#predatory journals and publishers

[elvesofnoldor]

we truly live in the most diabolical of timelines when people casually makes misogynist comments in regards to a male character lmao. The other day i saw several popular hundred-likes youtube comments under a IWTV thinkpiece video that jokes lestat is just like "one of those abusive women who get pregnant to trap their partners". so cool that people still think abusive just means "being mean". so cool that people doesn't understand that irl women "babytrapping" their partners are victims of abuse themselves and are often financially and socially dependent on their partner/abuser who probably cheat on them constantly, and since they literally had nowhere to go and no one to go to, she is forced to sacrifice their body just to have a roof over her head and food in her stomach. like lestat is 1. fictional and 2. a man, so this shouldn't be about him, but don't we love to get reminded that we live in a society where people cares very little for victims of abuse??? im in hell.

[melaeckenfels]

Predatory Journals — Kommentierte Ressourcenliste

Eine kommentierte Ressourcenliste, mit Ressourcen, die dabei helfen die Seriosität wissenschaftlicher Publikationen einzuschätzen.

Für meine Kommilitonen im Seminar “Beyond History. Historische Praktiken jenseits der Geschichtswissenschaft” habe ich eine Übersicht zusammengestellt, welche Ressourcen es gibt, um sich über Raubverlage und Raubjournals zu informieren und die Seriosität wissenschaftlicher Publikationen einzuschätzen. Nachdem ich davon ausgehe, dass diese Informationen noch mehr Menschen als nur die…

[sixteenseveredhands]

Moths in Disguise: these are all just harmless moths that have developed the ability to mimic wasps, bees, and/or hornets

Top Row (left to right): Eusphecia pimplaeformis and Myrmecopsis polistes; Bottom Row: Pennisetia marginatum

Moths are exceptionally skilled when it comes to mimicry, and there are hundreds of moth species that rely on that tactic as a way to protect themselves from predators. Their disguises are numerous and varied, but hymenopteran mimicry is particularly common, especially among the moths that belong to subfamily Sesiidae and family Arctiinae.

Yellowjacket-Mimicking Moths: Pseudosphex sp. (top and bottom left) and Myrmecopsis polistes (bottom right)

Some of their disguises involve more than just a physical resemblance -- there are some moths that also engage in behavioral and/or acoustic mimicry, meaning that they can imitate the specific sounds and behaviors of their hymenopteran models. In some cases, these moths are so convincing that they can even fool the actual wasps/bees that they are mimicking.

Such a detailed and intricate disguise is unusual even among mimics, and researchers believe that it developed partly as a way to trick the wasps into treating the mimic like one of their own. Wasps tend to prey upon moths (and many other insects), but they are innately non-aggressive toward their own nest-mates, which are identified by sight -- so if the moth can convincingly impersonate its model, then it can avoid being eaten by predatory wasps.

Wasp-Mimicking Moths: Pseudosphex ichneumonea (top), Myrmecopsis sp. (bottom left), and Pseudosphex sp. (bottom right)

There are many moths that can also mimic hornets, bumblebees, and carpenter bees.

Hornet-Mimicking Moths: Eusphecia pimplaeformis (top left), Sesia apiformis (bottom left), Paranthrene simulans (top right), Pennisetia marginatum (middle right), and Sphecodoptera scribai (bottom left)

Bumblebee-Mimicking Moths: Hemaris tityus (top and bottom left) and Hemaris affinis (bottom right)

Moths are some of the most talented mimics in the natural world, as illustrated by their mastery of hymenopteran mimicry. But it's not just bees, hornets, and wasps -- there are many other forms of mimicry that can be found among moths, and the resemblance is often staggering.

Moths deserve far more credit than they receive, to be honest, because they are so incredibly interesting/diverse.

Sources & More Info:

Journal of Ecology and Evolution: A Hypothesis to Explain the Accuracy of Wasp Resemblances

Frontiers in Zoology: Southeast Asian clearwing moths buzz like their model bees

Royal Society Publishing: Moving like a model: mimicry of hymenopteran flight trajectories by clearwing moths of Southeast Asian rainforests

[transmutationisms]

lotta academics have bought into the idea that predatory journals only exist because people don't know better, rather than because there are structural pressures encouraging publishing at any cost (incl. a literal monetary cost) in order to generate a line on a CV. one danger in believing that these journals publish only the ignorant or uninformed is that people come to believe that they and their respected colleagues are above all that, because they're considering publication to be an unbiased referendum on the quality of the work and not analysing the material conditions at play (the academic's career and professional interests, the university's financial and cultural capital, the journal as a business entity, &c).

the difference between a 'successful' and 'unsuccessful' academic is not that the former was inherently more deserving or smarter or harder-working... much more to do with luck, demographic privileges (which is to say also luck), and ability and willingness to work the system, including by generating publishable and published results. you can't get rid of predatory publishing so long as publication is a structural barrier to raises, job security, & reputation, & thinking that you personally are better than or smarter than some mythical category of Lesser Intellectuals based on what journal you publish in is just self-serving and naïve

[blueiscoool]

First tyrannosaur fossil discovered with its last meal perfectly preserved in its stomach

Researchers have found a tyrannosaur’s last meal perfectly preserved inside its stomach cavity.

What was on the menu 75 million years ago? The hind legs of two baby dinosaurs, according to new research on the fossil published Friday in the journal Science Advances.

Dinosaur guts and hard evidence of their diets are rarely preserved in the fossil record, and it is the first time the stomach contents of a tyrannosaur have been uncovered.

The revelation makes this discovery particularly exciting, said co-lead author Darla Zelenitsky, a paleontologist and associate professor at the University of Calgary in Alberta.

“Tyrannosaurs are these large predatory species that roamed Alberta, and North America, during the late Cretaceous. These were the iconic apex or top predators that we’ve all seen in movies, books and museums. They walked on two legs (and) had very short arms,” Zelenitsky said.

“It was a cousin of T. rex, which came later in time, 68 to 66 million years ago. T. rex is the biggest of the tyrannosaurs, Gorgosaurus was a little bit smaller, maybe full grown would have been 9, 10 meters (33 feet).”

The tyrannosaur in question, a young Gorgosaurus libratus, would have weighed about 772 pounds (350 kilograms) — less than a horse — and reached 13 feet (4 meters) in length at the time of death.

The creature was between the ages of 5 and 7 and appeared to be picky in what it consumed, Zelenitsky said.

“Its last and second-to-last meal were these little birdlike dinosaurs, Citipes, and the tyrannosaur actually only ate the hind limbs of each of these prey items. There’s really no other skeletal remains of these predators within the stomach cavity. It’s just the hind legs.

“It must have killed … both of these Citipes at different times and then ripped off the hind legs and ate those and left the rest of the carcasses,” she added. “Obviously this teenager had an appetite for drumsticks.”

The two baby dinosaurs both belonged to the species called Citipes elegans and would have been younger than 1 year old when the tyrannosaur hunted them down, the researchers determined.

The almost complete skeleton was found in Alberta’s Dinosaur Provincial Park in 2009.

That the tyrannosaur’s stomach contents were preserved wasn’t immediately obvious, but staff at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, Alberta, noticed small protruding bones when preparing the fossil in the lab and removed a rock within its rib cage to take a closer look.

“Lo and behold, the complete hind legs of two baby dinosaurs, both under a year old, were present in its stomach,” said co-lead author François Therrien, the museum’s curator of dinosaur paleoecology, in a statement.

The paleontologists were able to determine the ages of both the predator and its prey by analyzing thin slices sampled from the fossilized bones.

“There’s growth marks like the rings of a tree. And we can essentially tell how old a dinosaur is from looking at those, the structure of the bone,” Zelenitsky said.

Changing appetites of top predators

The fossil is the first hard evidence of a long-suspected dietary pattern among large predatory dinosaurs, said paleoecologist Kat Schroeder, a postdoctoral researcher at Yale University’s department of Earth and planetary science, who wasn’t involved in the research.

The teen tyrannosaur didn’t eat what its parents did. Paleontologists believe its diet would have changed over its life span.

“Large, robust tyrannosaurs like T. rex have bite forces strong enough to hit bone when eating, and so we know they bit into megaherbivores like Triceratops,” Schroeder said via email. “Juvenile tyrannosaurs can’t bite as deep, and therefore don’t leave such feeding traces.”

She said that scientists have previously hypothesized that young tyrannosaurs had different diets from fully developed adults, but the fossil find marks the first time researchers have direct evidence.

“Combined with the relative rarity of juvenile tyrannosaur skeletons, this fossil is very significant,” Schroeder added. “Teeth can only tell us so much about the diet of extinct animals, so finding stomach contents is like picking up the proverbial ‘smoking gun.’”

The contents of the tyrannosaur’s stomach cavity revealed that at this stage in life, juveniles were hunting swift, small prey. It was likely because the predator’s body wasn’t yet well-suited for bigger prey, Zelenitsky said.

“It’s well known that tyrannosaurs changed a lot during growth, from slender forms to these robust, bone-crushing dinosaurs, and we know that this change was related to feeding behavior.”

When the dinosaur died, its mass was only 10% of that of an adult Gorgosaurus, she said.

How juvenile tyrannosaurs filled a niche

The voracious appetite of teenage tyrannosaurs and other carnivores has been thought to explain a puzzling feature of dinosaur diversity.

There are relatively few small and midsize dinosaurs in the fossil record, particularly in the Mid- to Late Cretaceous Period — something paleontologists have determined is due to the hunting activities of young tyrannosaurs.

“In Alberta’s Dinosaur Provincial Park, where this specimen is from, we have a very well sampled formation. And so we have a pretty good idea of the ecosystem there. Over 50 species of dinosaurs,” Zelenitsky said.

“We are missing mid-sized … predators from that ecosystem. So yeah, there’s been the hypothesis that, the juvenile tyrannosaurs filled that niche.”

By Katie Hunt.

[typhlonectes]

Mice could someday become venomous, suggests study on the evolution of oral venom systems

Snakes and mammals share common genetic building blocks necessary for producing venom.

What do cuttlefish, scorpions, centipedes, snakes, and primates called slow lorises have in common? All evolved the relatively rare ability to produce venom — chemical toxins that kill or incapacitate other animals through bites or stings. And in a few thousands years, there’s a chance that scientists will add mice to that list. “Oral venom systems evolved multiple times in numerous vertebrates enabling the exploitation of unique predatory niches,” the researchers noted. “Yet how and when they evolved remains poorly understood. Up to now, most research on venom evolution has focused strictly on the toxins.” In the new study, published in the journal PNAS, researchers instead focused on the gene-regulating networks associated with the production of venom in snakes. Because venom is a complex mixture of proteins, venom-producing animals have evolved a molecular system that’s capable of properly folding chains of amino acids in a highly specific way. Without this, animals wouldn’t be able to withstand the cellular stress caused by producing venom...

Read more: Mice could someday become venomous, suggests study on the evolution of oral venom systems - Big Think

photograph by George Shuklin

[lauralot89]

Reasons to Be Put in a Saw Trap

From Saw to Saw X:

Taking drugs

Committing insurance fraud

Self-injury

Having no personality

Telling patients they are terminally ill

Being married to an oncologist

Being the child of an oncologist

Investigating the Jigsaw killings

Not fulfilling your dreams of becoming a doctor

Being a police informant

Being a crooked cop

Being the child of a crooked cop

Being put in prison by a crooked cop

Dealing drugs

Doing sex work

Being habitually imprisoned

Being too good at forensic science

Taking antidepressants

Being sad that your child died

Being the surviving child of someone who is sad their other child died

Fleeing the scene of a crime as the only witness

Giving a light sentence for vehicular manslaughter

Vehicular manslaughter

Making inescapable Saw traps

Providing legal defense for criminals

Trying too hard to save people

Pimping

Rape

Being an abuser

Being married to an abuser

Causing a woman to miscarry

Recklessly opening doors

Being a Jigsaw apprentice without actually having your heart in it

Murder

Pretending to be Jigsaw to cover up for committing a murder

Arson

Conspiracy to commit arson

Taking a bribe to say there was no arson

Taking a bribe to not publish investigative journalism about arson

Taking a bribe to issue a building permit

Predatory money lending

Working for an insurance company

Being related to someone who works for an insurance company

Being related to someone who died because they were denied coverage by an insurance company

Being an attorney for an insurance company executive

Smoking

Being in a love triangle

Being a Nazi

Pretending to have been in a Saw trap

Being the publicist for someone who pretended to have been a Saw trap

Being the lawyer for someone who pretended to be in a Saw trap

Being friends with someone who pretended to be in a Saw trap

Being married to someone who, unbeknownst to you, pretended to be in a Saw trap

Working in a morgue

Working in a police station

Putting someone in a Saw trap at Jigsaw's request

Killing the person who put you in a Saw trap at Jigsaw's request

Mislabeling medical records

Letting your mugging victim die of an asthma attack

Knowingly selling faulty motorcycles

Committing infanticide and then blaming it on your spouse

Drunk driving

Shooting an unarmed civilian at a traffic stop

Shooting a witness to prevent them from testifying against crooked cops

Peddling fake cancer cures

[novlr]

I want to publish my poetry in a litereary journal, but I'm being asked to pay $25 just to submit with no guarantee that my work will get picked. Is this normal? And is it worth it?

There is no shortage of predatory publishers, journals, and competitors who are ready to divest a writer of their hard-earned money.

While not all submission fees are scams, you do want to make sure you do your due diligence and research on the publication before you commit your money to the cause.

In the Reading Room today, we talk all about submission fees, what's reasonable, what you can expect, and what constitutes a red flag.

[rlyehtaxidermist]

I'm a day late for Thresholdposting but since I've been reminded, I'd like to shout out the American Research Journal of Biosciences, a predatory publisher that agreed to publish "Rapid Genetic and Developmental Morphological Change Following Extreme Celerity", a sham paper detailing the characters' alleged observations of the effect seen in the infamous episode.

For those unfamiliar, predatory publishers are fake journals who charge authors considerable fees, ostensibly to support their peer review program, but offer few or no actual review or other helpful services, simply pocketing the researchers' money. Predatory journals are a particular problem in the open access research movement, as many legitimate open access journals also charge fees in order to maintain their services in lieu of charging an access fee in the traditional model.

The original charge that the American Research Journal of Biosciences offered was $749 - though this was dropped to $50 when the author claimed they had limited funding. The author paid out of pocket, taking the loss to expose the journal's fraud.

when the joke was revealed, they quickly expunged it from their website, but it can still be seen on the Wayback Machine

[allthebrazilianpolitics]

Massive dino from Brazil ate 'like a pelican,' controversial new study finds. Why is it causing an uproar?

The study reveals new information about the carnivorous dinosaur Irritator challengeri, but the research has been criticized because the fossils may have been illegally removed from Brazil.

A large predatory dinosaur related to Spinosaurus may have scooped up prey "like a pelican" by extending its lower jaw, European researchers propose in a new study. But the findings have upset some paleontologists who contest that the fossils were illegally taken from Brazil and should be returned to their country of origin.

The dinosaur at the center of the controversy is Irritator challengeri, a member of the family Spinosauridae — a group of bipedal, carnivorous dinosaurs with long, crocodilian-like snouts. The species, which grew to a max length of around 21 feet (6.5 meters), was first described in 1996 from 115 million-year-old fossils uncovered in the Araripe Basin of northeastern Brazil and later shipped to Germany, where they now reside in the Stuttgart Museum of Natural History in the state of Baden-Württemberg. 

In the new study, which was published in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica, researchers digitally reconstructed the skull from the I. challengeri specimen housed in Stuttgart and discovered that the species' lower jaw could spread out to the sides, widening the animal's pharynx, the area behind the nose and mouth. This is similar to how a pelican widens its lower beak to scoop up small fish, suggesting that I. challengeri likely fed in the same way, the researchers wrote in a statement.

The new analysis also revealed that, due to its eye placement, I. challengeri would have naturally inclined its snout at a 45-degree angle and been capable of rapid-yet-weak bites. When combined, these features suggest that the snout would have been well suited to quickly scooping prey out of shallow water, the researchers wrote.

I. challengeri's journey from Brazil to Germany is a contentious one. The fossils were unearthed by nonscientific commercial diggers and were sold to the Stuttgart Museum before 1990, when Brazil began restricting scientific exports to other countries. As a result, the study's researchers believed that the fossils legally belonged to the Baden-Württemberg state.

However, an older Brazilian law dating to 1942 states that Brazilian fossils are federal property and cannot be sold, meaning that the fossil was technically stolen by the commercial diggers who exported it, Juan Carlos Cisneros, a paleontologist at the Federal University of Piauí in Brazil who was not involved in the new study, told Live Science in an email. "And buying something stolen does not make you its owner," he said.

Continue reading.

[she-is-ovarit]

Science needs to be accessible. The fact that knowledge is hidden behind journal paywalls is so predatory. It means only the people who can afford to pay the publisher for information will be able to learn. The inability of vulnerable groups - or even just the general population - to acquire certain knowledge creates power disparities.

So anyways, TL;DR, here's the means to access nearly any scientific article normally behind a paywall for free:

Have fun on your nerdy side-quest reading niche academic articles on whatever the hell it is you're into.

[lowcountry-gothic]

Really interesting article. Some highlights (emphasis mine):

It continues to come as a great surprise for many people to learn that psychiatry’s leading authorities, including the former longtime director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), have discarded the “chemical imbalance theory of mental illness”—an idea which has had a profound impact on millions of emotionally suffering people and on our entire society.

While researchers began jettisoning it by the 1990s, one of psychiatry’s first loud rejections was in 2011, when psychiatrist Ronald Pies, Editor-in-Chief Emeritus of the Psychiatric Times, stated: “In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.” Thomas Insel was the NIMH director from 2002 to 2015, and in his recently published book, Healing (2022), he notes, “The idea of mental illness as a ‘chemical imbalance’ has now given way to mental illnesses as ‘connectional’ or brain circuit disorders.” While this latest “brain circuit disorder” theory remains controversial, it is now consensus at the highest levels of psychiatry that the chemical imbalance theory is invalid.

In Blaming the Brain (1998), Elliot Valenstein, professor emeritus of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Michigan, detailed research showing that it is just as likely for people with normal serotonin levels to feel depressed as it is for people with abnormal serotonin levels, and that it is just as likely for people with abnormally high serotonin levels to feel depressed as it is for people with abnormally low serotonin levels. Valenstein concluded, “Furthermore, there is no convincing evidence that depressed people have a serotonin or norepinephrine deficiency.”

As a journalist, [National Public Radio correspondent Alix] Spiegel did some digging. She talked to Joseph Coyle, Harvard Medical School professor of neuroscience and editor of one of psychiatry’s most prestigious journals, who told her: “Chemical imbalance is sort of last-century thinking....It’s really an outmoded way of thinking.” Spiegel tried to discover why psychiatry has not made greater efforts at publicizing its jettisoning of the chemical imbalance hypothesis. Alan Frazer, chair of the department of pharmacology at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, told her that framing depression as a chemical imbalance has allowed patients to feel better about taking a drug and to “feel better about themselves, if there was this biological reason for them being depressed, some deficiency, and the drug was correcting it.” Apparently, authorities at the highest levels have long known that the chemical imbalance theory was a disproven hypothesis, but they have viewed it as a useful “noble lie” to encourage medication use.

I also found this video in which Mitch Prinstein, chief science officer at the American Psychological Association, says that SSRIs probably aren't a placebo affect and that people shouldn't just stop taking them, but suggests that depression is a complex phenomenon which SSRIs only address one facet of and may not be the best approach to, citing different therapy approaches as potentially more effective in certain cases. But then there's this:

Another interesting article that goes farther in linking the use of SSRIs to capitalism and the predatory influence of Big Pharma.

Almost every measure of our collective mental health—rates of suicide, anxiety, depression, addiction deaths, psychiatric prescription use—went the wrong direc­tion, even as access to services expanded greatly.”

During the last three decades, SSRIs have been repeatedly linked to higher suicide risk; found to create a far higher percentage of sexual dysfunction than to positively affect depression (with SSRI success rates no different than placebo rates or even lower than placebo rates); and result in withdrawal reactions that can be severe and persistent.

Big Pharma has spread its money around to psychiatric institutions such as the American Psychiatric Association (APA), the guild of psychiatrists, and to so-called “patient advocacy” groups such as the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). Big Pharma has also spread millions of dollars around to individual psychiatrists, especially so-called “thought leaders.” One of many psychiatrists exposed by 2008 Congressional hearings on psychiatry’s financial relationship with drug companies was Harvard psychiatrist Joseph Biederman—credited with creating pediatric bipolar disorder—who received $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007.

The individual-defect/pathologizing of emotional suffering and behavioral disturbances meets the political needs of those who wish to remain in denial of their connection with emotional suffering and behavioral disturbances. Psychiatry’s biochemical/brain disease explanations for emotional suffering and behavioral disturbances clearly meets the needs of the ruling class. If a population believes that its suffering is caused not by social-economic-political variables but instead by individual defects, this belief undermines political rebellion and maintains the status quo.

“Biological determinism (biologism) has been a powerful mode of explaining the observed inequalities of status, wealth, and power in contemporary industrial capitalist societies. . . . Biological determinism is a powerful and flexible form of ‘blaming the victim.’”

For societal and family authorities, psychiatry has another political role, an “extra-legal police function.” Specifically, a major political role of psychiatry is to control individuals—via involuntary drug and hospitalization “treatments”—who have done nothing illegal but who create tension for authorities. David Cohen, UCLA professor of social welfare, notes: “This coercive function is what society and most people actually appreciate most about psychiatry.”

On another level, psychiatry lives on despite repeated failures and lack of progress because it embraces the worship of technology and the belief that salvation from emotional suffering will come with a new technology.

A lot to think about.

To be clear, I’m not averse to taking medication per se. I’m on OCD meds and I know how quickly I spiral into misery without them. But it’s really frustrating to read all this since it just underlines that we’re really doing nothing about the real underlying problems, and the capitalism really is the root cause of so much of what’s wrong with the world right now.

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 64 – Poverty, by America by Mathew Desmond

I read Desmond’s Evicted a while back and found it a really excellent bit of sociology/journalism about the specifics and mechanisms of housing inequality and how modern slumlords exploit the poor. So this has been vaguely on my list for a decent while. Sadly, I found it a bit of a disappointment – more listing of facts and statistics that I already basically knew to support a manifesto than anything new or enlightening to me. Not that it’s bad, but if it was 20 pages instead of 200 I’m not sure much of value would really have been lost. Many such cases, I suppose.

The book is about exactly what it says is, a polemic decrying and investigation into why the United State’s poverty rates, and why extremes of material want are so much more common there than in comparable (poorer, even) western democracies. Refreshingly, Desmond has a clear thesis he doesn’t beat around the bush before saying – self-interest, essentially. The affluent benefit from having an underclass to extract resources from, and from excluding its members from the amenities they share, so they do. The book spends most of its wordcount enumerating and describing what Desmond considers the main problems: direct exploitation (underpayment, predatory financiers, slums, etc), an underresourced and misdirected wellfare state (compare the cost of middle/upper-class targeted programs like the mortgage interest deduction or tax-exempt savings accounts to the cost of adequately ending hunger or providing healthcare) and segregation (both spatial/residential and in terms of access to public or semi-public services).

It’s pretty traditional for a book like this to spend 90% of its wordcount diagnosing problems and then end with some publisher-mandated optimism and a chapter of solutions with a fraction of the care put into them as in the diagnosis. Desmond, to his credit, avoids this – each chapter includes both the problems and he considers the most feasible solutions to them to be. He actually makes a point of it, arguing that having practical, winnable goals that will actually improve things when achieved (and then celebrating them when they are) is a key part of any political organizing with a chance of actually working. Now, what I think of those solutions varies quite wildly, but they’re there and exactly what you’d expect for his politics – and speaking as someone whose been renting my entire life I wholly endorse fucking all the tax benefits you get essentially for having the cash on hand to make a down payment. (Relatedly, the book has a great deal of scorn for comfortable, affluent people whose progressive politics amount to lots of critiquing and zero actual positive action.)

Desmond is clearly writing this from the point of view of a(n inspirational) public intellectual; that is, by writing this he’s trying to call an audience and movement based around it into being. He likes the label Poverty Abolitionist and the central project of the book is basically trying to make it happen as an umbrella term people identify with – especially the affluent well-heeled people who read books like this, and might be persuaded to start boycotting companies for underpaying their employees or union-busting, or campaigning against government subsidies that benefit them instead of the poor. I did appreciate the relative hopeful tone, given the usual coverage of American politics – or, well, is ‘Washington was at least this fucked when it passed the Civil Rights Act or the New Deal” optimistic? Whatever the right word is.

Now, I’m summarized all this in ~500 words, obviously actually making the argument needs more space than that. But it really did not need to be as long as it was – a huge fraction of the wordcount is spent either restating arguments or just throwing around numbers and statistics without really contextualization (anyone who spends so much time comparing expenses and budgets across the decade should be legally required to adjust for inflation imo). There’s a good, well-cited (excessively cited, if anything. The footnotoes are like a fifth of the book) persuasive essay in here, but there is so much fat to cut around it.

Anyway yes, disappointing reading experience, given I was hoping for more sociology and less polemic. But as far as American political polemic goes, it’s pretty decent.

[grison-in-space]

also ngl y'all in nih land (me in nih land?) have got to like. Bother to organize your research societies. I went from all the best journals being society - run and sometimes completely independent from the giant predatory publishing houses to a field where all the journals are straight up run by the publishing houses and corporations also run all the conferences as for profit endeavors. Yikes.

[ygodmyy20]

Hello, I hear you have many thoughts on open access publishing? 👀

Okdoki Texas I have had enough time to gather my thoughts!

BIG caveat. I haven't worked in academic publishing sphere in over a year. Things change often and there likely are things I just (not being in the industry any more) don't know because I am not in the thick of it. I also am not an academic, I have never published in a journal. I just worked in the industry.

another also (so many I just, want to make sure I am super clear) anything with academia is complex, and there is no one perfect answer. There are a myriad of things that academic publishing is grappling with that isn't just OA publishing. But I'll just touch on OA publishing here!

Useful links that can probably give better definitions on things than I ever could:

^ DORA is related to publishing but i won't talk much about it here. Another issue with academic publishing is how journals are ranked. Which.....i am not gonna go into but if you search Journal Impact Factor you can find more info. (legit its like, academic publishing is a big iceberg hahahah)

First off, a brief def of what Open Access Publishing is:

OA Publishing is "A publication is defined 'open access' when there are no financial, legal or technical barriers to accessing it (source)." That is the best definition that exists. But OA journals are also characterized by funding models which do not require the reader to pay to read the journal's contents, relying instead on author fees or on public funding, subsidies and sponsorships. 

Within that are many types of OA publishing. Gold, Green, Diamond and more. You can find those definitions in the source link above on OA publishing.

Now, non-open access journals cover publishing costs through access tolls such as subscriptions, site licenses or pay-per-view charges. These are paywalled journals.

Open Access Publishing was created because research and knowledge was and is getting locked behind paywalls. For example, if I want to look up research on say....ADHD medication.

I do a search. I find this:

Paywall. Luckily I can gleam a good bit from the abstract they provide and they share some key highlights. But I cannot read the full text.

So now where do I go? I can try and dig around and find reddit or other articles on other sites, but what if I really wanted to read the research? What if i don't want to read an opinion piece on it? I can't. I have to pay for it (cuz I am not affiliated with a university) or find it somewhere else.

Open access reduces those paywalls so I can read that research if I want to.

However, worth noting, it isn't always a perfect model, as certain side effects have come up like an increase in predatory journals, incredibly high author costs, "double dipping" by large publishers (i.e., a journal charging an author fee and still charging libraries and institutions a subscription cost to the journal) and others.

At the same time, I fully back OA publishing over the old model because the locking of knowledge behind paywalls is too big an issue to ignore. Everyone deserves to be able to access research. And publishers are making so much fucking money off of research they didn't DO. (IN some cases an author is PAYING a journal to publish their journal and then the journal charges others to access and its like I AM SORRY????)

Reminder: You can always email an author and ask for their paper. They likely will send the PDF to you. They WANT their research to be read (bc my god the time it takes to publish a paper is insane.)

I am not the right person to give recommendations on how to publish. It is so dependent on your field of study, the journals in your discipline, etc. Most often, a professor or advisor will help with those decisions, but I think more younger academics should ask questions. Understand what OA is, and see if there are any OA journals in their field that would be a good fit for their research.

Anyway I hope that was helpful or interesting, Texas!! Again I am not sure I have any hot takes, I still just feel strongly about the dissemination of research to the public.

[sophieinwonderland]

Evaluating the reputation of a publisher is an integral part determining how trustworthy a source is. Anyone who says otherwise doesn't have the slightest idea what they're talking about. Especially in a world where you have predatory journals out there that will charge to pass articles through with little or no peer review.

It's incredibly important to have esteemed publishers like Oxford University Press publishing papers on tulpamancy and The American Psychiatric Association publishing books acknowledging endogenic and non-disordered plurality.

These aren't just blogs that will publish anything. These are incredibly reputable publishers with high standards who are willing to stake their reputations on the work of these authors.