Universities, colleges, even community colleges insist that faculty publish scholarly research, and the more papers the better. Academics and the schools they teach at rely on these publications to bolster their reputations, and with an oversupply of Ph.D.’s vying for jobs, careers hang in the balance.
Competition is fierce to get published in leading journals. But what about the overworked professors at less prestigious schools and community colleges, without big grants and state-of-the-art labs? How do they get ahead?
As it turns out, many of their articles are appearing in “journals” that will publish almost anything, for fees that can range into the hundreds of dollars per paper. These publications often are called predatory journals, on the assumption that well-meaning academics are duped into working with them — tricked by flattering emails from the journals inviting them to submit a paper or fooled by a name that sounded like a journal they knew.
But it’s increasingly clear that many academics know exactly what they’re getting into, which explains why these journals have proliferated despite wide criticism. The relationship is less predator and prey, some experts say, than a new and ugly symbiosis. (1)
Science once was for the elites.
Now science is for everyone.
And when a privilege is given to everyone, it immediately stops being a privilege. And then the people stop respecting it. Then people stop caring or even giving notice.
Science used to be the privilege of an educated elite.
Science used to be about searching for the truth.
Science used to be a quest for the mind of God.
Now all people do science.
Now all people publish something.
Now people do not care about Science.
Now people just copy-paste things said by the elite and rephrase them in their own misguided way – thus at the same time destroying the fabric of the very same system which accepted them with open arms. Because now the system is “open” and, thus, there is no system. Newton waited for years before he published something – if he even did. Now scientists publish one paper per nanosecond.
Now we have papers.
Now we have journals.
And somehow it seems that their pages are empty…
