I don't believe any scientists are getting rich off royalties from them, right?
I have never met a scientist who earned a nickel off of journal paper royalties; I could be wrong but I'm pretty sure no such thing exists. I've worked with people who have published in Nature and Science and they never mentioned ever getting money back for their papers; I was a co-author on a paper in PNAS and neither I nor anyone else on the paper received any money from that either.
Can anyone even make a good case for the existence of "Journals" -- as companies that get to sell access to research they didn't fund?
The big journals exist primarily because they have existed for so long. As I mentioned elsewhere, the academic journals aren't much different from health insurance companies; nobody likes them but they are so entrenched in our system that it's impossible to exist without them. Similarly both are parasites and neither are that different from many Ponzi schemes.
And surely the bandwidth costs etc. are so low as to be borne by the universities themselves, either by each of them self-hosting, or by funding a cooperative to host them all in one place
I will concede the journals do have some costs - just not anywhere near what they take in. They do need to store digital information - in some cases papers can have many gigs of data that needs to be stored for quite some time - and the archives of some of these journals now goes back well over 100 years. Arguably though the real racket to the whole system is in the review process itself; the reviewers are all volunteers and some of the editors are as well. The journals have almost no expense until the final article is accepted, and yet the scientists are paying money to them up front without a guarantee of publication.
A way better business plan is to charge a few thousand dollars for the submission! Get your money up front, guaranteed.
Not sure if you're being sarcastic there or not, but publication charges are significant for the most prestigious journals. Even the journals that don't have print editions charge hundred of dollars (or more) for publication fees - and many of the print journals are also supported by advertising.
Academic publishing is similar to health insurance. Nobody likes it - except for the people making money off of it - but there is no other option so we put up with it.
Can't wait to see what happens when the public gets to see the BS their tax dollars are spent on
You should look up "basic science", which I presume is not the acronym you were after with "BS". There is a lot of important basic science research that is funded by the NIH that gets spun - intentionally or otherwise - into things that it isn't. There is a lot that we don't know about fundamental molecular biology that we are funding research on that will pay dividends later but might seem obtuse right now.
Another great example is transgenomic - not transgendered - animal models. Whether the Trump Administration made that misstatement intentionally or just ignorantly is open to discussion, but the value of the work is not. We learn a lot by doing genomic work in mice; work that leads to better understanding and treatment for human diseases.
The paywalls are big part of what helps keep that stuff under wraps.
You couldn't be more wrong on that if you tried. If scientists had work they didn't want people to know about why would they publish it at all? To get a publication in anywhere it has to go through peer review, which means more people read it and know about it. If you had awful results that you didn't want to tell anyone about then wouldn't you just not even submit it to a journal at all?
Well technically not if they voted from cheaper groceries but he does seem to have delivered on all the bad stuff they apparently didn't want.
Maybe the ballot was different in your state, but here "Cheaper groceries" were not running for POTUS. Donald Trump and Kamala Harris were running for POTUS. There were a few third party candidates on our ballot as well but none were called "Cheaper groceries"; hence nearly everyone who cast a ballot voted for Trump or Harris.
To give credit to the folks who always yell about the need for a third party, I know I certainly don't agree with Trump or Harris 100% of the time. One I agree with far more than the other, but neither I agree with every time. I can say the same about every other office I voted for last November. I had to choose the candidate who was closest to aligning with my values.
For too many, TOO MANY, they were taught not what is useful and productive,
One huge problem there is that the same material is not "useful and productive" for everyone. I took three years of Spanish through high school and I can't handle the answers to simple questions in that language - yet I have very nearly no use for it whatsoever in my field of work. By comparison I have a sibling who went to Spanish immersion and does occasionally use the language - though we work in vastly different fields.
Similarly I use calculus on a regular basis, and chemistry and physics every week.
Life. Don't talk to me about life. - Marvin the Paranoid Anroid
