Strike!

[discovolante]

A quarter of India's working population has recently held a nationwide general strike, demanding cash, food, increased employment in rural areas, anti-privatisation, and pension rights: http://www.industriall-union.org/over-2 ... e-in-india

Amazon workers are also organising international industrial action: https://theintercept.com/2020/12/03/ama ... al-strike/

Not that you would know from reading the LAMESTREAM MEDIA

Just thought these were worth noting, after this recently too.

[Bird on a Fire]

There was the Manchester university student rent strike as well. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2 ... d-protests

It's amazing how much low-kew labour organising I see on social media, albeit mostly in meme form. But I think there's a huge and growing sense of dissatisfaction with the economic status quo, and a realisation in a lot of places that the established political infrastructure is part of the problem.

I'm also seeing more academics boycotting for-profit journals, which is good. If Nature want to charge authors £9000 for PDF hosting they can pay reviewers a competitive wage.

[discovolante]

There was the Manchester university student rent strike as well. https://www.theguardian.com/education/2 ... d-protests

It's amazing how much low-kew labour organising I see on social media, albeit mostly in meme form. But I think there's a huge and growing sense of dissatisfaction with the economic status quo, and a realisation in a lot of places that the established political infrastructure is part of the problem.

I'm also seeing more academics boycotting for-profit journals, which is good. If Nature want to charge authors £9000 for PDF hosting they can pay reviewers a competitive wage.

Ah sorry, kept forgetting to reply to this. Thanks for that link, I didn't know about that one.

It's good to see organised action happening but it would be even better for it to receive more media coverage. I know certain media establishments like to portray these things in a certain way, but still. I think visibility is important.

I have to admit that I have a fairly stupidly romanticized perception of south Americans (yeah the whole continent generally, what about it) being great at this kind of stuff, and am happy to be educated if that's totally wrong.

[secret squirrel]

On the general theme of protests, there's also the anti government/monarchy protests going on in Thailand. These aren't at the moment connected up to a larger labour movement, but hopefully this will change, seeing as Thailand is one of the most unequal countries in the world.

... I'm also seeing more academics boycotting for-profit journals, which is good. If Nature want to charge authors £9000 for PDF hosting they can pay reviewers a competitive wage.

I'm not convinced by these boycotts and associated measures. Obviously I'm not a fan of big publishers, but there's a lot of palming off of responsibility going on with all this. What I mean is, the people who suffer the most from big publisher monopoly are university libraries and other institutions who have to pay for subscriptions. So obviously the correct course of action is for these relatively powerful organizations to band together with the appropriate professional bodies to create a good alternative publishing system (i.e. not gold open access), one that addresses the problem, which they themselves have created, of researchers having to pump out papers to acquire the necessary prestige to get jobs. But what's actually happening is that researchers, particularly junior ones, are getting moral pressure put on them to take a more difficult path through their own careers, for the financial benefit of the same institutions who will very much not take that into account when making job offers.

[Bird on a Fire]

On the general theme of protests, there's also the anti government/monarchy protests going on in Thailand. These aren't at the moment connected up to a larger labour movement, but hopefully this will change, seeing as Thailand is one of the most unequal countries in the world.

... I'm also seeing more academics boycotting for-profit journals, which is good. If Nature want to charge authors £9000 for PDF hosting they can pay reviewers a competitive wage.

I'm not convinced by these boycotts and associated measures. Obviously I'm not a fan of big publishers, but there's a lot of palming off of responsibility going on with all this. What I mean is, the people who suffer the most from big publisher monopoly are university libraries and other institutions who have to pay for subscriptions. So obviously the correct course of action is for these relatively powerful organizations to band together with the appropriate professional bodies to create a good alternative publishing system (i.e. not gold open access), one that addresses the problem, which they themselves have created, of researchers having to pump out papers to acquire the necessary prestige to get jobs. But what's actually happening is that researchers, particularly junior ones, are getting moral pressure put on them to take a more difficult path through their own careers, for the financial benefit of the same institutions who will very much not take that into account when making job offers.

Yes. I'm just over halfway through my PhD and about to start drafting papers, and this kind of stuff is on my mind.

Loads of the journals in my field are owned either by conservation organisations or learned societies, so they're at least ploughing money back into the community to some extent - one genuinely worthy society I know is bricking it at the loss of income from journals.

On the other hand, 1) call me egotistical but I'd like people to be able to read my stuff. A lot of what I do has relevance for conservation practitioners, government and industry, which mostly don't have journal access. I use volunteer data, and they don't have journal access. I'm doing my PhD in south Europe, and I barely have journal access. I'm reliant on individuals breaking rules by hosting pdfs themselves, and sci-hub. Publishers are basically charging lots of money to reduce the impact of my work by making it harder for people to read it, which seems like the exact opposite of what a publisher should be doing.

So the easy solution is using preprint servers. Both my universities have an institutional one, plus loads of preprint servers have sprung up run by non-profits (at least for now) and academic institutions. They've mostly arisen in the last 10 years. So if the academic community can sort out pdf-hosting infrastructure, and already do all the writing, all the reviewing and most of the editing pro-bono, why have we not yet sorted properly free journals?

I'm a member of a small society, that costs €35 a year - as much as a single article viewing charge - for a year's membership, which includes three printed copies of its journal, which is decently edited by proper scientists and that. It kind of fills a niche (studies on a particular group of birds that are of little interest to non-specialists), and submissions keep growing. But it's also volunteer-run, makes a profit, and is seriously f.cking cheap. Surely aquatic birds don't attract ubermenschen of such superlative quality (myself notwithstanding) that other journals couldn't be run in a similar way, with no need for a professional publishing house. Nobody touches paper journals any more, and they're all advertised on twitter rather than through TOCs or whatever, so what are we paying them for?