@jonny @brembs @j_feral @lschiff @[email protected] Yeah, makes sense.
Does this in effect also leave us in a place where big societies=bad and small societies=good?
@jonny @brembs @j_feral @lschiff @[email protected] Yeah, makes sense.
Does this in effect also leave us in a place where big societies=bad and small societies=good?
@UlrikeHahn @koen_hufkens @brembs @jonny @dstephenlindsay I guess it’s a matter of scale, when using commercial publishers non-members pay *more* (if we go by profit margin alone, then 30-40% more).
@UlrikeHahn @koen_hufkens @brembs @jonny @dstephenlindsay My interpretation of what Björn’s writing is that non-members are all of us, not just readers. Heck, anyone who pays tax anywhere, because at the end of the day they are the ones who pay the bill. If many more societies opted out of the big publishing houses to open alternatives, we could slowly get rid of subscriptions, publication fees would fall drastically, and as such expenses would fall across academia - and eventually there would be more money available for doing actual science (perhaps even for grants for academic societies!?). So by “taking the money”, whether it is intended or not, anyone who’s not a member is worse off (and given the attention these issues are getting, I’d think that board members are not oblivious of this fact).
@brembs @j_feral @lschiff @jonny @[email protected] It's crazy coming at this, still, a bit blue-eyed. When I think of societies, I'm thinking small-ish congregations of nerds (in the best possible sense of the word, proud nerd). So these mega-societies are a really strange size to me. SfN, AAAS, ACS, they all seem to operate much more like businesses (e.g. with large exec salaries).
Regarding their publications, they all have high-prestige journals. Do you think that the journals derive their prestige from being under the umbrella of a large, esteemed society; or is that mostly a marketing gimmick (unfolded over many years)? If e.g. SfN were to take Journal of Neuroscience to a PKP platform, would the authors follow? (in this hypothetical scenario we don't care about the vast amount of money they surely lose from such a deal).
When academic societies keep their journals in the big publishing houses, what do they get in return? Cheap or free infrastructure? Or do they even still pay even for that?
I’m trying to wrap my head around what it would take for societies to transition their journals elsewhere (or have their own infrastructure). Can anyone pitch in with experience?
Modern science relies on (open source) software and hardware, but whereas creating tools (writing code) can be turned into academic currency (papers), there is currently no incentive for researchers to provide feedback and improvement suggestions for tools despite how valuable these contributions are to the scientific community as a whole. One possible way forward would be to treat "issue creation" and other Git-based activity as an acceptable form of peer review.
This is an issue and idea I’ve been thinking about for a while. I’d love to flesh it out into an actual set of actionable proposals/suggestions, as well as figuring out which (technological) hurdles would need to be overcome, in a opinion-styled paper - could anyone be interested in working on this together with me?
Please share!