Hi Andrea,

I dug it up while writing my thesis on environmental assessment. As you may
read, it is a field where we hear researchers crying for data for decades
but ironically they 'd rather continue crying than acting upon the
situation, i.e they don't do much for making it 'free' (cc-by like).

" Researchers don’t *sell* their papers. They sell their whole work as
researchers: they teach, they publish, they advise dissertations. That’s
the work they are paid for. But they don’t get money from the papers "
Indeed.
But to be a professor you need to have been publishing in a selective list
of journal (or any secured position researcher you have in the system you
are in, I'm french and do not know italian system. To us it starts at
lecturer MC and continue with professor Pr).
And to receive funding (now that competitive models rule research funding)
you have to show the most impressive list of publications (at least a "more
competitive publishing pedigree than the other competing researchers)
... well nothing new as you describe that.
But in the end, you seem to skip a bit.
" Ultimately, the *ring that rules them all* is this final process:
evaluation of research, meaning *counting citations*. "
Here, state sentences with subject-verb-complement.
Who is funding what/who
Who evaluate what/who and particularly who decides that evaluation of
research *is* counting citations.
To act on a situation, we have to know the current *actors.*

When a group of researchers (known ones, leading their field can do so),
decides to quit a publisher (lingua-glossa
<http://kaivonfintel.org/lingua-glossa/> ; JMLR
<https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Machine_Learning_Research> ;
Journal_of_Topology <https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Topology> ;
others <http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Journal_declarations_of_independence>)
, they state their rules showing who is producing the value. But for the
general case, authors in dominant position
*are in dominant position because they followed the mainstream lucrative
rule.*
So it is more about how power is distributed inside academia than any other
question.
We have the publication system of our academical power system. It is a
struggle against a 'monopoly of scientific competence'. I may read anew
Bourdieu in case 'Questions de sociologie' - "Le champ scientifique" gives
me a new lead.

In my thesis (if you read french, my .tex are on GitHub), I consider the
situation as a Nash equilibrium. My opinion is it may change as we make the
values of the game change or/and let enter other players. To me, a player
that is currently waiting - wanting on the bench is (some fraction at least
of) 'taxpayers'.
- To read something we/they pay 3 times : 1°) pay the researchers 2°) pay
the subscription fees of researchers 3°) pay what you read as a taxpayer
outside of a subscribing university.
- They/we pay research, but are hardly consulted on "What do you want to
know that we (as a species) do not know yet ?"
- They/we support the consequences of industrial research led for product
development (good or bad according to each-one judgments).

It is roots of my contributions about making wikimedian spaces tools for
aiding pressure on freeing publication. (for instance : not putting OA
publication in front necessarly, but putting correspondign authors and
funding contacts next to closed access articles with possible open archives
ready to receive them.

Let taxpayers play a direct role (for instance in institutions that vote
research grants. Here we have, universities grants, regions grants, some
specific institutions as ADEME ... or even in juries for HDR (french
'title' allowing a university Pr or MC to lead research : enrol PhD student
i.e. go up the ladder of academical capitalism). Do that and the cards of
the publication game may change.

BR
Rudy





On 23 March 2018 at 10:20, Andrea Zanni <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hello everyone,
> sorry for the shameless plug, but few days ago I published a long overdue
> blogpost:
> https://medium.com/@aubreymcfato/academic-publishing-sci-hub-and-the-
> ring-that-rules-them-all-f8a12c29ef9f
>
> I'm sharing this here because I'd welcome feedbacks on it: I spent a lot
> of time trying to figure out *why* we're in this situation, and why we
> can't get out of it.
> I tried to frame academic publishing in terms of power, but I'm not sure I
> succeeded.
> My question always is: what are the power relationships that leads us to
> the status quo? Why can't we change them?
>
> Criticisms/feedbacks/suggestions are welcome.
>
> Cheers
>
> Andrea
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> OpenAccess mailing list
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> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/openaccess
>
>
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