Ever since I looked into academic publishing many years ago, when I was considering what avenue I might publish my ideas in if I ever ended up publishing those ideas, I’ve been shocked at just how incredibly exploitive and corrupt so much of the academic publishing industry really is. You would think that it wouldn’t be nearly as bad as it is. Science is supposed to be the pinnacle of rationality and integrity, and yet so much of the financial side of it has been pervasively parasitically co-opted by corrupt journal monopolies.
Most academic journals seem to claim almost all of the intellectual property ownership of the research publications that academics end up producing. Even worse than that though, they also push all of this content behind expensive paywalls that are inaccessible to the same public that funded much of the research.
Even the authors of the papers themselves are often not given access to their own research without paying a fee. The authors are also given almost none of the profit that the publication produces. This is completely backwards relative to how the system should actually work from an ethical and logical standpoint. It is ridiculous. It’s surprising that so very few academics have had enough spine to do anything at all to stand up against such blatant corruption and exploitation.
This is a great example of how even groups of people who are supposed to be rational and intelligent and strong-willed can still easily become slaves to groupthink and the forces of social momentum and institutional pressure. It makes me very glad that I operate outside of the boundaries of academia. Academics are basically forced by their universities to be repeatedly exploited and violated and to surrender all of their rightful ownership of their own work to these extremely corrupt and greedy journal monopolies, which then feeds directly into the pockets of just a few politically powerful people who did little to nothing to create the research they are profiting so massively from.
The overwhelming majority of the financial gains of scientific research should go directly into the pockets of those who actually produce the research, not to parasitic middlemen. For this to happen though, more academics need to be braver about being willing to self-publish commercially. The norms of a social institution can only be broken by deliberately refusing to go along with the system and instead choosing to push against those boundaries. More people have to be willing to make short-term sacrifices for the sake of the long-term good of both themselves and the community. It requires self-respect.
The corrupt journal monopolies have long relied upon scare tactics and artificial prestige as propaganda to create the impression that nobody will ever take any academic’s work seriously unless that work is published in one of these journals, where all of the author’s rights will be immediately stripped from them and their content locked behind a ridiculous paywall. This is not how things should be. These journals’ unethical tactics sadly appear quite effective at frightening most academics away from breaking out of the system. The level of fear academics have about publishing outside these journals though is very disproportionate. Research can easily stand on its own merits.
The cycle of exploitation is simply a self-perpetuating monster created by the fear of breaking away from the group. It is just yet another example of conformity crippling people’s ability to think freely. Science is supposed to be objective and should be based overwhelmingly on the actual substance of the research people produce. Unfortunately however, much of the way that science operates has now been co-opted by the “publish or perish” mentality and by disproportionate concern for what other people might think. It has become too authoritarian, too fearful, and too popularity-based.
Instead of people focusing on the substance of research, i.e. the underlying logic and evidence supporting it, you all too often see “scientific” decisions being made with far too great weight placed on completely logically fallacious factors such as which “prestigious” journal the research was published in or how many citations it has or how much it adheres to the current dogma or style of other academics or of popular culture. This is sad. It is the opposite of how objectivity is supposed to work.
Too many decisions are being made based on authority fallacies or popularity fallacies and not enough are being made based on a real clear-headed analysis of the evidence. Far too much of academic success has become determined primarily by a combination of (1) willingness to sell your soul to extremely exploitive journals, (2) being politically connected to other academics in positions of power, (3) aligning your research with whatever the existing groupthink and knee-jerk assumptions are. Far too often, the appearance of credibility by being willing to conform to superfluous social institutions has become far more important in determining success than actual scientific substance.
This kind of exploitation can only truly be defeated if more people are willing to be brave and to break away from these journal monopolies. It would be much better if academics all collectively decided to keep all of their own rights to their own work and to self-publish commercially instead. Far too much of science is currently under the control of other people’s arbitrary capricious whims and assumptions and financially corrupt institutions.