The Market for Lemons: How predatory journals make a new quality journal unsustainable for business?

By





Nobel prize winner George Akerlof described how the quality of goods is degraded due to information asymmetry between buyers and sellers, leaving only “lemons” behind. Lemon is a vehicle with several manufacturing defects that buyers don’t know while buying.





The mechanism:





Suppose buyers can’t distinguish between a “peach” (high-quality car) and a “lemon”. A dishonest seller can sell the “lemon” saying it as “peach” at a price that is the average value of lemon and peach. So, in the market of lemon and peach, selling lemon will continue and sellers holding peaches will start leaving the market (as buyers can’t distinguish between lemon and peach, and lemon will have a lower price than that of peach). It produces a positive feedback loop because, when enough sellers of peaches leave the market, willingness to pay for buyers will decrease (as the average quality of cars on market decreased) leading to even more sellers of peach to leave the market.





Due to lemons, or predatory journals, new journals are seen in the eyes of doubt. Many started relying on unscientific, non-transparent birds-eye reviews run by individuals like Beall’s List, which has the potentiality to kill any new journal without any proper and valid reasons for listing. Even govt policies that are meant to tackle bad publishing like funding research only if author articles are indexed in Journal Citation Reports (JCR) make a new journal unstainable which leads to only monopolistic publishers thrive.





It requires an average of about 5 years to get indexed in JCR and it requires lots of resources for it. But no one likes to publish their research in a non-indexed journal which makes a new journal too hard to sustain and nurture.





Dear scientists, you are scientists and are supposed to make decisions on the purview of scientific arguments. We at mercury reaudito will provide a complete open peer review that will be published with the article. The review is done with rigorous scientific guidelines or review criteria to follow.





I hope you will put such arguments in front of governments so that they give a new good journal a fair chance to thrive, otherwise, publishing will only be in the hand of a few oligopoly markets.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The whole process of voting in a DPoS Country

By
Image
The overview of fair democracy: https://iambrainstorming.wordpress.com/from-hypocrisy-to-democracy-this-way-delegated-proof-of-stake-2/   Evolutionary democracy using hierarchical specialization with adapted delegated proof of stake algorithm, where different specialized departments are in a symbiotic or mutually beneficial relationship.  The Tree of Democracy Each funnel is a department with its subdepartments A Department For example, the education department can have its sub-departments such as kid education, adult education, research, entrepreneurship. Each department consists of large outer representatives and a few inner representatives. These large outer representatives are the grand total of all its sub-department outer representatives and the few inner representatives are the grand totals of all its sub-department inner representatives. Inner representatives of center and state are policy approver,   and inner representatives of all the regions (center, state, ...
Read more

A new fair democracy inspired by Delegated Proof of Stake algorithm

By
Image
Preprint link: https://osf.io/82mpk/ dem·oc·racy [democracy democracies] 1) fair and equal treatment of everyone in a country or organization, etc, and their right to take part in making decisions 2) a system of government in which all the people of a country can vote to elect their representatives Yes, most democratic countries fulfill the second definition of democracy, but none to the first definition. Abstract: Democracy is about fair and equal treatment of everyone in a country. But it becomes unrealistic to achieve when political parties have their conflict of interest , and leaders don't have the expertise to make evidence-based policies and neither have the skill and manpower for solving problems that surround our society and ecosystem. The new fair democracy provides an elegant way of governance that separates the representative responsibility according to their specialization and can grow into any complexity. The governance is divided into various departments, and each ...
Read more

Importance of educational videos and solving its limitation by teachers assistance

By
Image
Many technologies have promised to revolutionize education, but so far none has. With that in mind, what could revolutionize education? Why educational videos don't work? 1) Procrastination : Educational videos give freedom of anytime learning, but this can lead to procrastination. According to Parkinson's Law: "Work expands to fill the time available for its completion". But in case of video lectures or MOOCs there is no limit of time, so usually, we procrastinate. Limiting time to complete the MOOCs is also a bad idea, as it takes away its advantage of any time and anywhere learning. 2) Lack of a social interaction : We share emotions, feelings, discuss with the teacher, friends that come to our mind just like a true social animal and classroom brings a social two-way interaction, but it doesn't happen in case of MOOCs. 3) Answerability : No one is there to keep you accountable for finishing the course, no outward push, everything lies with intrinsic motivation...
Read more