July Patreon Video: Journal Capitalism Rant
little nervous about how America is ending but you know...I'll just talk about academia a bit like that matters at all.
Comments (64)
This is also a good example for all the problems we could get rid of if an "Unconditional Basic Income" was introduced.
Every time I come across the Demon Core stories or other incidents where it was crystal clear that a person had received a radiation dose that will 100 % result in an agonizing death within days or weeks, I can't help but think how cruel it is to even try to stabilize those patients instead of - sorry - euthanasia, whether within any form of legality or not. Of course this would be illegal in a lot of places, but if we're honest, that happens all the time already with extremely old and weak patients. They know their suffering will only get worse and then they ask to be left alone for a few minutes with the doctor who is responsible for that ward in the hospital, and they tell the doctor that they wouldn't mind if they, let's say, accidentally slightly overdose the morphium painkiller dosage. Am I the only one with this view?
Sorry if this has been said before, but one way around the problem of doing research and then being unable to publish results is a framework called 'registered reports' in some places: you write a research proposal where you lay out your methods and what you expect to see and that gets submitted for review. If it's accepted then you will be able to publish your results regardless of what they were. This doesn't solve all the problems, but it does get around a lot of sunk cost stuff and can open up the publication of null and replicated results. Also, employers must give people on hiring committees more time to look at the quality of research for applicants. This is of course really hard when you have 300 people applying for a single position, but when the number of publications is the only thing that matters it produces so many fucked incentives.
Academia is a system that is really disfunctional on a lot of fronts. It's not all bad, but basically almost everything related to: - reputation - financing research - pay level - unpaid work - exploitation of students at different stages to work for free, or to be expected to work full-time while only ever being paid like a 50 % job, that's the norm for anyone in Germany that is writing their PhD - men I don't have some big concept of how to change this, the only thing I have always tried to tell people is similar what you said about unpaid reviews. It won't stop as long as there are people willing and eager to be exploited. That means that no one who has some self-respect left in them has a chance of making it. Your only chance is to swallow the s**t and suck up to your boss, simply because so many others are willing to. And that's a crime that is not enough talked about: if you allow yourself to be exploited as an undergrad, that's not only your business, it's not only yourself who you're hurting. Anyone who does this is ruining it for everyone else. People need to get called out about that instead of getting praised, like it's the norm in our hustle cuilture.
Presenting papers at industry conferences is annoying because you get 5000 business cards afterwards. But, if you are unscrupulous, you can get some really nice gratuities.
5,000 business cards?
Somebody is suing a bunch of journal publishers in an anti-trust lawsuit. https://dailynous.com/2024/09/13/journal-publishers-sued-on-antitrust-grounds/ . Since it's just an individual she might have a hard time with standing for antitrust, but it's a start.
When textbooks explain how radiation damages us, they always show little squiggly radiations hitting DNA and breaking it, but that's not the issue. More than 90% of the damage radiation does to people it does by creating reactive oxygen species out of water molecules, which are 2/3 of our body by volume. In high-dose radiation like Slotin's incident, his body is essentially saturated with hydroxyl radicals in an instant. Our bodies actually make hydroxyl by accident all the time, which is why we take antioxidants and thank our mitochondria for being the professional chemists of the body who keep this under control. Hydroxyl has a half-life in the body of one nanosecond; it's as reactive as fluorine and will essentially snatch a proton from whatever molecule is in the area. It will damage DNA, of course, or the first protein molecule it hits, but the real danger is when a hydroxyl contacts a lipid, like a cell wall. In that event, the action of the hydroxyl on the lipid creates another free radical, which reacts with the lipid, creating another free radical, and it just races down the cell wall, unzipping the cell until it happens to run into an antioxidant molecule. If you've ever seen butter go rancid, what happened to that butter was a single hydroxyl radical. That's how toxic this stuff is to lipids. So, when you get a high dose of radiation, the hydroxyl radicals are like the Borg, they're everywhere, and everywhere they touch a cell wall that cell is dead, because we can't be made out of antioxidants or our biochemistry would shut down. There are just too many for our natural defenses to handle. So every tissue just starts melting. Dr. Collier's quick recap of what this is like to experience, or watch, is if anything an understatement. If you've ever read Black House, by Stephen King and Peter Straub, one character's demise -- the most horrific event in the book -- is a pretty good recap. So yeah, don't play with plutonium.
I don't have a solution for the problem, but I can say I'd love to see you presenting this topic as a guest on the Well There's Your Problem Podcast!
I would say don't be discouraged that you get sour reactions from editors - a lot of protection of interests per se. I have been seeing a bigger growing consensus among my circle of academics regarding all the problems of academic publishing, and places within social science studies have definitely addressed this if you ever want to engage with those having more contexts and understandings
Regarding the social sciences I think it is debatable that they have "more context and understanding" about these issues than physics or computer science. I work in computer science, cognitive science and philosophy and I see the same issues Angela describes when I try to publish in the social sciences. If anything, I think there tends to be more issues within the social sciences because the definition of what even constitutes social science is something there really isn't a consensus on the way there is a consensus in fields like physics and computer science. So it can be very closed to new ideas. I've had papers rejected from philosophy journals that I thought were quite good and in some cases by tweaking the ideas and emphasis a bit was able to get them published in CS journals and conferences. In Philosophy, especially IMO, it is really a very closed world of group think that doesn't give alternative points of view any consideration. Also, in Computer Science it is very rare for reputable journals to require you to "pay to play". For the most part in CS, if a journal requires a big publication fee then they aren't considered reputable. I've published around 30 papers in my career and have never paid a publication fee. Once in a while I'll pay something extra to make the article open source rather than behind a paywall or to use special graphics. I recently published a paper with a colleague in medicine and was shocked to find it is similar there (although not quite as bad) as Angela described in physics. My guess is that it all comes down to capitalism. That somehow there is more funding available for CS journals from corporate sponsors or the government because of the commercial applications.
RE: YT copyright stuff - in my experience, even with music, the only thing that happens is that some/all ad revenue is diverted to the claimant, but your video's visibility & channel status are unaffected. And it's always worth it to file a counter-notice, if you believe your use is appropriate. The claim is released more often than not. For many media critic channels that's just a constant part of the job. (Proper account copyright strikes are usually reserved for those who upload an entire film/episode/song, as is. We *good* youtubers never do that anyway...)
Thanks for posting, that's good to know! In the past I have just edited the clip out to avoid the strike.
I was one of the more vocal folks asking for this and I've just now gotten to watching it. Agree wholeheartedly with everything you've said and you've given me a lot to think about, particularly around your perspectives of the flaws with how to fix the situation. I don't have the academic experience that you do so I don't know the things you do about the academic... would it be too unfair of me to call it the academic industry? It's fine (still love the shirt, btw!). I also learned a lot about how reviews happen and how a single jackass reviewer can just ruin your career as an academic because he's a dick. So many things I learned here in addition to the "capitalism is the worst" catharsis. Thank you for making this. 💜
This video is F3$% amazing but no please dont publish it. people can use it against you. maybe you return to academia . I dont know keep those doors kind of open. Honestly this video could have more potential of being even more viral thant the string theory-binding of isaac speed run but please be careful with this stuff.... its kind of sensitive. (even though all that is so obvious that the system DOES NOT WORK)
I remember the amount of unpaid work that would go into typesetting a paper for publication. Fighting conflicting laTex styles to try to keep things working. I don't know if this still happens, or ever happened outside of computer science research. I used to love laTex, for the record, but the different templates for different journals was a pain
I have spoken to several of my colleagues about this issue. For context, I'm a grad student researching antibody-related therapeutics for influenza, and I work both experimentally and computationally. On top of the points Angela made in her video, I want to emphasize the problem of reproducibility. I've experienced this firsthand and have lost several months of work due to protocols having seemingly minor typos in them (e.g. mM instead of M, a 1000x difference in chemical concentration), or by just being incredibly vague and poorly written. I've really had to dig through the literature to find genuinely reproducible and detailed protocols for what I needed (shoutout to the Jewett lab at Stanford). This issue has unfortunately gotten and continues to get worse as science journals continue to deteriorate in integrity. My colleagues and I were bemoaning the state of this and how much of a joke it is despite science's selling point being reproducibility. We landed on, what I think is, a pretty neat amendment to the review process, albeit potentially costly and certainly controversial at an institutional level. The idea is to establish some sort of Center for Scientific Reproducibility (let's call it CSR). This center, as its name implies, would be responsible for pumping out reproduced data for published papers. The idea is not to bar papers in revision from being published. Rather, papers that were successfully reproduced by the CSR or other labs around the world would be awarded, say, a gold star (idk, some kind of mark that shows the paper is legit). One for each time it's reproduced, for example. This way, scientists have an incentive to thoroughly write out protocols, proofs, etc. and are encouraged to work with an impartial institution to polish their work instead of just forgetting about it and immediately moving on to the next paper. Obviously, there are some key problems with this. 1. Who pays for the CSR? Ideally, government(s) which was already brought up in this thread. Good luck getting people to actually agree on a budget for this, though. If you wanna be really optimistic, how about we put those journal fees to good work! ;D Again, unlikely to ever happen, but fun to think about. It would admittedly be a big money pit, since no products actually get pumped out to generate revenue. Almost the exact opposite of journals though, isn't it? Generating actually useful data to determine feasibility, reproducibility, etc., while not making anything new to generate revenue lmao 2. Who works for the CSR? How can you make sure they're impartial? Impartiality is always a tricky question. However, these jobs would be meant for people with bachelor's degrees, and would thus have little to no ties to academia. Assuming the center is fully funded (lol) it would potentially create a LOT of jobs for people who graduate college with any science-related degree. They wouldn't be creating anything, necessarily, but would be contributing greatly towards the fidelity of scientific works. Training is also a big question, but my colleague brought up that, even if a person is completely new to science, a good protocol should have all the details necessary for them to run those experiments. This is not always practical, obviously, and thus I would propose that several members with varying levels of experience are recruited to reproduce novel results. Even so, some experiments are SO sensitive and SO noisy that a 100% reproducibility rate would be unfair. There is a pretty big difference between getting contradictory results and just not being able to get an experiment working, though. This would at least, in theory, encourage collaboration between the authors and the CSR members, and this exact exchange could drastically improve the quality of protocols that are being put out. 3. What about those mega experiments that take years or even decades to run in the first place? Yeah the CSR would definitely not be equipped to do this. The idea, though, is just to slow down the publication rate and improve the fidelity and quality of modern science. We already have a system that is founded on trust, so any landmark publications (such as the Higgs Boson paper) probably wouldn't need to prove themselves anyway. I would like to emphasize that this CSR is not meant to place papers that are in review on hold until their results were reproduced, but instead would award a retroactive "this paper rocks" or "this paper is OK" kind of amendment to newly published work. A huge advantage is that data fabrication and/or plagiarism could be substantially reduced just by virtue of the work itself being held under scrutiny. Long post, sorry. But I'm curious to see criticisms/feedback of this institution. Obviously this idea is overly ambitious, unrealistic, and perhaps naïve, but it would be SO rewarding to see the results of such an undertaking.
Even "simple" experiments can be time consuming and costly to reproduce and require specialized facilities and equipment. And there are so many papers written and submitted for publication that you'd consume half of all scientists to staff the CSR. But I like the idea of a "CSR" anyway. I'd modify it by making it more of a parallel review/audit/tracking function and creating a separate category of citations or even just a flag for citations. My modified version would let authors set a flag on citations to indicate "the present work validates the experiment/model in this citation", and then those "reproduction cites" would also get tracked for papers, just the same as regular "these peeps did something that we need to reference" cites. Then the set of cites for any given paper would then get kicked over to the CSR, where they would review (or more likely, round up relevant reviewers independent of the two publications) who would then give a thumbs up/thumbs down on the reproducability. Ideally with some reviewers notes on "this part is convincingly reproduced, this part is not, here's why we think that". The value of the CSR here is that rarely do people set out to specifically reproduce something - it's already been done and isn't very publishable. But people often try to use something that's been published, in order to extend it, and find that it's not reproducible. Or people try to use part and it's not obvious to the later readers which parts were well reproduced and which were not. This sort of happens in the current publishing model when it's working well, but it's less effective in smaller specialized subfields. And even when it's working well, there's a lot to wade through to figure out if something has been verified or not and how well. It can also be subverted by groups that function as "combines" or loose collaborations who rubber stamp each other's experiments (sometimes multiple spinoff groups from a lab that produces a lot of PhDs). That's where the CSR would be valuable to validate/double check the claims of confirmation.
What was the journal editor doing while this awful reviewer was demanding to be a co-author? The editor should have immediately found a second reviewer and banned this first one from ever reviewing, or publishing, for that journal again. Also, the 6 month turn around for a review seems horrible. The last couple review requests I’ve gotten from Astronomy journals required I promise to return a review within 3-4 weeks. Of course, not all reviewers are going to keep this promise, and then the editor is stuck giving reviews lots of extensions or starting over from scratch with another reviewer.
(I’m pretty sure) anything in Canada that is funded by the government has to be open source. Open source fees are a thing though
Hello everyone! First, the topic choice is perfect, I remember having voted for the topic both times it was a close second, and I actually prefer it over the other topics. About the issue itself, I understand this might sound a little naive, but I've always wondered if the scientific papers review system could follow a system similar with what happens with open source software projects contributions. The journal itself would be a platform that works something like github ("sci-hub" is already taken, but one could name it something like that), where the users/scientists could host/send their papers for review. The reviewers would be the community itself. It would be completely free of charge, but also the reviewers would not have compensation for their work, at least not in money directly. In software development, being a contributor in an open source project/repository is great for experience, networking, cv and reputation building, and I believe it could work similar to a scientist that contributes with paper reviews on a platform like that. What do you guys think?
A colleague of mine and I have discussed a very similar concept, where there would be a blog-type website for science submissions dedicated to feedback. We had several issues that came up as we were discussing: 1. Should it be anonymous? Probably not, as anonymity tends to bring out the worst in people. Assuming not, then you have the issue of reputation, where people who are already big in the field will have a 'more important' say than others. 2. Who would pay to maintain the webserver? These webservers may get pretty expensive, so whoever can keep them up would have quite a bit of power over the publishing world, unless it can be certain that the host operates in good faith and impartially. 3. How would the review process be delegated in terms of who reviews what? If you throw it out at the community, you might get an overwhelming amount of responses and would have to comb through all of it to prioritize revisions. If you let the authors choose the reviewers, that's a big fat conflict of interest. That really only leaves random selection of reviewers, who could range from grad students or even undergrads to professors unless you establish some cutoff for qualification. If you randomly selected, say, 5 people to review a paper, all of them would have to be active on the site and have the right experience to give proper, constructive feedback. Perhaps I'm not being creative enough, and I'm cynical as is, but I don't really see an advantage to this other than just open discussion on science. To this end, we already have researchgate (which is great) but I don't see this format being useful on a publishing level
Very good rant! I feel like we’re kind of stuck in this loop in so many places where people say “capitalism is ruining __” and then we all sit and do nothing because we have no other ideas. It’s at the root of so many issues. I’m not a scientist so it was super interesting to hear how this has affected what, from the outside, is seen as the real idealogical foundation of science. The whole idea of “peer reviewed” journals is the thing we all point to as an indicator of if something is trustworthy or true. The way that is being eroded is pretty scary (maybe this is a science horror story?). I’m an artists and couldn’t help but feel a parallel to the copyright system while you were explaining this. When I was in art school (for commercial art, like illustration, graphic design, etc.) we really had it beaten into us that copyright was this important thing that was there to protect artists. When you’re commissioned to do work for a magazine or something, you aren’t selling your art — you’re selling the right to publish the art. This means you can then continue selling the rights, in theory into perpetuity, profiting from your IP into retirement! But what we actually end up with is the exact thing you’re worrying about with making a Picard video — big corporations wield copyright like a hammer and individuals still get ripped off (by corporations, AI training, etc) and the whole system seems to work against what we’re told it’s for. It’s mind boggling and similarly has no clear solution under capitalism. UBI and real social support would be such a boon for creativity — imagine all work was just public domain because nobody needed the art to pay their bills. But even taking a step toward that utopian vision feels impossible from where we are today. Anyways, loved the video ❤️ and thought it had lots of parallels with general societal rot! 😅 yay!
The journal is only useful if it is rejecting bad papers and properly reviewing worthwhile ones. That's where all the money they are given should be going. If they are not spending it doing that they shouldn't exist and should be replaced by somebody that does. The journal itself should be responsible for making sure the reviewers are doing a good job, if they fail at that their core product is worthless. I see this mostly as a labour law issue. This is clearly unpaid labour for a for profitable business. Wheather or not some people would do it for free, they shouldn't be allowed too.
Lots of parallels to the music business here. I think the "lots of unpaid labor by people who do actual work with administrators who don't do anything raking in profits from it" model has spread to most fields...
This is all fundamentally why we just need the true reputational economy of Star Trek in which people work on things because they want to. So many problems like this have no real solution under capitalism because there is no good way to align the incentives to social good. Unfortunately in reality the Vulcans aren't coming to save us when we actually do start the equivalent of World War Three or the Eugenics Wars. Weirdly I wrote this comment before hearing that the next video is actually about Star Trek. Also, if anyone's curious about a plausible take on the reputational economics idea, I'd recommend the book Trekonomics.
This might not be on your radar because of the whole “death of American democracy” thing, but if you can stomach it, the Terrence Howard situation, and Eric Weinstein’s attempt to rehabilitate him, is wild. It’s crackpot vs educated, Peter Thiel connected crackpot, and I feel like there’s parallels to educated conservatives playing defense for Qanon folks.
P.S. I apologize sincerely for recommending Joe Rogan
The journal "rant" makes me realize how lucky I was to have the advisors I did and publish to the journals I did (we got to choose our reviewers, and they were all collaborators of my advisors—which is a problem in its own right), but I want to +1 the first part of your video, when you talk about speaking up when you see something wrong. Because: 1. It's Hella important 2. It doesn't happen enough 3. It's an incredibly important component of Allyship where, if you're in a privileged position, speaking up for those who can't speak for themselves is one of the most important things you can do. *tl;dr*—I hope you get to give that graduation talk one day.
I think you might find The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin hits a weird intersection of your interests! It's a lot of things, but in the middle of it is a plot orchestrated as a response to academic arch dickery!
(spoiler alert: it transcends capitalism)
Angela, thanks for "Journal Capitalism Rant". Alas, I too have no solution :-(. Also, a belated thanks for your video of 7 months ago: "electricity and magnetism are the same thing". After watching that earlier video I wanted to suggest a follow-up topic, but dismissed it as being unreasonable. But then you gave us "why you can't explain qcd" and I realised that I should let you make the decision -- maybe you could find an angle? So, , "Unification Part II: Why electromagnetism and the weak force are the same thing." How hard can it be?
I wonder if it would be possible to have some sort of reviewers union that's an independent non-profit and all of the articles from all journals are sent there for review before the authors send to the journal with an official approval from the reviewers. The journals would sponsor this org because otherwise no papers are reviewed and they wouldn't have anything to publish. Hopefully this would not result in even more expensive publishing fees for authors, though having a union might help put pressure on journals against increasing them. Making submissions for review could also be made public and open, since the paper in the end is expected to be public anyway, and the transparency could help with better accountability for people trying to cheat the systems.
I think journals would just get around reviewing them correctly (surely AI can do it, right? /s) or sell "premium in-house review" or nonsense like that.
The whole thing of a reader refusing to okay a paper because you wouldn’t let them jump on as a coauthor to further pad their CVs reminds me of those Hollywood finance people who demand a producer credit to build their IMDb pages.
I've seen channels play clips without audio and / or at slightly altered speed to set context then explain what happened and comment on it.
A meta-study of meta-studies will help!
I would definitely be interested in hearing about the coup in Dynamics that happened in the 1980s that resulted in a lot of people leaving the field! I am one of the four!!!
i think journals as they operate now could probably just afford to implement paying reviewers--what are all those profits going towards anyway?? but that won't happen because journals are terrible.
Yeah don’t worry I saw a paper published that was literal google translated garbage retracted recently. It’s only going to get worse with AI especially with the current reproducibility crisis. Researchers are using way too much AI before solving the black box problem. Just a matter of time before someone with time and money goes to invalidates tons of studies over a R AI package that they can’t train to exact specifications
I'm wondering whether it's about capitalism at all. I mean scientists were always underpaid and overworked and you know, making a name for yourself is like gaining the prestige to enter the club of old guys who act like little children in the kindergarten. It's always like "it's a big club and you ain't in it". If you make the cut then one day you may enter a bubble where you are protected from the system and you can be like a little baby and if you don't, then it's about the system what does it with you. In ancient times they brought the peasants to the fields, in Soviet Russia they brought people to the gulag and in capitalism the ones who remain outside will be exploited day and night.
this is truly the worst timeline
One technique people have used to avoid YouTube copyright strikes is to use tools to remove the music from the audio of the video clips they sample.
This might end up kind of a long comment, sorry about that. The for-profit journals are just providing a service for researchers who need to get past hiring committees that use paper count, cite count, and impact factor as significant criteria (cutoffs at the start, rather than possible tiebreakers at the end). They’re confusing objective criteria with meaningful criteria, and when job candidates see that, they’re really obligated to try to game the system with papers. So the for-profit journals comply and take money to give them what they want. The only way to make it go away is for hiring committees to look at the actual work that people do, rather than the number of LPUs (least-publishable-units) that they can break it into. Unfortunately I don’t see that happening any time soon – people are terrible out deciding who to hire, so they’ll take the easy way and count papers and cites to reduce their work. Some journals do “pay” reviewers with credits toward publication. That eliminates the professional reviewer possibility, and it makes it a little easier for people who aren’t well funded to essentially pay their page charges with sweat equity – “review 2 or 3 papers and we’ll waive all the publication charges for your next paper in one of our journals” As far as reviewing – I can’t begrudge a grad student for not wanting to review papers. They’re already terribly exploited. I have the luxury of a decent paying job where I can publish (but am not obligated to, so I have a lot less pressure to spew out junk) and can squeeze out time to review papers, so I try to review approximately as many papers as I publish. Given that journals struggle to get referees already, I end up getting requests essentially every day. So I only say yes to the ones that look interesting to me – basically things that that look like I might like to cite them some day. And for people who don’t deal with reviews – what both of your bad reviewers should have done is give you prompt, constructive reviews so that they could then cite your work in their own work that it inspired. What they both did was terrible, and editors should cross people off from being reviewers for that kind of thing. (and I want to apologize for sometimes taking too long to get reviews out. Like you say – it’s not paid, and I sometimes have too much paid work already, but I also want to contribute back because somebody reviews my papers. At least I try to make them constructive and help the authors have a better paper.)
Not quite what I expected, but great, as always. "Real Home Owner's Association Energy" is going into my weekly lexicon. Maybe worthy of a t-shirt, lol
Thanks for the little blurb about safety near the beginning. Nothing we do in the lab is worth getting hurt over, ever. I work with a lot of fancy expensive stuff and we try to engineer it so that it won't be dangerous, and will also go safe if something bad happens (like a fire in the lab building cutting power). But the most important thing is always getting the people out safely. We can figure out later what to do about the stuff.
I missed why all the solutions kept the high paper submission fee? Shouldn't it just be way lower? Where does the money even go? If all the labor stays free what does the money actually do? I don't know if lower journal fees helps any part of the problem.
Yeah, I have the same question. I understand that the publishers actually do have staff that have to get paid and such. But isn't a significant part of the problem that they are for-profit corporations, so presumably most of the money is getting funneled to investors? For example, wikipedia seems to indicate that Springer is owned in large part by some private equity group.
Re: clips - Video Essayist CJ the X recommends not using more than 5 unaltered seconds of a clip, cutting out silence, and generally editing it in a way to get your point across. It's at 1:13:46 of FD Signfier's essay How I Made it as a Video Essay. CJ has done essays involving Stranger Things, Victorious and at least one Disney movie which I assume the IP owners take real seriously. I don't think I can link these things on here. Anyway I'm not a video essayist or Youtuber, I just like CJ's editing style
couldn't you have the basic structure of the function of the journals done by an open platform like the Archive if it were to provide it? I don't have any experience with Academia, from the outside it sounds like the journals mostly provide a system that could be run with massively less money than the journals currently gobble up. Most of what the Journal does sounds like it could be done with software with the exception of what the editors do. At the very least it should be possible to bring the price per paper down heavily. I worked a lot in decentralized moderated communities, its not easy but there are precedents and solutions out there for systems like this.
Great rant, and I am not one that says that every rant has to have a solution. And your laying out the options, showed that a solution is not as easy as one might think. It's fine.. Also me - waiting for Avi Loeb to be mentioned - Let out a little yay for that. - Cheers.
Thank you for the perspective.
HOA energy LOL
"little nervous about how America is ending but you know..." it's fine, just fill the Boston harbor with bibles instead of tea this time.
All of the "problems" you listed are not problems to capitalism. It is designed to keep the rich rich and the poor poor. So, you are getting the hurdles as intended. They are not "bugs" they are "features" which is also the reason that jerkfaces are the unpaid reviewers, they figure they are buying citations. It's all not really broken, just broken for normal people.
Also, the "invitations" to pay money, reminds me of the costs of getting into "Who's Who" type books. All scams.
The first thought that comes to mind would be for reviewers to be full-time staff of the journal. The problem would be that only the Science/Nature-type journals could afford to hire that kind of expertise. And smaller journals are important too. Unrelated point and I’m not sure where I am going with this, but during my PhD my adviser would often give his reviews to his postdocs and grad students to do anyways. I thought it was rather normal actually, although exploitative.
I've often talked to my friend who's an editor at Nature about this. The idea that authors should pay to have their work published is pretty unique to academia — it would be considered totally unacceptable in any other field of publishing. I think it's basically because of the push for open access. Most reputable journals don't charge authors to publish non-open access. Journals definitely over charge for what they do, but they don't do nothing and someone has to pay for it. Normally in publishing it would be the readers who pay, but if they're going open access then it has to be the authors. The real problem is the push for fully open access IMO, which doesn't allow authors without funds to have outlet for their work
I was going to make a similar comment about open access, but your wording sounds better than mine :)
The rest of the world will need good journals to publish studies on the collapse of the United States, so this is still completely relevant. (Perhaps I could have thought of a more life-affirming way to phrase that, but...)
I bet any of your solutions would work to purge capitalism from science if you had a budget of 200 billion dollars. I think that is less than the amount of money banks and finance companies net off handling fees from investments and CCs in just one year.
I'm old, so I'll probably be dead before the full America First fascism kicks in and the Climate Wars begin, so NYAH, NYAH! Thbbpppttff!
I, too, am quite concerned about the future of our democracy. it's fine. (it's not fine)
thank you for posting through the chaos - we need it Also great topic !!