There's a behind the bastards about him.

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-robert-maxwell-how-ghislaine-274165028/

If you didn't know this, it'd be weird how many academics are in the Epstein files. Once you do know it, it's obvious.

Oh, and Robert Maxwell was legitimately a badass in WW2. Everything terrible about him starts after that.

Sometimes I feel like everything shit in the world can be traced back to like a dozen people and their parents and grandparents.

I got lucky in that my publication was through a journal that doesn't charge money for access or submissions. It's part of our professional organization and our annual membership fees cover the journal's expenses.

Without independent wealth and deep personal connections it’s incredibly difficult to succeed in academia, regardless of the quality of your research.

Always has been, ~~why do you think he's called SIR Isaac Newton?~~

EDIT : Turns out his knighthood was afterwards, but he did have connections. There are several examples of science being the domain of already rich people.

Really needs to be a wikipedia style service for academic papers.

In grad school your institution should be paying for fees like that. If the school itself isn't paying, then doesn't the supervisor have a grant they can file it under?

It is so much worse than that.

I spend my time researching the literature on a topic so that I can spend my time and energy writing a grant. It probably won't get funded.

If it does, I get to do a bunch of work. It might involve travel, where I will do everything at minimum expense to save enough money for the coming lab work.

I will spend significant time getting the samples analyzed, spending most of the grant money. Then I will come up with a logical way to interpret the data.

I will spend more time sending a document around to coauthors. This may take months, or even years if the coauthors fight.

We eventually submit to a journal. It gets rejected.

We rewrite and submit again. A few months later, congratulations, you get to publish. Money please.

I work for the money to do the work, I work for the writeup, I fight for the acceptance, and I have to pay to publish.

It's a stupid system.

The subscription service/pay-to-play being everywhere has to stop eventually, right?

Like, eventually enough consumers will realize that they are bent over the barrel by their services.

I was darkly joking that Microsoft is like an abuser in another post yesterday, but the more I thought about it, the more the metaphor stuck. They take and take, make decisions on your behalf, cut you off from outsiders and make it increasingly difficult to escape the longer you let them get away with it. And that's not Microsoft's fault...that's capitalism, baby!

IHMO: All science should be freely accessible, free as in freedom and price.

Taxpayers pay $13B/yr worldwide to the private publishing industry, for content they cannot read.

Remember that 80s magazine OMNI?
Science, tech, sci-fi, Mensa-caliber games... by the very same Bob Guccione who published Penthouse!

Every issue had an in-depth interview with a prominent and interesting scientist, figures like Alan Guth or Luc Montagnier or Morris Berman.
One issue was a little more off-beat, the interview was with an anthropologist, whose student life and career went like this:

Attending the University Of Montana in Missoula, this student loved drinking every day, so he asked the question - "What's a relatively easy major with little math, that will interfere the least with my drinking?" - and landed on Anthropology.

After graduation, the next question became - "What will I do my thesis about?" - a friend gave him the vague advice to do it on something he knew or was passionate about, and like a "eureka" moment, it hit him: "I'm gonna research drinking culture, bars!"

And so, he became one of the rarefied few for whom drinking on the job was basically a requirement!

It’s a feedback loop. In order to raise your academic profile and potentially get a job, you need a solid CV full of peer reviewed publications. In order to get published in the first place, you often need money and institutional backing.

If you circumvent that cycle by self-publishing (a solidly logical idea btw), then you’ll have an even harder job getting people to take you seriously and will alienate yourself from “mainstream” academia. It’s messed up. Some open access journals have tried to solve this, with some success, but it’s a systemic problem.

Peer review is often done by other PhD candidates for free.

sorry, not the first time I saw you saying that.

This idea has been around over 20 years. It dies every time because major lab PIs, usually in US, HATE the idea of not being able to gatekeep research publications in journals of "high impact". This impacts how institutions are assessed, because, God forbid people actually have to read the papers. This feeds back to Editors, so the number one factor that influences Editors now is zip code.

If we went to a simple repository archive, with transparent peer review, then no one could imply their research is more important because of where it was published. We would let citations determine impact. Science publishing has always pushed the idea that if Einstein drove a Honda, everyone who drives a Honda is a genius.

Meanhile, The Lancet (JIF 105) took 12 years to retract a paper linking autism to vaccines, when it was clearly fraudulent from day one. Nature, Science, CELL, just stopped retractions, at best, they have "statements of Editorial Concern". This high JIF model is why Alzheimers research has stalled behind a flawed hypothesis only reinforced by fraudulent work not retracted for 25 years. Some people, like the President of Stanford, rose to the top tier on fraud and journal gatekeeping.

2020 saw the world arguing over ivermectin based off a paper "reviewed" overnight, with the journal Editor as an author. The journal 5 years later refuses to prove the paper was peer reviewed at all. 3,400 citations.

Then we have predatory journals that will publish literally anything for page charges. Examples:

Get me off your fucking mailing list.

and

Chicken, chicken chicken chicken, Chicken? chicken. (Cited 35 times)

The difference is the peer-review process. Without a good peer-review process, those journals won't have a strong cite score and so they will be considered unreliable.