this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
1240 points (96.5% liked)
Technology
60091 readers
2729 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
How would you publish if you're not a part of a major research institution? Los Alamos National Lab could host its own papers just fine, but what about small-time labs? I know of at least one person who doesn't even officially work in science but publishes original research they do in their free time.
The journal system still provides a service, even if they over-charge for access. The peer review system has value. Imagine if there was zero barrier to publish. As a reader, you'd have to wade through piles of trash to find decent science.
Where would you find it all? Currently we use journal aggregators, whose service also has value and costs money. Are you really going to go to every university's website looking for research relevant to your area? We could do that again, but with everyone responsibile for publishing their own work, well, who gets indexed with the aggregators?
You get published with a university instead of a for profit publishing system. And universities would get a good or bad reputation for their peer review, just like journals. The aggregator could easily be run by a coalition of universities with government grants to make the maintenance and upkeep free to the users and universities.
We do not have to lock research behind paywalls.