Remember that 80s magazine OMNI?
Science, tech, sci-fi, Mensa-caliber games... by the very same Bob Guccione who published Penthouse!

Every issue had an in-depth interview with a prominent and interesting scientist, figures like Alan Guth or Luc Montagnier or Morris Berman.
One issue was a little more off-beat, the interview was with an anthropologist, whose student life and career went like this:

Attending the University Of Montana in Missoula, this student loved drinking every day, so he asked the question - "What's a relatively easy major with little math, that will interfere the least with my drinking?" - and landed on Anthropology.

After graduation, the next question became - "What will I do my thesis about?" - a friend gave him the vague advice to do it on something he knew or was passionate about, and like a "eureka" moment, it hit him: "I'm gonna research drinking culture, bars!"

And so, he became one of the rarefied few for whom drinking on the job was basically a requirement!

A journal about the science of blackjack and hookers?

There's a behind the bastards about him.

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/105-behind-the-bastards-29236323/episode/part-one-robert-maxwell-how-ghislaine-274165028/

My advisor, who ostensibly understood my background and means, could not understand how such a relatively small fee would be so prohibitive.

No advisor expects a student to pay publication charges. My lab pays about $10,000/yr into this racket.

I got lucky in that my publication was through a journal that doesn't charge money for access or submissions. It's part of our professional organization and our annual membership fees cover the journal's expenses.

Really needs to be a wikipedia style service for academic papers.

Without independent wealth and deep personal connections it’s incredibly difficult to succeed in academia, regardless of the quality of your research.

Always has been, ~~why do you think he's called SIR Isaac Newton?~~

EDIT : Turns out his knighthood was afterwards, but he did have connections. There are several examples of science being the domain of already rich people.

Without independent wealth and deep personal connections it’s incredibly difficult to succeed in academia, regardless of the quality of your research.

oh bullshit.

In grad school your institution should be paying for fees like that. If the school itself isn't paying, then doesn't the supervisor have a grant they can file it under?

The subscription service/pay-to-play being everywhere has to stop eventually, right?

Like, eventually enough consumers will realize that they are bent over the barrel by their services.

I was darkly joking that Microsoft is like an abuser in another post yesterday, but the more I thought about it, the more the metaphor stuck. They take and take, make decisions on your behalf, cut you off from outsiders and make it increasingly difficult to escape the longer you let them get away with it. And that's not Microsoft's fault...that's capitalism, baby!

It is as if the New Yorker or the Economist demanded that journalists write and edit each other’s work for free, and asked the government to foot the bill. Outside observers tend to fall into a sort of stunned disbelief when describing this setup. A 2004 parliamentary science and technology committee report on the industry drily observed that “in a traditional market suppliers are paid for the goods they provide”. A 2005 Deutsche Bank report referred to it as a “bizarre” “triple-pay” system, in which “the state funds most research, pays the salaries of most of those checking the quality of research, and then buys most of the published product”.

Racket.

Maxwell insisted on grand titles – “International Journal of” was a favourite prefix. Peter Ashby, a former vice president at Pergamon, described this to me as a “PR trick”, but it also reflected a deep understanding of how science, and society’s attitude to science, had changed. Collaborating and getting your work seen on the international stage was becoming a new form of prestige for researchers, and in many cases Maxwell had the market cornered before anyone else realised it existed.

If you explain to any outsider that what we call science is a game of collecting and showing off units of prestige, they will be flabbergasted. Maxwell catered to the most superficial and vain aspects of the human psyche, and traded in a measure of righteousness. This is genius, I will grant him that, but opposite to the objectives of science. He made the worst possible metric about which to measure everything, and created a global system of narcissistic organizations selling their souls to publish to these journals.

And scientists are the least probable to rebel against this status quo. If anything, it will make them appear as big-time asses who are full of themselves. They are bound to project more legitimacy onto the system, similar to doomsday cultists.

It’s a feedback loop. In order to raise your academic profile and potentially get a job, you need a solid CV full of peer reviewed publications. In order to get published in the first place, you often need money and institutional backing.

If you circumvent that cycle by self-publishing (a solidly logical idea btw), then you’ll have an even harder job getting people to take you seriously and will alienate yourself from “mainstream” academia. It’s messed up. Some open access journals have tried to solve this, with some success, but it’s a systemic problem.

That's what research grants are for.

Yea and idk about other parts of the world, but in Romania, the publishing fee is paid in full by the university if the researcher is part of a doctorate or masters programme... So it's just science institutions trading money between each other here...

In a roundabout way, yes a researcher does get paid for their publications but not directly. Universities exist on their reputation and their reputation is determined, in part, from the publications their researchers make. So a researcher who publishes a lot of high quality publications has a better chance of being offered a position at an institution with a good reputation, which can offer to pay them more.