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A comment on French Universities Cancel Subscriptions to Springer Journals. Parent comment

Re:French Universities Cancel Subscriptions to Springer Jour... by fnordsensei on Monday April 02, 2018 @02:35PM (#16737701)
As a researcher, in a lot of cases, you want to be published in a reputable journal. Publishers have learned to charge for the reputation over the years. Reputation has a lot of inertia.

The PR model would have to answer the question of how reputation is built. A "star" system would likely be inadequate for a number of reasons. But the major obstacle would be in getting researchers on board with the new model.

Early adopters would have to withstand scoffs from their peers who haven't accepted the new model yet.

Even Open Access, which could be regarded as an incremental improvement, has years, if not decades, of grueling work behind it.

The network effect is very strong within the research community, which results in a situation which is very close to "all or nothing."

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Re:French Universities Cancel Subscriptions to Springer Jour... by jjoonathan on Monday April 02, 2018 @03:09PM (#16738099)
> Early adopters would have to withstand scoffs from their peers

More importantly: punishment from the people who give them money.

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Re:French Universities Cancel Subscriptions to Springer Jour... by PopePompous on Monday April 02, 2018 @07:16PM (#16740339)
Also, the persons most comfortable with a radically different publishing model like PR are apt to be young researchers, but they are the ones most in need of establishing a reputation by publishing in established, prestigious journals.
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Re:French Universities Cancel Subscriptions to Springer Jour... by fnordsensei on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @01:10AM (#16742066)
Spot on. There's a huge potential for optimization in the entire field, but also an amount of inertia rarely seen elsewhere.
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Re:French Universities Cancel Subscriptions to Springer Jour... by zentiggr on Tuesday April 03, 2018 @08:07AM (#16743846)
Sounds like a case for "shaming" those who rely on 'prestige' since that seems like the only way to break entrenched habits. I am not in research or publishing or anything else directly involved. This is just a generalization that exposure and denigration of egregious cases tend to be the most effective initiators of systemic change, given our hard-wired approval seeking.
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