In the US at least, that evaluation is performed by faculty not by a system. If three schools (say MIT, Harvard, and Stanford) said 'we will no longer consider any work published in non-open source journals in the award of tenure' the system would flip very very quickly. Institutions could do the same with REF in the UK.
It is a system of social norms and conventions that are treated as inherent while also constantly shifting...but no one will admit are shifting or socially constructed.
This makes me wonder if there's room for a kind of legal hack that could carry these things over to a new journal. A journal's reputation is essentially tied to its name; and the name is what goes on people's CVs and on the lists of approved journals and so on. It seems like the name is really the only asset of a journal that could not very quickly be duplicated elsewhere if the editorial board decides to move together.
I assume these names are protected by trademark law and that the publishers will fight to the death to protect them. But in the scenario where the editorial board jumps ship, is there some kind of legal argument they could use to either (a) effectively steal the name from the publisher or (b) piggyback on the name and reputation of the old journal, for example by naming the new journal "The Journal Formerly Known As X", so that it's clear to everyone that this is the journal X in all but name, and thus should be treated like X for the purpose of performance reviews etc.? Anyone know how far an editorial board could go in this direction, if they made up their minds to do so?
"Legislation and regulation"? This is an astonishing claim. As far as I know, universities decide their own performance evaluation processes. How on earth did you get the impression that legislators passed laws dictating that academics publish in high impact factor journals?
Not necessarily. In some countries, public research institutions are governed by regulations that cover organization aspects, funding, and performance evaluation.
> How on earth did you get the impression that legislators passed laws dictating that academics publish in high impact factor journals?
By the fact that I spent close to a decade working as a research engineer and as a PhD candidate, and I had to learn how my research group was funded and evaluated in order to remain a research engineer.
This is part of the fleecing. It ends up in law the same way that "Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organizations" (NRSROs) ended up in law in the US, or anti-third party laws (like against "fusion.")
Those laws and regulations seem like great places to attack, seeing as against the vast majority of academics, the few juggernauts of academic publishing would be very much underdogs. The problem is the weird rationalization that these arbitrary brands serve a useful purpose simply through being labeled as brands that should be respected.
It's no wonder they do as little as possible and charge as much as possible. Their value lies not in the papers they publish, the quality of their peer reviews, or the composition of their boards (which could easily be transferred) but in their titles, as if they were royalty. The only way to transfer this value is to sell the name to a huge company that can realize economies of scale and monopoly power to bring costs down even farther.
I wouldn't be surprised if, say, China did, but China doesn't dictate the way research is done globally.
I suspect you didn't spoke to a lot of UK and EU academics then, because that's how things are ran in here. The EU has been, for the past two decades or so, reforming their research institutions to introduce performance-based funding, which include and are not limited to tracking relevant and meaninful research output in a competitive environment[1]. These include bibliometrical indicators, which takes into account "publication type and the rank or citation impact of the publication channel". At the member-state and and institutional level this involves whitelists of acceptable reference publications.
Re: the EU materials you've added to the post, thank you, I didn't know about this and I can definitely appreciate that it would make defection from the established set of journals more difficult. That said, editorial board defections usually produce journals with similar impact factors to the originals, so it is far from an insuperable barrier.
At any rate, my original comments seem to apply to countries like the US and UK that dominate in research. Academics there have the power to stop serving paywall-and-overcharge academic publishing corporations. We know this, because they sometimes do, and those that do are often successful. But most choose not to.
Not really, at least not anymore. Depending on which metrics you choose to look at[1], China currently leads research output, and by a long stretch, over the US.
Meanwhile, within the EU Germany outperforms the UK by a considerable margin, and both India and Japan outperform the UK as well.
The UK fares even worse in papers-per-capita, ranking between the Czech Republic and Portugal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_number_of...
> Academics there have the power to stop serving paywall-and-overcharge academic publishing corporations. We know this, because they sometimes do, and those that do are often successful. But most choose not to.
Don't get me wrong, it's possible to overthrow the likes of Elsevier. The current push for public-access research is a significant step to eliminate the stranglehold these companies have on research output by abusing copyright laws. However, unlike the initial claim, this is no easy feat nor straight-forward.
Nobody who knows anything of the content of the research underlying those metrics takes this seriously.
To be very charitable in my interpretation, your personal assertion is simply presumptuous and outright wrong. China outright dominates research in some key fields[1], and in some fields it's outright impossible to search through topics without getting search hits from china.
[1] https://asia.nikkei.com/Business/China-tech/China-s-research...
Do you have any idea what they do to game those metrics?
That would actually be completely irrelevant. Performance evaluation in academia is tied to the ability to post X papers in well respected established publications with a high impact factor. This requirement is generally imposed by legislation and regulation. Thus what matters is a publication's impact factor, it's reputation, and whether they are already in the acceptable list or not.
If a mass protest led an entire editorial board to leave an established high-impact factor journal to start their own journal from scratch, said new journal would fail to meet any of the criteria that makes a journal an acceptable publication.
> Because, again, these folks don't care if anyone can read their research outside of colleagues who might cite them.
Thus assertion is also wrong. There are researchers who put together their own journals and use them to circle-jerk their way into relevance. This has been happening for years, and I even know of a case where said researcher even ties his papers to his own congress. However, these journals do tend to have a piss-poor impact factor, thus they don't count for performance reviews.