I cannot handle the fucking irony of that article being on nature, one of the organizations most responsible for fucking it up in the first place. Nature is a peer-reviewed journal that charges people thousands upon thousands of dollars to publish (that’s right, charges, not pays), asks peer reviewers to volunteer their time, and then charges the very institutions that produced the knowledge exorbitant rents to access it. It’s all upside. Because they’re the most prestigious journal (or maybe one of two or three), they can charge rent on that prestige, then leverage it to buy and start other subsidiary journals. Now they have this beast of an academic publishing empire that is a complete fucking mess.
Wow, I never knew about that and it’s not just a small fee either. This 2020 article has it at 9,500 Euro/10,300 USD. “Some observers worry Nature’s €9500 publishing fee is so high that it threatens to divide authors into two tiers—those at wealthy institutions or with access to funds to pay, and everyone else.”
It’s already hard enough getting funding in some fields of science without that kind of added expense to put your data out there. Definitely sounds like you’re right to call them out.
Nb. Nature News Team is editorially independent from the Journal title “Nature”.
I’m suspicious of this concept of editorial independence. I think it’s a smoke screen that lets companies have their cake and eat it too. As far as I’m concerned, whoever cashes the checks also gets the blame, because either ownership means something, in which case the concept exists to obfuscate that, or it doesn’t, in which case why is nature buying up other journals?
Well by posting this they give the appearance of being on the good side.
except Sci-hub hasn’t been adding new papers since 2020. Anna’s Archive is a better bet, because they aggregate both sci-hub and libgen, among others. They also make torrents available for data hoarders.
You’re right about Sci-Hub because of their Indian lawsuit which is very important to them, but I didn’t know that Anna’s Archive was a repository of scientific journals. Is it? I know Library Genesis (or LibGen) has a lot of scientific textbooks, but I didn’t know it had papers. Does it?
Anyhow, Anna’s Archive and LibGen are super awesome too!
Aaron Swartz would like a word.
I’d love to see DOI automating a copy of each entry to archive.org. This would improve the likelihood of them remaining available.
Sure, it would make grifters like Elsevier mad, but scientific knowledge worth a DOI entry shouldn’t be limited to a for-profit organisation.
Edit: Worded first para badly. I meant anything assigned a DOI ID, regardless of where the work is hosted.
It’s interesting reading quotes from that article like: “If you can’t verify what someone else has said at some other point, you’re just trusting to blind faith for artefacts that you can no longer read yourself.” and “After you’ve been dead for 100 years, are people going to be able to get access to the things you’ve worked on?”
It reminds me of problems the US military is having with refitting/upgrading old ICBMs. From the 2021 article, “Minuteman III Missiles Are Too Old to Upgrade Anymore, STRATCOM Chief Says”: "Where the drawings do exist, “they’re like six generations behind the industry standard,” he said, adding that there are also no technicians who fully understand them. “They’re not alive anymore.”
It’s sounds like the danger is we’ll be able to access the science (or just trust it’s true) but in some cases we’ll be unable to retrace our steps.
Aw man that’s real sad
