This is in line with the True Cost Economics Manifesto: http://www.adbusters.org/campaigns/truecosteconomics/sign
I cannot see how a critique of mainstream economics is relevant to the fact that most scientific journals is very expensive.
How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?
21–30 of 90 posts
Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?
#22But surely, one might think, that some of the price goes to offset the expensive costs of peer review? The author neglected to mention that peer reviewers work for free, and that the editorial boards are also made up of scholars who work for next to nothing. (edit: see reply below, this was in the article and I missed it) It used to be that it fell to the publishers to typeset the articles, but with the advent of TeX…
Speaking as an academic, these companies do nothing for us Start the revolution at home. Put PDFs on your university website. Ask your collegues to do likewise, ask the rest of university to do likewise. Start the ball rolling.
I do. But I also publish them in expensive journals, because senior people have told me this is good for my career.
Once I get tenure (knock on wood), I intend to be more selective about which journals I publish in.
Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?
#23I heard an interesting argument from my advisor (a very famous mathematician). I strongly disagree with it, but it is the only argument I have heard for keeping this system in place. His argument was the following: In many fields such as laboratory science, research is expensive; one has to apply for grants and then spend the money, and these departments have large budgets, and this all looks good to deans. If a depa…
So who are the cheapest?
Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?
#24I heard an interesting argument from my advisor (a very famous mathematician). I strongly disagree with it, but it is the only argument I have heard for keeping this system in place. His argument was the following: In many fields such as laboratory science, research is expensive; one has to apply for grants and then spend the money, and these departments have large budgets, and this all looks good to deans. If a depa…
I'm not sure about that. If you pump out a tonne of great research, but use relatively less money, wouldn't that make you look better? Or is the academic world that far removed from the rest of the economy?
Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?
#25> The reason is that the big publishers have rounded up the journals with the highest academic impact factors, in which publication is essential for researchers trying to secure grants and advance their careers(16). You can start reading open-access journals, but you can’t stop reading the closed ones. This is the only problem standing in the way of open access publishing. While the arXiv doesn't offer peer review an…
... the ecosystem would quickly adapt to open peer review
A reviewer's comments and critiques of a scientific manuscript often say as much, or more, about the reviewer than they do about the work.
The current system should definitely be made more transparent and papers should be more freely available, especially those funded by public money, but there are currently plenty of avenues to openly comment on a piece of work (letters to the editor, blogs, journal website forums, opinion pieces, review articles, conference talks, positive or negative references in future publications, etc.)
Experiments are easy to propose, which makes finding faults and requesting more work from authors quite easy to do for reviewers. That's why, if a paper passes muster with 2-3 qualified reviewers, it should be allowed to be published, and additional criticisms can go through the existing channels I mentioned above. An open peer-review system, if I am imagining it correctly from the above poster's description, could turn into a three-ring circus, and scientists would waste unimaginable amounts of time defending every comment levied against their work instead of working on new projects.
I don't think that the methods of scientific review or discourse are broken. What needs to be fixed are issues of accessibility and transparency.
Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?
#26I heard an interesting argument from my advisor (a very famous mathematician). I strongly disagree with it, but it is the only argument I have heard for keeping this system in place. His argument was the following: In many fields such as laboratory science, research is expensive; one has to apply for grants and then spend the money, and these departments have large budgets, and this all looks good to deans. If a depa…
So who are the cheapest?
Philosophy - they don't need the wastebasket [JOKE]
Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?
#27This is not quite right. The NIH does, in fact, maintain a Public Access Policy:
http://publicaccess.nih.gov/policy.htm
which states that all NIH-funded research must be placed in this database ("PubMed Central") within 12 months of publication. I do not know how widely it is obeyed, but I know that the several labs I've been in regularly deposited their papers there.
Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?
#28Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?
#29But surely, one might think, that some of the price goes to offset the expensive costs of peer review? The author neglected to mention that peer reviewers work for free, and that the editorial boards are also made up of scholars who work for next to nothing. (edit: see reply below, this was in the article and I missed it) It used to be that it fell to the publishers to typeset the articles, but with the advent of TeX…
"[T]hese companies do nothing for us."
I agree 99%. The one thing they do for us, and the one thing that any alternative system would have to replicate, is provide a signal of quality through their history and prestige. The whole constellation of scientific publications, grant writing, grant reviews, tenure committees, faculty searches, and dissertation committees revolve around publications. But it seems nobody can, or desires, to read all of an individual's publications, synthesize the content of what they've produced, and compare it to the other work in increasingly specialized sub-fields.
Instead, to evaluate the quality of work and the scientists themselves, we rely on the number of articles published multiplied by the journal's impact factor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor), roughly speaking. This we've used as a proxy for scientific quality. And besides lazy, it's insidious, too. Before even sitting down to read an article, I've already absorbed which journal this article appeared in. If a prestigious journal, how can I help being predisposed to think favorably of it?
It's a seductive shortcut. This is why the academic journals are so entrenched. And it shows what any alternative system must replicate. It is relatively easy to create a website that unites authors, peer reviewers, editors, and a publishing/editing system. What is not straight-forward is to create a system with that last 1%: the external quality signal.
Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?
#30I heard an interesting argument from my advisor (a very famous mathematician). I strongly disagree with it, but it is the only argument I have heard for keeping this system in place. His argument was the following: In many fields such as laboratory science, research is expensive; one has to apply for grants and then spend the money, and these departments have large budgets, and this all looks good to deans. If a depa…
I'm not sure about that. If you pump out a tonne of great research, but use relatively less money, wouldn't that make you look better? Or is the academic world that far removed from the rest of the economy?
The Halo Effect is a well-known bias. Important things cost a lot of money, therefore if what you're doing doesn't cost a lot of money, it's not important. This happens in large institutions in the private sector as well, sections of companies building their own fiefdoms.