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!
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.
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.
Publish on a public university or institute
Points for the scientific metrics. You get more points for publishing in higher impact journals.
