That's interesting take, personally I'd say that graduate-level math is orders of magnitude harder than significant majority of programming. And I mean that it's inherently harder, i.e. not due to lack of background.
Please note that this initiative does not support pillorying authors. Pointing out errors increases quality of research, and as a scientist your most important guiding principle should be attempting to find the truth. The only people who do not benefit from finding errors in their work are the ones which have wrong incentives or are aware of their mistakes/malicious errors, yet for some reason do not want to acknowledge/fix them.
Incentivizing looking for errors will not improve the quality of science. Rather individuals will use this power to take down articles they disagree with. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
But you can look for errors in articles and contact editors even right now. It appears you either do not understand what this initiative is or how scientific process work.
Do you know how expensive open access publications are? I guarantee that editing, typesetting and curating could easily be performed for fraction of that price (and it's easy to prove it - just check how much Elsevier makes each year!). Also keep in mind that most of editors - which are responsible for curating - are not paid at all... And if you mean "curating" as in providing access to pdfs, then there is arxiv which does just that - for free.
You don't need to convince me. Convince all of the authors out there.
They have the power to send their work wherever they want. Really. They do.
The fact that they continue to choose the publishers after all of these years suggests to me that the publishers are doing something that the authors want.
And btw, who do you think would do this work for a fraction of the cost? Are you going to pay them? What if they unionize and demand a fair share of the grant money?
I feel like the Wizard of Oz telling Dorothy she had the power all along.
The bundle pricing is a problem, as is consolidation in the publishing market. The fact that that there are so few publishers nowadays really doesn't help with pricing. Another example why antitrust enforcement is needed.
Most authors are rated based on the journals they publish in, and the most prestigious journals are typically from predatory publishers (Elsevier, Nature etc., yes I know that predatory journal is typically used in other context).
If he is turning from "economic independence" offered by BRICS it would mean that he is much more sane than many would believe. BRICS has nothing to offer and nothing in common apart from being against the western world.
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