The deceit of traditional acadamic journals —
The traditional academic journal system is a legacy of pre-Internet research, when the only way to find out what other scholars have written was to go to the library and manually pour through outdated indexes. I can’t imagine how hard it used to be to perform literature reviews.
Of course, the problem extends beyond “science” journals, to disciplines in social studies, philosophy, etc.
The Journal of Public Deliberation is available to everyone and anyone. They do not get upset if you share papers, that’s what they are for.
Published under a Creative Commons License
“The largest academic journal firm, Elsevier, made a staggering profit margin of 37% in 2011, up from 36% in 2010. This resulted in profits of £768 million from revenue of £2.1 billion. “
It’s immoral to suck such obscene profit from the publicly-funded public good of academic research.
From The Conversation article The great publishing swindle: the high price of academic knowledge
Posted by Ron Lubensky 03 May 2012 03:46 pm | link