Hi Andrea,
I dug it up while writing my thesis on environmental assessment. As you may read, it is a field where we hear researchers crying for data for decades but ironically they 'd rather continue crying than acting upon the situation, i.e they don't do much for making it 'free' (cc-by like).
"
Researchers don’t
sell their
papers. They sell their whole work as researchers: they teach, they
publish, they advise dissertations. That’s the work they are paid for.
But they don’t get money from the papers
"
Indeed.
But to be a professor you need to have been publishing in a selective list of journal (or any secured position researcher you have in the system you are in, I'm french and do not know italian system. To us it starts at lecturer MC and continue with professor Pr).
And to receive funding (now that competitive models rule research funding) you have to show the most impressive list of publications (at least a "more competitive publishing pedigree than the other competing researchers)
... well nothing new as you describe that.
But in the end, you seem to skip a bit.
"
Ultimately, the
ring that rules them all is this final process: evaluation of research, meaning
counting citations.
"
Here, state sentences with subject-verb-complement.
Who is funding what/who
Who evaluate what/who
and particularly who decides that evaluation of research
is counting citations.
To act on a situation, we have to know the current actors.
When a group of researchers (known ones, leading their field can do so), decides to quit a publisher
(
lingua-glossa ;
JMLR ;
Journal_of_Topology ;
others)
, they state their rules showing who is producing the value. But for the general case, authors in dominant position
are in dominant position because they followed the mainstream lucrative rule.
So it is more about how power is distributed
inside academia than any other question.
We have the publication system of our academical power system. It is a struggle against a 'monopoly of scientific competence'. I may read anew Bourdieu in case 'Questions de sociologie' - "Le champ scientifique" gives me a new lead.
In my thesis (if you read french, my .tex are on GitHub), I consider the situation as a Nash equilibrium. My opinion is it may change as we make the values of the game change or/and let enter other players. To me, a player that is currently waiting - wanting on the bench is (some fraction at least of) 'taxpayers'.
- To read something we/they pay 3 times : 1°) pay the researchers 2°) pay the subscription fees of researchers 3°) pay what you read as a taxpayer outside of a subscribing university.
- They/we pay research, but are hardly consulted on "What do you want to know that we (as a species) do not know yet ?"
- They/we support the consequences of industrial research led for product development (good or bad according to each-one judgments).
It is roots of my contributions about making wikimedian spaces tools for aiding pressure on freeing publication. (for instance : not putting OA publication in front necessarly, but putting correspondign authors and funding contacts next to closed access articles with possible open archives ready to receive them.
Let taxpayers play a direct role (for instance in institutions that vote research grants. Here we have, universities grants, regions grants, some specific institutions as ADEME ... or even in juries for HDR (french 'title' allowing a university Pr or MC to lead research : enrol PhD student i.e. go up the ladder of academical capitalism). Do that and the cards of the publication game may change.