“Clearly something you want me to do because you keep on paying, lol.”
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2025
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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!
Fun (random shit I heard on the internet): the enshittification of journals mostly started with Pergamon Press which was founded by Ghislaine Maxwell's father.
There's a behind the bastards about him.
Are we sure that current events aren’t just one long behind the bastards episode?
You mean a matrix style dystopian nightmare? One can only hope.
It's bastards all the way down
Bastards... what a bunch of bastards.
Behind the bastard is just another bastard standing in line
Fantastic episode
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.
People that do well in wartime and during peacetime are different type of people.
hmmm… makes the hanging ~~suicide~~ murder of Aaron Swartz look extra funny
Do these researches even get paid for publishing their work
Yea and idk about other parts of the world, but in Romania, the publishing fee is paid in full by the university if the researcher is part of a doctorate or masters programme... So it's just science institutions trading money between each other here...
In a roundabout way, yes a researcher does get paid for their publications but not directly. Universities exist on their reputation and their reputation is determined, in part, from the publications their researchers make. So a researcher who publishes a lot of high quality publications has a better chance of being offered a position at an institution with a good reputation, which can offer to pay them more.
In grad school I remember being encouraged to submit a paper to a journal that would have charged me a few hundred dollars to put it in for peer review, and I told my advisor no, I needed to buy groceries, I would not throw my money away for an extra line on my CV. He got all flustered and it was a great example of why higher education is so fucked. My advisor, who ostensibly understood my background and means, could not understand how such a relatively small fee would be so prohibitive. He was incapable of understanding that I was essentially unemployed while enrolled as his grad student, and every dollar of funding went to bare essentials so I could continue breathing. He had access to discretionary funds for this exact kind of issue (I found out later), and didn’t think to offer.
Without independent wealth and deep personal connections it’s incredibly difficult to succeed in academia, regardless of the quality of your research.
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?
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.
Also, Newton was not born with the connection, he made them in Grantham. He had a very strained relationship with his mother and step father and was raised by his grandmother.
I was talking about his uncle that gave him an in for University
His uncle the Reverend William Ayscough, who had studied at Cambridge, recommended him to the university.
But I just read that shit off wikipedia so, I'm no scholar. 🤷
- Neils Bohr, from a Jewish/Danish banking family.
- James Clark Maxwell inherited land and wealth in Scotland.
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz… look at the size of the wig on the man!
Neils Bohr, from a Jewish/Danish banking family.
come on man, don't start with something distasteful even if it's true.
Judaism is distasteful?
Or is it the Danes?
He was a dreadful Bohr
Jewish banking and etc are tied to many (false) conspiracy theories. Me mentioning science has been part of the elites and immediately tying someone who happened to have a family that had bankers that were jewish ties into that in a distasteful/false/etc way.
I'm sure it's not intentional, but I don't like giving these idiots more fuel for their fire
The scientific journal industrial complex is one of the highest profit margins in the world. It's consistently at like 30-60% pure profit. Obviously not all journals are the same, some are reasonable, but some are insane. LOOKING AT YOU ELSEVIER
It's like music. There's a lot of value in the back catalogue.
I honestly don't understand this. It's not that expensive to just host a website where you publish your research to instead of using these scheisters.
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.
20 years ago we relied on printed books and libraries. I've noticed in real time this last decade [nearly] every paper gaining a PDF download button on some website.
Well yes but you also need to hassle high profile researchers to give their opinion before you host research, and that can get really expens... wait, no, they do it for free as well.
Behind you, an executive encourages your participation in academia. *plap* *plap* *plap* *plap* get published get published get published