In today's academic world, a myth about knowledge and money is on the rise, and the contribution of an amateur local fan, like a sharp surgical knife, precisely carves out the seemingly radiant but decomposed veil of academic journals。
It's amazing. Amateur love is bad
The amateur author, with his enthusiasm for local aspirations, wrote an article on the difficulties of collecting information from the ministry of the economy in the third round of local writing. The text was revised three times, reviewed for several months, and, with a sense of vision, it was submitted to the chinese journal of localities with great expectation. However, the first sentence of the customer's service on the telephone asks, “is it for a rating?” like the same cold water basin, the passion of the author's heart is suddenly extinguished. And when the author answered "amateur hobbies," he said, "you've got the wrong place, there's no free ones." the author is in place, as if he were in a completely new world, where knowledge production has long been reduced from a good model of "publishing -- reading -- publishing -- paying" to "paying -- queuing -- publishing -- certifying." the author is no longer the creator of “publication” of ideas and sharing of wisdom, but the customer of “work” “consumption”。
What is even more ironic is that the author later found out that the chinese journal of localities does not itself charge a copy fee and pays a copy. It turns out that the “visiting” was not an editorial staff, but rather an intermediary that was condensed around academic journals. Like ancient tax collectors, they set up the “stand is my way” on the road to the flow of knowledge, reaping the enthusiasm and hope of authors。
Academic caste: amateur crimes
The question of the client service is a relentless revelation of a cruel academic caste system: it is not worthy of entering the so-called academic system without the need for a functional title. In the current academic food chain, the authors are brutally classified as “gangs of need” and “minors, etc.”. “gang needs” is a graded teacher, a graduate doctor, a graded researcher, who is tacitly a willing-paying lamb and a sustainable harvest of herbs in the eyes of an intermediary; and “foot fox” like the amateur author, who has no unit reimbursement and no test pressure, is a mere “power-generation by love” and, for intermediaries, is simply a problem of wasting print resources, behind “no free” is the logic of “you don't pay for your job and you don't deserve me to waste time”. The public attributes of academic periodicals were completely replaced at this point in time by the services associated with the profession。
In retrospect, the zhonggon institute of the civil republic, guo xiang, received the contributions from his predecessors, but only studied them in depth and did not ask the authors for directions. Chamu was only a secondary school teacher, but was able to publish in zongo and eventually become a ancestor. But if we put it now, chamu is afraid he will not be able to add his editor's micro-letters, without an associate professor's title and a direct filter by an intermediary; without the funding of the subject, where is the cost of the page? This contrasts starkly with the era of change and academic decline。
Diversion of knowledge: history of depravity, from paper to page cost
The older scholars remember that in the past, in the magazine, the editorial department sent the cost of writing, which was respect for intellectual labour and the material basis of “text and channel”. Today, however, windwater reverses and the author reverses thousands or tens of thousands of dollars in order to get a paper entry. Behind this reversal is the arms race in the academic evaluation system. When the papers are published as hard currency for job titles, project filings, and promotions, the journal pages become scarce resources. According to the bimonthly survey, the cost of the edition of ordinary periodicals has become “ruled”, with core periodicals running at tens of thousands, and the intermediary channel being a well-coded price. The original editor-in-chief of the social science institute of one province, soso, earned nearly tens of millions of dollars in royalties, up to a maximum of $50,000 per book. Academic journals have fallen from “knowledge agents” to “ rent-seeking tools”, which is a much worse qualitative change than fees themselves。
When the editorial department charges “financial difficulties”, it is actually carrying out a dangerous transaction: the exchange of academic standards for economic gain. The higher the cost of the layout, the lower the standard of revision, the resulting reversal of the “bad currency to expel the good currency”. People who are serious about learning cannot afford it, and those who have money don't care about the quality of the articles. What is even more absurd is the parasitic existence of intermediaries who, because of the scarcity of resources in formal periodicals and the stringent censorship, have monopolized publishing channels by a large number of “thesis agents”. They are better informed than authors about “striking preferences” and are more familiar with “operating processes” than editors, earning high price differentials between supply and demand. From writing to publishing, a paper can be broken down into selection fees, surrogate fees, embroidery fees, weight-checking fees, layout costs, excruciating costs ... Knowledge production is cut to pieces and fed a full chain of academic corruption industries。
Cultural anaemia: the fallout of “amateur”
The arrogance of the client service is essentially an expulsion in pursuit of non-meritorious knowledge. When a society turns “amateurs” away, it is actually destroying a precious cultural ecology. Local codification is the culmination of local knowledge, and it is often not the ivory pagodas who are the most knowledgeable of the countryside, but the literary and historical lovers of the deep arable land. They are familiar with the changes in every alley, remember the oral statements of every generation and have local knowledge that cannot be found in official archives。
But the rule is that, without a title, observation is not academic; without the cost of the layout, research is not worth publishing. Such institutional snobs are systematically excluding “civil wisdom” and turning academic journals into small circles of distribution of benefits. In the long run, our cultural production will be mired in terrible homogenization. When all authors write for the purpose of evaluating their titles, the choice of the subject necessarily leads to the hot spots, the view is necessarily safe and the expression is necessarily rigid. Those hobbies of “no use” — fascination with local aspirations, twilight with cold history, attachment to marginal issues — will die because they cannot be realized. A society that does not allow “amateur” to exist is bound to produce a large number of “occupations”。
Complicity: who killed academics
The blame was attributed to the “paper-only” evaluation system, which was considered to be a job evaluation to force prostitution. But in my view, the cost of the page seems to be the result of multiple complicity. Management has used the term “simplified publications” as a pretext for strict control of publications, creating an administrative monopoly on academic journals; privatization of public platforms by the editorial board of periodicals on the grounds of “self-financing gains and losses”; the smelling of business opportunities by intermediaries to suck blood in supply and demand cracks; and the willingness of some authors to pay for “academic packaging”. The quartet has worked together to transform the hall of knowledge into a prestigious venue. The client's service, asking the author whether to “approve the title,” was just a screw on this huge machine, and her apathy was not a matter of personal ethics, but a necessity of system alienation. When academia is completely integrated into market logic, “amateur” becomes unpriced waste, and “love” becomes a meaningless joke。
Relocate dignity: return “free” to common sense
It is gratifying to note that a number of official periodicals, such as china's local register, still maintain the bottom line of the non-receipt bill, which, like isolated islands in academic circles, prove another possibility: the public knowledge space is not subject to monetary measures, and the enthusiasm of amateurs deserves to be respected. But it is far from sufficient. We need to break the monopoly of publications and return academic publications to competition in the market rather than to administrative concessions; we need to put in place mechanisms for the withdrawal of journals that would deprive the evils of the price of the books; and we need to reshape evaluation criteria so that “titles” are no longer the only yardstick for measuring the value of knowledge。
Cultural prosperity has never been achieved through “contributory publication”. When our periodicals are willing to open their doors to high school teachers like chammo, when “amateur” is no longer the reason for being rejected, when the first sentence of the client's service is changed to “your choice is interesting”, we are truly committed to cultural dignity。
In the end, the amateur author did not transfer the “guest” money, not because he was stingy with the thousands of dollars, but rather because he did not want to recognize the absurd premise that knowledge had to be paid for to circulate and ideas had to buy the way to meet people。
In this era when knowledge is used as a business, pure love becomes an anachronistic luxury. But we strongly believe that if china’s local journal does not welcome “amateurs” for the time being, then look for academic parks that still adhere to the “no-roll” principle; if paper publications do not allow for pure thinking, then look for peers in cyberspace. For the publication of ideas is never the gift of anyone; the right to think, let alone to exchange permits for money。
One day, when this “face-face” comes to an end, when the academic discourse returns to the essence of the conversation, those words about the philosophy will be re-raised to shore by the laterers because of their sincerity and solidity. At that point, they will also wonder why such a serious author could not find a “free” place to publish. And the answer to that question is all the anger and discomfort that we have today and the source of our struggle to preserve cultural dignity。
