Scientific Journals For Sale in a Dangerous Way

 Before I get into the main blurb for this week, I want to share with you something I was not aware of.

        A Unique Way to Use a Cell Phone

Suppose you are driving in a remote area and your car breaks down. The first thing that you’d probably do is check your cell phone to see if you have a connection to call for help. If you don’t have a connection, you’ll probably start cursing or something similar.

Well, the new thing I learned is that you can still probably connect with emergency services. 

Now you’re probably going – Huh, how can you do that?

It turns out if there are any cell towers from other cell phone carriers around, they are all required to accept your 911 call regardless of who your carrier is. This means you can potentially get help when you need it.

It will also work with an old phone that doesn’t even have a service plan! 

So, the suggestion is to keep an old deactivated phone charged up and in your car to use in case of an emergency and if your regular cell phone’s battery is dead, you’ve got an option!(Reported AARP The Magazine, June 2024)

Now for the regular blurb on:
Scientific Journals For Sale in a Dangerous Way

What I’m writing about in this blurb is not about your having a subscription for a scientific journal. 

Instead, I’m writing about is the current state of how articles are accepted for publication in these scientific journals.

It used to be that research articles would be submitted to journals to be peer reviewed before they could be published. First of all, that system has become weaker due to most researchers being on the payroll of drug companies. This means it’s just harder to find really independent researchers.

Now researchers who want to publish their research may be able to skip a real review by paying the publisher to have their work published. Sounds absurd, doesn’t it? Well, the entire editorial staff of the Journal of Economic Surveys walked out over the pay-to-publish policy of the publisher which was Wiley.

At another Wiley publication the editorial board staged a month-long strike while a thousand academics signed a non-cooperation statement.

Another company doing this is Elsevier which publishes around 2,800 journals. The going price to have your article published in one of their journals is $2,000 to $4,000. 

If a researcher or institution doesn’t have the funds, well that’s too bad for them. They won’t be published no matter how important or groundbreaking the research is. Image if Albert Einstein didn’t have the money to publish E=MC 2. 

While they promise that papers will be peer reviewed, the money is probably more important to the company’s bottom line than having the papers reviewed for real.

So…unfortunately, this is going on right now, which means you can no longer employ the statement of “Follow-The-Science” and “Trust-The-Science,” instead it needs to be “Follow-The-Money. If an author has had to pay to publish, then the credibility of their research needs to immediately be suspect.

Even though they are not in the scientific business, it sounds like something National Enquire would love to implement! Oh yeah, they already did.
(Reported WDDTY, May 2024)