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I don't get why publishers get paid either by the researchers or the users, when their service is minimal compared to the researchers or peer reviewers, who don't get paid at all.
What service do they even provide at this point? Web hosting? Formatting? Proofreading? These are not particularly expensive services. Can’t we just create our own low cost or free publishers?
You know what is really messed up about the publishing system we have? There are people out there that defend it. They claim the high costs are a "feature" that prevents fake/garbage papers from being published. Which best case scenario, shows that the emperor is stark naked.
Yes, it seems right now the only thing holding back that change is researchers treating paid journals as prestigious and adding clout to their name and publishings, and lacking a system to engage in peer review outside of journals and conferences. ArXiv is basically halfway there to registering users and publishing, they just need features for registering as a peer review, engaging for a review, and judging as acceptable or not. Most of that could be covered by votes and comments like Lemmy but limited to an accredited community of peer researchers.
Edit: to be clear not all researchers, some reject paid journals just not enough to change behavior in the general field/branch yet
To be fair, real proofreading is no easy task. You need someone proficient in that field of study to really do that, but as recent AI-escapades showed, none of those publishers do that anymore.
The pricy thing is the establishment of a journal. A new journal, particularly a cheap one will get only crap articles, and because it has only crap articles, it won't get better. Neither from the side of referees, nor authors. In some countries it is not even relevant how successful your article is. It only counts how "fancy" the journal is (according to some outdated ministry list)
And btw, researchers don't pay for that. Subscription journals are payed by University licences and open access articles are payed by project funds, which also pay the researchers. You don't get any less salary because of an expensive journal. You just might not be able to publish all your work as open access.
Refuse to review for these scam journals. Only review for open-source venues.
Agreed, but is there a directory to find alternatives that are both reputable and reasonable in their pricing?
Varies by discipline, unsure if there is a cross-discipline directory. In my discipline there's a free open-source journal, and many/most conferences post articles online for free.