My current thinking (but very open to being convinced otherwise) is that lower fees to access publications wouldn’t really change anything fundamental about what science is being done, which makes it seem like a lot of work for limited gains?
My intuition is that forcing lower fees would make more money available for other parts of science. After all, most research is still done in universities and government agencies, and they usually have a limited budget to distribute each year. And honestly, I’m not sure if it so much works, it should be something that confederations of universities should be able to agree upon. I don’t know. To me seems much harder to try to force people not to publish in those reputable journals. In a sense, I feel they are extracting rents from the environment in a damaging way. In particular, it seems to be possible from a back-of-the-envelope calculation that ~10% of the cost of making science goes to these people.
My crux here would be that even though I think this has the potential to make research much more enjoyable to a broader group, it’s a bit unclear if it would actually lead to better science being done. I want to think that it would, but I can’t really make a strong argument for it.
It would be very interesting to know more about what attracts people to science careers, and what reasons for staying are—I think it’s very possible that status/​being in a completely academic social context that makes other career paths abstract plays an important role.
I think that you are right in that social status can play some role, but I don’t think this is the leading reason. The leading reason, to me, seems to be that it gives people purpose in a way that other things don’t so much. In a way, people going into and sticking to academia seems more like a struggle to do work that advances human knowledge or their own knowledge; even if the environment is kind of shitty. That’s why it feels weird to drop out of academic research. Of course, this is very subjective and I might be wrong.
Hey C Tilli, Thanks for commenting!
My intuition is that forcing lower fees would make more money available for other parts of science. After all, most research is still done in universities and government agencies, and they usually have a limited budget to distribute each year. And honestly, I’m not sure if it so much works, it should be something that confederations of universities should be able to agree upon. I don’t know. To me seems much harder to try to force people not to publish in those reputable journals. In a sense, I feel they are extracting rents from the environment in a damaging way. In particular, it seems to be possible from a back-of-the-envelope calculation that ~10% of the cost of making science goes to these people.
My intuition for this was that when you have a single kind of task, you are both able to specialize more but also allows you to concentrate more on the work you are doing, rather than having to jump between them, which I believe kills (my) productivity: https://​​80000hours.org/​​podcast/​​episodes/​​cal-newport-industrial-revolution-for-office-work/​​. That being said, I might be wrong.
I think that you are right in that social status can play some role, but I don’t think this is the leading reason. The leading reason, to me, seems to be that it gives people purpose in a way that other things don’t so much. In a way, people going into and sticking to academia seems more like a struggle to do work that advances human knowledge or their own knowledge; even if the environment is kind of shitty. That’s why it feels weird to drop out of academic research. Of course, this is very subjective and I might be wrong.