this post was submitted on 26 Apr 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world 57 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Legitimate question here. What’s stopping researchers from creating their own federated publishing system for academic journals?

[–] Enkers@sh.itjust.works 70 points 1 week ago (2 children)

It's not federated, but arXiv is free and volunteer supported:

https://info.arxiv.org/about/index.html

[–] anzo@programming.dev 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Not peer reviewed though. Those are called preprints and not papers. Both would be research articles but the difference matters (to scientists at least).

There's JOSS which is reviewed. I love it!

[–] Enkers@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 week ago

Thank you for the clarification!

[–] disguy_ovahea@lemmy.world 12 points 1 week ago

Nice! I’ll check it out!

[–] mlg@lemmy.world 48 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Big grants and research money connections are typically only accessible because your paper got published in a "reputable" journal, which of course you only have a chance of getting if you publish with a "reputable" system.

spoilerReputable my ass

[–] HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 43 points 1 week ago

Short Answer - Universities

Long Answer:

To get and hold a job as an academic, you must continually produce "high quality research". To get the job, in the first place, you must also be seen to do this.

"High quality" is often metriced by universities to mean "published in high impact journals" and "well cited". This metric is known to be faulty, but universities really dislike change.

So, to get a job, you have to give up your rights to your research, and to keep your job, you have to do likewise.

Worse, in the current financial climate, academia is seeing unprecedented cuts, which further entrenches this issue.

[–] Thedogdrinkscoffee@lemmy.ca 21 points 1 week ago

Publishing is a racket. This should have been done decades ago.