> Cease to supply this system with the fruits of your research labors.
Historically academics have felt forced to support this system, because for-profit journals are the high-prestige ones they must publish in in order to get tenure. This has changed for certain fields, but it isn’t as simple as just suggesting that one publish elsewhere.
It’s up to not only academics who publish articles, but also organizations that issue grants and tenure. Public policies to adjust their definitions of “prestige” or “quality” would help.
Case in point:
The ARC, the biggest Australian Research funding body, recently explicitly banned the mention of preprints in grants. You can't include your own arxiv/biorxiv/etc. preprints in your grants to show your work!
To the ARC, that's unpublished work. I know a few mathematicians who exclusively publish on arxiv who were bitten by this change, the whole grant got rejected.
Sure, but it's a divide-and-conquer problem. Academics have to mutually support each other rather than trusting everything to a competitive marketplace (which most of them seem to hate anyway).
For some fields the for-profit problem never happened at all. For example, in some branches of linguistics, history and archaeology the main journals have always been published by the same non-profit learned societies for decades (since the 19th century, sometimes). Prices for the hardcopy were always reasonable, and with the digital era, these journals became open access.
In other branches of those disciplines, I have seen that recently some big-name editors have founded new open-access journals with the express aim of gradually taking prestige away from for-profit journals. See here [0] (PDF).
Even before likes were introduced to Facebook, the site was still capable of delivering a blow to one’s self-esteem, because comments were another sign of attention given to you. Plenty of people can tell you how in the period 2005–2009 their status update saying, for example, that they were having a hard time with their lives got zero comments from supposed friends, while someone’s vacation photos got many gushing comments.
Removing 'likes' won't solve all the morale-crushing issues of course. When everyone you know is posting pictures of the happy hours that you weren't invited to, and the fabulous vacations that you don't have the time or money to take, it's pretty miserable.
There are people I unfollow just because their posts fill me with envy and a destructive hope that they secretly have problems they don't talk about. I can sit here and tell myself they might be under crushing debt or have bitterly miserable marriages - but that's a nasty, unhealthy frame of mind. Some people have better lives than I do. I have a better life than some other people. Expecting some sort of karmatic "fairness" isn't going to help.
I agree. I stopped using Reddit when I saw that even if I avoided the new design, its culture of discussion was being formed by 95% of people being on the new site. The new interface has only exacerbated problems with memes replacing substantial discussion, and an Eternal September-like feeling because the sidebar (with its possible FAQ and links) is hidden, leading to newbies asking the same questions over and over.
When you use Bermuda like that, you pay various fees to do so (registration fees, banking fees), and money ultimately goes into the national budget from that. The state then invests in infrastructure and some job creation from that national budget.
Similarly, when Caribbean nations sell citizenship to foreigners seeking easier travel or tax optimization (another avenue they have explored into order to diversify their economies), the foreigner typically pays a fee in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for the passport, and that goes into the national budget.
Even in countries where you can still buy a SIM card without ID, once you use your bank card to buy more credit for the SIM (and in Sweden you always will, because cash is basically dead there), it is trivial for the authorities to link the phone number to your real identity.
Indeed. I recently noticed this while relying on DDG for documentation for Common Lisp, a language I still learning. The top-ranking site for any Common Lisp function was an SEO scam site, where clearly someone had hired freelancers to take preexisting CLisp documentation and rewrite it – in poor-quality English – until it would no longer be detectable as copyright violation, then loaded it with ads.
(I just checked and this copycat documentation site has, thankfully, now been pushed down a bit in DDG results.)
Note that as I quite recently learned DDG has support for a bunch of bang-commands listed at [1]. There are a bunch of them for documentation sites for all kinds of programming languages, including a couple for lisp it seems like.
This is a view held by actual Eastern European Jews who first survived the Holocaust, and then after the USSR's arival saw their compatriots either imprisoned locally or deported to Siberia, or living in constant fear of such for the long years until Stalin died. For just one of many, many examples of this "out of the frying pan, into the fire" feeling, I can recommend the work of Imre Kertész.
Poe entered the general literary canon in Eastern Europe (where he is read, of course, in translation). Lovecraft, meanwhile, is not on the radar except for some genre readers.
Belarus is among the repressive countries that have not made it too difficult to get around censorship. Sure, sites get blocked, but you can fire up Tor or create a proxy with ssh -D and you are good.
Unfortunately, Nigeria (like several other countries in the region) is interested in the Chinese approach to filtering. The Great Firewall has been able to block Tor and SSH workarounds for many years now. So, the outlook is grim.
No, they aren’t. Foreigners in China often get around the Great Firewall through foreigner-specific SIM cards or VPNs. A tiny, tiny amount of locals is able and interested in avoiding the Great Firewall. But for the vast majority of Chinese, the Great Firewall is never overcome; few even feel motivation to evade censorship. Compare that to a situation like Belarus where nearly every computer-literate person is aware of what to do.
Historically academics have felt forced to support this system, because for-profit journals are the high-prestige ones they must publish in in order to get tenure. This has changed for certain fields, but it isn’t as simple as just suggesting that one publish elsewhere.