Kinda fucked up that it’s not only about being smart or having the tenacity to acquire these kind of jobs but that it’s also depending on the altruistic mindset and resiliency of people. The pool of people having most if these traits is quite slim…
Yup… Somehow, being able to suffer financially is somehow a sign of your academic commitment. Post-docs are rare enough and most professors dont even get tenure anymore. The result is an insular community of hyper-competitive credit-chasing asshats looking to put their name on your work because you needed their signature for something once.
A friend of mine chased a PhD instead of looking towards industry for jobs. He kinda found out roughly how much a few of us were paid compared to him with a lot less years in education and he was NOT happy. He spent the rest of the night trying to belittle people until people called him out on his bullshit.
But why? If the science is accurate and reproducible, where it is published shouldn’t matter. Like if I solved one of those unsolvable math problems and posted the answer and my work to Reddit or another popular social media, surely someone important would find out. Right?
So here is the funny thing, with most research you’re expected to get the funding, which includes wages, before you even begin the research.
Meaning you’re not paying to let other people make money off your research, you’re just paying for services needed for fulfilling your end of the bargain which you had previously agreed upon from the very beginning.
The cool part of all of this is that in many places when you get public funding the research can be made available to others for free after it’s peer reviewed.
Honestly, if you could trust individuals in every industry with this much credit, then it is how the entire world would work. But you can’t trust everyone that much.
That’s all correct, of course, but it represents somewhat of an ideal case.
First, yes, you have to secure funding. Your best chance is to be someone who has already successfully completed grant-supported research with a solid history in your field, and to be looking at something considered sexy at the time. I’m not in the business anymore, but I shudder to think about how many grant proposals are offering to use LLMs. The rub is that grants can be tough to get - there’s orgs within the NIH that have a less than 5% acceptance rate. Let’s say you’re lucky and you get your grant. Depending on your institution, a big chunk of that goes into administration. The rest is for you and your colleagues and students and lab workers and so on, as well as equipment and other expenses.
You also will probably want to hold back about $10k or more for publication fees. Many journals do not require a fee to publish, but do require one to make the paper open access so that others can read it without paying a $30 fee for a single paper. When I was doing it the fees were usually between $2-3k per paper. It’s not that big of a deal if your grant is $500k, but it can be quite a chunk of money for smaller grants. In any case, you’re paying someone to print your paper, which you wrote and edited and which was reviewed and recommended for publication by other unpaid academics. If you cannot pay the fees, your work will not be accepted by most open access journals, and will not be open access if accepted by a paywalled journal.
It is not true (at least in the US at the time I was doing it) that government sponsored research will be open access by law after peer review. We fought hard for it, but the publishing lobby is pretty strong. I think the law is currently that government financed research must be made open access within a year or so of publication.
The problem comes with smaller institutions and less well known researchers. I had a friend who was a professor of finance at a smaller university, and he had to pay out of pocket for his publications as well as some of his conferences. And their salaries aren’t that high in any case. He had hard money - his salary for teaching classes - but also had to keep publishing to keep his job and advance. I had another situation where I was publishing a paper in a very small but within its subject prestigious journal, where I was more than happy to pay the pub fee. The editor told me quite frankly that he was working with a researcher from another country who was trying to figure out how he could afford to pay the pub fee because he said our paper would essentially be paying for his as well.
So, after all of that, I do consider the academic publishing business predatory and parasitic. Here’s how to get papers for free - legally. I’m not touching on any other means.
Search for the title - in quotes - that you’re looking for. You can find individual papers by their abstracts, which generally are made publicly available. There are preprint services like ArXiv where researchers upload their papers before they’re published. If it exists, most of the time a published paper will have its final form available as a preprint with the layout being the only thing that changes. It makes sense to check though.
Go to the author’s website. Researchers will often have links to their publications on their professional page.
Write to the researcher and request a copy. We love that. You might need to ping them a couple of times because people get busy and forget things, but overall you’ll probably find someone who would be very happy to send you a copy.
What is the benefit of publishing in the first place? Why not upload to arXiv and not bother with the journals? Wait. It has to do with grants, doesn’t it?
Yes, a preprint will never look as good to grant panels as a paper in Nature. But also, a preprint hasn’t been peer reviewed, and that is an important step in the process. Both could be overcome to produce a less predatory system, but it would need a radical overhaul of process and, quite frankly, scientists’ sentiment.
Arxiv isn’t peer-reviewed and doesn’t count as a publication. If all you want to do is get your work out there, you’re free to do it, but it’s highly unlikely anyone will see it.
As a researcher, your greatest hope is to learn something, tell other people about it, and have them build on it. That’s not going to happen if your paper hasn’t gone through peer review. It’s also not going to count as a publication as far as your career is concerned, and that bit does have to do with your professional standing, which counts from everything from career advancement to, yes, grants.
Some countries are doing this. But it’s a beginning only. The reputation still comes from the biggest journals. The new ones must make their reputation first.
Academic publishing is in a very weird place and is very, very political. Its true that authors have to pay to have their papers published in most journals or conferences after they’ve been accepted, but like all things academic, this is highly dependent on the field. Some universities will reimburse professors publishing costs, others need to pay out of pocket or with grant/public funding.
While its true that there are open-access journals and conferences without such costs, I would wager that most well known researchers would avoid such avenues of publication due to prestige. The larger journals and conferences have review boards where the top scientists in the world sit on them. As a potential published author with such an outlet, its a great honor to even be considered. Most researchers don’t want to take the risk of going with a less prestigious outlet if it will run the risk of smearing their image or damaging their ability to publish in better outlets in the future.
Source: Was a Doctoral candidate that ran the whole ringer besides the dissertation.
And all those reasons are why I don’t want to go into academia. It really feels like a the competition/politics/pissing contest of who you know is more valued than people coming together to push the boundaries of what we know and how we understand things. What are the upsides?
While its true that there are open-access journals and conferences without such costs
To publish open access normally costs upwards of $3k USD as well. There’s practically no point in the publishing chain where academics aren’t getting screwed.
Let’s also not forget that you have to review other people’s papers for the journal for free.
The getting to keep your job bit is not quite right. Often, one also has to go find their own funding. Sort of based on the publications, but not necessarily.
I think the implication is the whole “publish or perish” mindset in academia.
If you don’t constantly publish something then your career and work is considered stagnant. At which point you lose out to other researchers, and effectively can’t get paid for your work. Aka: you lose your job
The academic system is a tiered system. Publish or perish is a term that mostly applies to early to mid career researchers, who are pracitcally all employed on fixed term contracts.You don’t lose your job if you don’t publish, you just can’t get (or are less competitive for) your next job.
Tenured academics (professors/A. Prof.) are on ongoing employment by the university. Their job is never really under threat. Although if they wanted to move jobs and be successful in grants then they want a productive group (many publications) to prove they are leading cutting edge research.
Universities care directly around how much grant funding their professors can pull into the university. However, in many countries it’s difficult to remove long serving academics. It’s not uncommon for ‘retired’ proffs to die at their desk, even though they checked out decade’s ago.
The challenge is the peer review system - not saying it can’t be done, but facilitating quality reviews is often costly.
There has, however, been a push to publish articles as “open access” which costs more for the author but makes it publicly available free of charge to read.
Overall the system is still a pretty big scam, but would be difficult to make 100% free.
There’s groups doing free peer review in a mutual aid sort of way. As I understand it, reviewers don’t really get paid anyway and the work is often dumped on students around the professor. Example of a group doing community peer review: archaeo.peercommunityin.org/PCIArchaeology/
States/academic institutions have to make it part of the job description of people. Get designated an editor of a journal? Your Uni understands and hands you an additional TA to lighten the load elsewhere and/or deal with the paperwork aspects.
The reviewing itself is already done pro bono anyways.
The way I see it, this “free” journal is gonna have some overhead, from servers to maintainers, coordinators, and potentially even designers to help get consistency.
Some people may be able to support with their free time, but ultimately if those people/systems are going to be paid, the platform will need a revenue stream, and like magic we’re back to square one, albeit with hopefully significantly lower profit margins.
For any one journal, very few, maybe even fractions of a headcount per journal, but for the thousands of journals out there spanning dozens of disciplines and hundreds of specialties, it adds up. If you want to make the end-all-be-all magic journal of all-topicness and maintain a respectable level of quality, you’re going to need quite a few SMEs policing the submissions.
There’s millions of scientific papers published annually - you need people to process all of that information and moderate peer reviews.
Ok, but we’re talking about thousands of dollars in fees for a single journal. There’s no reason that a single journal should have costs anywhere near thousands of dollars for a single article.
The average number of articles published per journal per year is ~110. Let’s say a major journal publishes probably closer to 300/yr.
Assuming you try and barebones it with 3 staff members, a technical lead for screening, a graphics / visual editor, and a peer review manager. Assume you want someone relatively competent for your journal so you pay each (inclusive of overhead & benefits) ~$150k/yr.
$150k/yr × 3 / 300 articles = $1.5k/article
Again, not saying it’s a perfect system and things can definitely benefit from economies of scale, but it really doesn’t take much to get $1k/article in expenses to pile up.
I’m not convinced that 3 full time staff is barebones given that the writing and formatting is being done by the authors, and that a solid chunk of what normally falls under the editing umbrella is being done by peer reviewers who are also unpaid.
Even if that is a fair representation of the cost to the journal to get the article published, that would mean they would break even, maybe even earn a profit purely on the submission fees. Never mind that multiple universities pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to subscribe to the journals.
Not trying to break down the exact specifics of the journal business model, just trying to show there’s no such thing as a free lunch peer reviewed journal.
If you want anything of even the most mediocre of quality, there will be fees. Personally I’m fine with the fees being paid by the researchers as just a small part of the cost of doing research - it also incentivizes them to not try and publish utter garbage. One could try and crowd-fund a journal, but I don’t really see how that’s much better than putting the burden on the research teams.
What I’m not okay with and needs to be fixed is anyone having to pay to view the results of publicly funded research. If my tax dollars are supporting this effort, I deserve to know that was learned.
Well, it does preserve the scientific editing system to a large extand so yes. I would prefer there is no embargo at all, because I’m paid with public funds and I don’t see the point of paywalls, but I get the Government has a to be gentle to the international editing scene to some point.
Yes, this is correct. Also, if you want to publish your dissertation, you’ll need to do all editing and indexing yourself and wait like 3 years to publish it and receive about 1% of all sales
Don’t forget that sometimes you also do work for that journal, telling them if a paper is good enough or not for them, and also basically don’t get payed.
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