1. Sign our petition calling on Cochrane to withdraw their review of Exercise Therapy for CFS here.
    Dismiss Notice
  2. Guest, the 'News in Brief' for the week beginning 18th March 2024 is here.
    Dismiss Notice
  3. Welcome! To read the Core Purpose and Values of our forum, click here.
    Dismiss Notice

Article, UK: "Is it time for our universities to fight back against profiteering publishers?"

Discussion in 'Research methodology news and research' started by Andy, Dec 12, 2017.

  1. Andy

    Andy Committee Member

    Messages:
    21,814
    Location:
    Hampshire, UK
    https://thebristolcable.org/2017/12/time-universities-fight-back-profiteering-publishers/
     
  2. adreno

    adreno Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    413
    Location:
    Scandinavia
    It was time for this a long time ago.
     
    ladycatlover, Esther12, Inara and 8 others like this.
  3. Barry

    Barry Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    8,385
    Great article. The classic paywall scenario also means some possibly dubious researchers can obscure their work from public view. Interesting this article is by the Bristol Cable.
     
    ladycatlover, Esther12, Inara and 4 others like this.
  4. Jonathan Edwards

    Jonathan Edwards Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    13,278
    Location:
    London, UK
    I think the universities have brought this on themselves by 'measuring' research in terms of publications.

    There is a very simple solution. We already all have college websites provided by the college IT department. Anything we want to publish can be uploaded on to the college site. The college can easily organise peer review - there could be a mutual system arranged between universities. All research that has actually been done should be published anyway. So peer review would not be a matter of publish or reject. It would be a much more useful commentary on the value of the material. As it is academics have to peer review for journals who are very often extremely unhelpful with software etc. SO there would be no extra work doing peer review for sister colleges.

    So work from University College London would be published by University College London, with peer review. Nothing could be simpler. All those people at Elsevier are just a waste of space.
     
  5. Barry

    Barry Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    8,385
    Sounds good @Jonathan Edwards. And all that misspent money could be reinvested into much more worthwhile activities - education, research, etc. I also suspect that universities doing their own publishing, might itself be very educational in its own right.
     
    Last edited: Dec 12, 2017
    ladycatlover, Esther12, Inara and 2 others like this.
  6. Sean

    Sean Moderator Staff Member

    Messages:
    7,046
    Location:
    Australia
    I don't have the words to describe how much I loathe the parasitic for-profit journal industry and their amazingly blatant and successful scam.

    Sooner it is killed off, the better.
     
  7. Samuel

    Samuel Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    620
    true.

    > So work from University College London would be published by University College London, with peer review.

    still concerns regarding incentives, transparency, pre-registration, providing data before publication in open and documented formats and making it accessible, etc.

    we watched agape as qmul fought tooth and nail against science.

    but plos one didn't solve it either. they are being cowards.
     
    Moosie, Inara, Esther12 and 1 other person like this.
  8. Jonathan Edwards

    Jonathan Edwards Senior Member (Voting Rights)

    Messages:
    13,278
    Location:
    London, UK
    I think if individual Universities/Colleges ran their own publishing they would be motivated to police their own people's standards otherwise they would rapidly get a general reputation for being 'dodgy'. Institutions with good staff doing good work could afford to lay everything bare and still come out on top. Any institutions trying to hide their dirty washing would very rapidly come to be known for that.

    No system is going to be perfect or impervious to corruption but the current system could not really be worse.
     
    Barry, Inara, Sasha and 4 others like this.

Share This Page