This comic is partially right. If you pay, you get open access, so no cost for readers. If you go old-school you don’t pay and the article is paywalled. Terrible system either way, but open access is necessary nowadays, as otherwise you will get cited less
The readers are taxpayers, they are paying whether they like it for not.
The solution is to post articles on preprint servers, like Arxiv or BioRxiv, which are open and free to read.
I refuse to pay open access fees and use BioRxiv for all my publications.
We also do preprints 100% of the time, but academic incentives are baked AF. Not ‘publishing’ means a large proportion of other academics simply won’t read or cite your work as they don’t believe in preprints. Additionally, funding bodies care about prestige publishing in top ranked journals, so if you don’t do this, the grant pool you have access to will be smaller.
The incentives need to change, where journal venue is irrelevant, or weighted far less than it is.
This comic is partially right. If you pay, you get open access, so no cost for readers. If you go old-school you don’t pay and the article is paywalled. Terrible system either way, but open access is necessary nowadays, as otherwise you will get cited less
The readers are taxpayers, they are paying whether they like it for not. The solution is to post articles on preprint servers, like Arxiv or BioRxiv, which are open and free to read.
I refuse to pay open access fees and use BioRxiv for all my publications.
💯 with you on this.
We also do preprints 100% of the time, but academic incentives are baked AF. Not ‘publishing’ means a large proportion of other academics simply won’t read or cite your work as they don’t believe in preprints. Additionally, funding bodies care about prestige publishing in top ranked journals, so if you don’t do this, the grant pool you have access to will be smaller.
The incentives need to change, where journal venue is irrelevant, or weighted far less than it is.