivity agreements. It's a jungle, especially for prestige journals. A lot of scientists just push hard for prestigious journals, especially pre-tenure as prestigious journals supposedly impress tenure review panels. While I personally have my doubts that prestigious journals impress anyone, those who don't push for prestigious journals are often viewed as unable to publish high quality work, so at a minimum, most scientists submit to the most prestigious journal they think will accept them (i.e. mid-tier journals).
When they don't look for prestige, they're usually looking at social factors. Do my peers publish here? Is this associated with one of my societies? This is why some scientists associate more strongly with society journals, but it's certainly not exclusive. While there are free journals out there that will publish whatever you send them, they're mostly filled with trash that respectable scientists don't want to be associated with. A new cheap or free journal comes with that stigma attached -- whether they want it or not.
The problem with peer review is that there are often only a hand full of people in the whole world who have what's required to look at things carefully and ask the relevant questions. You need the technical background and niche familiarity - including having kept up the developments in the niche. Usually the journal editor only knows the field (the broad category of work), so journals ask the author to recommend reviewers. Fraudsters can pretty easily shuffle about reviewers and authors while sticking new names on papers as collaborators, citing previous fraud to boost citations, and publishing stuff that looks broadly like science -- even adding (meaningless, easily obtained) data. It's hard to catch because you don't really know any of the people and can't really tell if the science is uninteresting or part of a ring of fraud.
That's why I think it's better to be established in your community before you push too into strange or radical ideas. You don't have to chase prestige, but do enough to be a known quantity that does good work.
Looking silly is fine, though.
I can't point to exactly when I crossed the line from some nobody who self publishes everything for easy sharing, to respected professional with a deep useful online archive of work.
Maybe that line is still upcoming, actually...lol.
Yeah, I don't know. I'm not willing to chase prestige for tenure, but I don't think I'd be able to get away with self published for career progression. Not that I'm even sure I'll make it that far, I'm struggling just to find a post-doc position.
The publishers, ofc.