Wellsy wrote:Any one use it? Thoughts?
In my opinion this deserves support, mainly because journals don't do the job they are supposed to do, i.e. quality control of the published literature. It starts with their useless pre-publication peer reviews, goes on to their lack of enforcement of making the data of published articles available, and ends with their reluctance to publish post-publication corrections let alone retract papers.
There are of course better and worse journals, but it's frustrating to see that not even the PLOS journal which prides itself to require that the underlying data of all published articles must be available on request seems to be unable (or unwilling) to enforce this policy. I'm following a case where the data of an article published by PLOS has been requested by a researcher and all PLOS seems to do is drag its feet. It's been almost half a year since the data request.
Sci-hub doesn't address all of the problems with scientific research but at least it makes it possible for individuals to check whether the abstract reflects the facts as they appear in the whole article, because the sad truth is even that is often not the case. In many cases abstracts are pure spin and not an accurate summary of the results. So journals even fail at this most basic check.
One has to wonder just what value journals actually provide. And to top it all off, their profit margins are the envy of companies such as Apple and BMW.
As for the absurdity of journals' role in the publishing process, I'll quote somebody else since I wouldn't be able to put it better or more succinct.
The Scientist Opinion wrote:Let's take a look at the flow of money in the production of research. The government takes tax revenue from citizens and uses it to fund university research groups and libraries. Researchers obtain government grants and use the money to conduct experiments. They write up the results in manuscripts that are destined to become published papers. Manuscripts are submitted to journals, where they are handled by other researchers acting as unpaid volunteer editors. They co-ordinate the process of peer-review, which is done by yet other researchers, also unpaid. All these roles—author, editor, reviewer—are considered normal responsibilities of researchers, funded by grants.
At this point, researchers have worked together to produce a publication-ready, peer-reviewed manuscript. But rather than posting it on the Web, where it can contribute to the world's knowledge, form a basis for future work, and earn prestige for the author, the finished manuscript is then donated gratis to a publisher: the author signs away copyright. The publisher then formats the manuscript and places the result behind a paywall. Then it sells subscriptions back to the universities where the work originated. Well-off universities will have some access to the paper (though even they are denied important rights such as text-mining). Less well-off universities have access to varying selections of journals, often not the ones their researchers need. And the taxpayers who funded all this? They get nothing at all. No access to the paper.