I am not in academia but did participate in published research both in college and in a job as a lab assistant afterward. I don’t really think your analogy holds up. There is literally no cost to such a change; scientists just need to start READING and CITING papers from free, alternative journals for them to be legitimized. The profit incentives of the universities, private industry, and government that fund the majority of research are not affected by the choice of the medium of exchange of ideas. Only the journals’ pockets.
You aren’t wrong, there isn’t actually a lot holding the system back from changing, which is exactly why I compare it to a mafia model.
The mafia is only ever just one jerk at the top who makes every chump underneath them sacred enough not to look to their neighbor and go “do we really need this asshole?”. Just understanding the current conditions as a pure product of individual agents agreeing to consent or not to is not a complete picture, you have to include in the context the ways in which a culture of consent both in what is necessary and what is possible is created that is essential to the suffocating power of the system to preclude other possibilities.
I am not in academia but did participate in published research both in college and in a job as a lab assistant afterward. I don’t really think your analogy holds up. There is literally no cost to such a change; scientists just need to start READING and CITING papers from free, alternative journals for them to be legitimized. The profit incentives of the universities, private industry, and government that fund the majority of research are not affected by the choice of the medium of exchange of ideas. Only the journals’ pockets.
You aren’t wrong, there isn’t actually a lot holding the system back from changing, which is exactly why I compare it to a mafia model.
The mafia is only ever just one jerk at the top who makes every chump underneath them sacred enough not to look to their neighbor and go “do we really need this asshole?”. Just understanding the current conditions as a pure product of individual agents agreeing to consent or not to is not a complete picture, you have to include in the context the ways in which a culture of consent both in what is necessary and what is possible is created that is essential to the suffocating power of the system to preclude other possibilities.