This has nothing to do with universities. Anything they have access to which is not generally available, they are paying for.
Academic paywalls are a product of the publishing industry.
Funny Events of the "Woke" world
- Thread starter CriticalGaming
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Academic paywalls are a product of the publishing industry.
Yes, from overseas this looks like a really important step here. Make the admission transparent and make it about grades primarily.
The problem is I can't get good datasets from Youtube, I need for example S&P500 Stock history in the past 1 year, but recent data is impossible to get, I tried asking my college's business school, and they rejected me.
There is a bunch for poli-sci and economics, but the business ones are under lock, and key. Also, I kind of want JSTOR quality journal articles, but it costs an arm, and a leg to get.
Yeah, that's not gatekeeping, that's just a result of the fact it isn't the job of colleges and universities to provide reams of free research and data to any rando that asks.
Universities and colleges exist as institutions of education and of academic research, both of which have formal processes. They carry materials for those purposes. They do not operate a public library service, because they're not public libraries.
The costs of which are not dictated by colleges and unis.
They kind of are to a degree as that whole system operates with the tacit approval of someone powerful in academia; without their support and peer review etc the whole system is worthless. Journals cost what they cost because they can get away with it.
Edit: I've simplified this because I'm walking.
I just used UI-path to generate an S&P500 Spreadsheet. It had 35 errors, 30 were its fault, and five were outdated names. Very annoying when my college could have literally just given me their spreadsheet and very inefficient. I am just doing this as a hobby, imagine a small business having to do this.
I'm just going to point out that journal access costs a lot less because of academia, because academics do vast quantities of the work for academic publishers for free. The journals don't have to pay them to write articles, review them, etc. Journal editors receive some payment, but it's pretty much chickenfeed.
Try going to a lawyer or a medical doctor and expect them to spend hours of their time for no payment, see how that works out.
Not just free, they pay to do it! But without academia there's nothing to publish (and a much-reduced customer base), so someone in academia must support the system. I know open access was an attempt to escape it but was pretty badly captured by the big publishers (which, again, I feel must be endorsed /somewhere/ in academia or why is it allowed to happen?)
A brief history of academic publishing...
In the old days, academics created journals and did the work themselves, but it was a bit "cottage industry" and there was a lot of inefficiency. It was actually the late Robert Maxwell (his daughter Ghislaine is probably more famous currently) who revolutionised it - essentially he offered to take all the publishing work away, albeit leaving academics with the writing, reviewing, much of the editing, etc. In a sense this was great and academics loved it. On the other hand, they kind of also hated him for making obscene profits off him and essentially gaining so much power over them. It was how Maxwell made his fortune. He sold off his academic publishing in pursuit of the power and glory of becoming a newspaper baron, and of course ended up losing much of his fortune and dying in mysterious circumstances. But he pioneered the rise of the big players in academic publishing (Elsevier, Springer, etc.)
The next big revolution was the switch from pay to view towards pay to publish. I actually have mixed feelings about this. The good thing was that it made academic knowledge much more available to more people. The downside is that it causes a lot of strain on poorly-funded laboratories to get their material out there, and has also supported the huge profusion of predatory publishers filling the internet with meritless junk.
I know of at least one example where a student was told their work was of publishable standard by a tutor. They offered their script to a predatory publisher without taking advice, who then demanded a pretty hefty payment that the student couldn't/wouldn't cover. At which point the publisher started sending threats to publish the script under a different name, and also making demands for payment from the university. Completely immoral and improper, but that's the thing with predatory publishers: they just don't care.
Yeah, it's pretty bleak stuff, and some of the work that's landed on my desk over the years has been of really questionable value. And that feeds back into academia: I did a masters a few years ago that's focused on older (or second career) learners who don't necessarily have a BA or BSc, and there was no attempt to make clear that the quality of what's produced in journals varies so widely. It's very big on 'don't cite wikipedia', less so on don't cite The Journal of Odds and Sods from the University of Life. So the people on my course are reading from the latter and learning that that's what academics publish, that these are valuable studies, and no one at the university is guiding them otherwise. (I had many other issues with the course and the institution that's gone a pretty long way to sour me on tertiary education, through no fault of the individuals actually running the course.)
I would be interested to know (though not enough to check right now) what the price difference is between those journal subscriptions run by academic publishers like Elsevier vs those run by university presses like OUP.
It's definitely a big problem if students are not guided properly on what to cite. However, I also often feel that they are being taught, they just don't really care.
Some of this is laziness. Some of it is not paying attention to what they are taught. Some of this in lack of investment in their course - a student who sees an assignment as a box to tick rather than a task to learn and develop from. It can be strategic: how many marks can you give to referencing in a lit review? 10%, maybe? A student may readily think "It will take me six hours to reference this properly, or I can just not bother and take a 5% hit on my grade. I'll probably still pass".
Mind you, poor referencing is often the result of approaching a task badly. Students writing a lit review should read a load of stuff, work out an overview of the subject, and then set about writing it, adapting and fine tuning along the way. As they've already read a load of stuff to build their knowledge and fix the concepts in their mind, references should fall into place quite naturally. What I think actually happens is that students don't approach it as a structured task. They read lightly and haphazrdly, start writing, and then just add stuff as they think they need to ad hoc by googling and picking the first result that says what they want.
My personal experience (and this really is just my personal experience) is that the lack of caring is a two-way street. I paid £8K for a masters course and the (late arriving) material was a sub-GCSE-level introduction of the water cycle. Yeah, I get it, water doesn't flow up hills and the sun is hot. That sort of thing does not stimulate personal investment (apart from the 8K already handed over) in learning (nor was it really relevant to the course, it was just filler knocked up in a hurry IMO because the lecturer was under pressure to produce a course).
Yes, it is very easy, I think, to decide what you want to say then find a paper that backs up your point (made worse if there's a low bar to publishing and the only criteria for inclusion in one's research is that an item was published). But I can tell you for nothing that it's not just students who are shocking at referencing ... (this is sometimes handwaved away as established professors having 'paid their dues' so not needing to worry so much about it, but to me it just looks like laziness and phoning it in -- very do as I say not as I do.)
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Aw, spoilsport.
I've been taught that water runs uphill between the sea and Karavomylos, and that it is a proof of God (in Greece everything is a proof of God, Greece is very very proud of having had its antique mythological system destroyed by christianism which is now its proud core identity, Greece is also very very proud of its antique mythological sytem of course - nationalists are twats is what I'm getting at).
Anyway, I was shown a river and was told that in that section, it goes miraculously uphill. Actually, paint had been poured a sea-level and popped up on the hills for real. But still you people ruin eveything.
Now I want to go on holiday. You know, to test the water thing, from next to the pool.Anyway, I was shown a river and was told that in that section, it goes miraculously uphill. Actually, paint had been poured a sea-level and popped up on the hills for real. But still you people ruin eveything.
Also, water will seem to flow uphill if there's a big storm and your gutters are connected to a drain in your bathroom and rainwater ends up coming up and all over the floor and reaches your carpeted staircase, as wicking action will mean that it's not just the carpet that actually touches the wet floor that gets wet.
Ah, yes.
Academia, like any field, has employees who are slapdash, lazy, disinterested, lack conscientiousness etc. and some courses are going to suffer when these lesser talents do a lot of the work on it - and such staff can be hard to get rid of.
However, there are also sector wide problems, which essentially amounts to the fact that many universities are chronically underfunded and have high student:staff ratios. This leads to staffing and resourcing problems, overworked staff, sector salaries are modest-low (for their skills and qualifications), low morale, and frequently job insecurity with rolling one-year contracts. These often have negative impacts on the quality of courses. In some cases, courses are produced as money earners without adequate time, attention, planning and resourcing in a desperate attempt to pull more money in, and I think these can border on sharp practice where the quality is too low.
This is pretty much how it felt. It was very different from when I did my undergrad in the early 2000s (though also I was basically a child then and didn't pay much attention). It's a shitty place to be, being paid not enough by one entity to provide services to a third party when you aren't able to say to the third party 'Look, this is what you get for what they're paying me.'
When did you do your course and what sort of institution (e.g. ancient / redbrick / plate glass / post-92) if you don't mind me asking?
Labour oversaw a substantial increase in HE funding 97-2010. The Con/LD coalition didn't do so much because although they increased fees to £9000 a year, they also heavily reduced central government HE funding. Obviously, increasing fees is politically painful, and so has barely happened since - it's now £9250, but that's effectively (due to inflation) a massive cut to HE funding compared to 2011. And I can assure you, the squeeze is hurting. 10% inflation this year: unis can't adjust their prices, so it's a massive hit to uni finances. They've tried to compensate with international students, but Brexit hit that, and if Suella Braverman gets her way she'll hammer the income there as well.
In terms of salaries, like most of the public sector, uni staff have been locked into subinflationary rises for over 10 years, so a real terms salary decrease of 10-15% since 2010. Then another 5% or so this year alone. Obviously the financial crash hit the private sector too, but in fact the private sector did not generally see salary decreases, so HE is now way behind roughly equivalent private sector jobs (e.g. corporate scientific research), and HE salaries in other countries such as USA, Australia, etc. Without wanting to disparage myself and my peers unduly, there is always some element of "pay peanuts, get monkeys".
There is another issue, which is unis overspending on stuff that isn't teaching. The trick here is to get a student through the door because once in, the cost of them quitting is high so they are likely to complete (or drop out from HE altogether). However, that's often not by offering great courses, it's through marketing and flashy buildings. So they've spent tons on beautiful new campuses and advertising, at the cost of staff and teaching resources. This also is partly due to the government. The Tory government wanted universities to compete for students, free market ideology and all, so removed enrolment caps and drove them to fight each other for students.
Essentially, the British HE system has long been admired and rated one of the best in the world. It brings in tens of billions to the UK every year, just in international students never mind the intellectual output and general advantages to British students having such ready access. Bluntly, I find it hard to view the Tories' policies as anything other than an ideologically motivated wrecking ball. I'd like to say someone might fix it, but HE is so far down the priorities of the government and general public, I don't hold high hopes.