Last week I tweeted a cow-based academic publishing analogy in response to the prompt in the title, and the replies and quote-tweets extended the metaphor so gloriously, so creatively, so bleakly and hilariously at the same time, that I’ve pulled my favourites together below.
Here’s the original tweet:
Cows make milk. They milk themselves.
Other cows check the milk (for free).
Cows – get this – PAY THE FARMER to take the milk away.
Then the farmer (you won’t believe this, honestly) sells the milk *back to the cows.* #academicpublishing https://t.co/mgYneu4Goi
— Ned Potter (@ned_potter) January 16, 2020
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Speaking as a goat, I approve of open access.
When I took a diversion from my various computer science related qualifications to study psychotherapy for a while, I was amazed to discover how fortunate we computer scientists are that so much of our literature is published open access. It probably comes from the culture of the discipline, whose forefathers were publishing their work as open-source software or on the Internet long before academic journals reached the online space. But even here, there’s journal drama and all the kinds of problems that Ned (and the people who replied to his tweet) joke about.
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