The accumulation of power in indexed journals and the competition amongst the academics, are creating a class struggle?
As\always it depends on the scholars and the institutions. Whilst it is undeniable that there is strong competition amongst both, I would like to believe that the best science comes from collaboration.
I find the question lacking in clarity. Civil war has been defined as "a violent conflict within a country fought by organized groups that aim to take power at the center or in a region, or to change government policies", and I don't think this is applicable to research competition, even if it can sometimes be fierce. Also, I simply don't understand what "accumulation of power in indexed journals" refers to, sorry.
Thank you Mary.
In academia, the working class –researchers and professors– are fighting in the class struggle against the owners of the means of production, the journals, and the current class struggle should end with revolution that restructure the system.
If you take it positively it is a healthy competition which is a need of time.and of course it will lead to a perfect moto but not war
Hi Rafael. You comment above clarifies the point you want to make.
One reason why I didn't get this before is that I would not define the owners of the publishing houses as scholars, they are business people plain and simple and academic publishing is Big Business with some of the greatest profit margins found in any business sector (20-50%; see e.g. http://www.nature.com/news/open-access-the-true-cost-of-science-publishing-1.12676).
Scholars are the researchers and professors working in academia, and there's no "civil war" going on between scholars, literally or otherwise ;-).
However, I completely agree with you that the system of academic publishing needs restructuring. At the moment, we're paying two or even three times for publishing our data. An example is the top journal in my research field - Endocrinology. First , some of the overhead costs taken off my research grants will go to paying the horrendously high subscription fee for this journal in our academic library. Then, when I publish a paper in it, I need to pay 115$ per page in page charges. Then, as the journal is basically non OA journal, and we're being indoctrinated that everything has to be published as OA, the journal has an OA option. If I pay additional 3000$, my paper will be OA.
So we're definitely being screwed, but not by other scholars, but by ruthless business people who see a huge opportunity of making a fortune in a system where we not only pay for the subscriptions, the pages and the OA, but write the papers for free and review them for free!
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