[Irtalk] PLOS ONE: The Oligopoly of Academic Publishers in the Digital Era

[Hilton Gibson]

*Unfortunately, researchers are still dependent on one essentially symbolic
function of publishers, which is to allocate academic capital, thereby
explaining why the scientific community is so dependent on ‘The Most
Profitable Obsolete Technology in History’ [48].* Young researchers need to
publish in prestigious journals to gain tenure, while older researchers
need to do the same in order to keep their grants, and, in this
environment, publishing in a high impact Elsevier or Springer journal is
what ‘counts’. In this general context, the negative effect of various
bibliometric indicators in the evaluation of individual researchers cannot
be understated. The counting of papers indexed by large-scale bibliometric
databases—which mainly cover journals published by commercial publishers,
as we have seen in this paper—creates a strong incentive for researchers to
publish in these journals, and thus reinforces the control of commercial
publishers on the scientific community.

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0127502
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