THE GAME IS OVER

Whether you lost or won you should know why.

Some statistics we collect

Of the zzzzz games played, xxxxx won, yyyyy lost.

Most people needed wwwww levels to win and ppppp to lose.

The most popular publisher was qqqqq and the average price of purchased papers was rrrrr.

The majority of purchased papers were published sssss.

The locked system

That was just a game… right?

Well—sort of. As a researcher you are a part of a long chain. A chain made of researchers, ideas, discoveries, publishers, movements and activists. And sure, you wanted to make money out of your research by selling it.

But what if that wasn’t the best way to go?

What if the same system that should encourage the diffusion of knowledge is actually slowing it down?

How to play?

In the game you play as scientific researcher and — much like a real one — your main task is to publish papers to share your research with the world.


FINANCIAL RESOURCES

To do so you have a limited budget at your disposal that you can use to buy the papers you want to use as a reference for your research.

Once you’ve written your paper you can decide the way to publish it. There are two main ways you can publish your work: you can hand your paper to a Publisher or make it available for free online via ‘Plus’.

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If you decide to publish your work via a Publisher there are some things you need to know. Each publisher offers two main options to share your paper:


-Paid publishing: you decide to give away your intellectual property rights (copyright) to the publisher, which can make some (more tons of) money out of it.

-Open Access: the publisher shares your work with the world for free, but you have to refund the loss of their expected earnings (you know, publishers are all about making money).

PS. You may wanna take a look at the price the Publisher is selling your work for.

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Every publisher has a Prestige value ranging from 0 to 100. This value depends on the brand reputation and the visibility offered by the publisher.


You also have your personal Prestige value (also ranging from 0 to 100) that depends mainly on how you publish your work.

GOAL OF THE GAME

Your task is to reach 100/100 of Prestige, without spending all your budget, but be prepared to some unexpected events.

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THE PUBLISHING SYSTEM

Publishers offer different access costs to knowledge: these different approaches produce a fragmented and polarized scenario implying two parallel and distinct cultures.

Full info about the controversy here

THE PUBLISHING SYSTEM

BOYCOTT AND THE COST OF KNOWLEDGE

The Cost of Knowledge is a boycott movement (a form of the protest) against the costs of publishing of Elsvier and the way it works. More then 16 thousends person have already sign the petition. TCoK insists that the authors of research are entitled to easily accessible ways to share their work with the world.

Full info about boycott here

LICENSES

The circulation of scientific knowledge has a lot to do with licenses too. Licenses are an authorization given by a licensor (namely, the researcher) to use the licensed material by the licensee (or, the publisher). In the last three years a particular system of licenses has seen increasing usage rates: the Creative Commons licenses are being chosen by more and more people to publish their work in an open way.

Full info about licenses here

Tricks and Cheats

HOW TO BYPASS THE RULES OF THE GAME?

Just as in games, there are some people that “cheat” the system in real world too. In scientific publishing cheating usually equals downloading the papers you need illegally. But who is illegally downloading papers? Apparently, everyone.


At right you can see a day of the server logs of Sci-hub, a pirate paper portal, combined with the H-Index of the countries.

Full info about piracy here