The military-industrial complex! Done, next question?
Why would a government want to remove the middle-man when the middle-man is making enough money to lobby the government to protect them? -_-'
How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?
41–50 of 90 posts
Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?
#42One possible disrupter is the open-access model used by the Social Science Research Network, http://www.ssrn.com , which was founded in 1994 and seems to be extensively used in the legal academic community. SSRN makes posted PDFs available for free download. The Wikipedia entry says that "In economics, and to some degree in law (especially in the field of law and economics), almost all papers are now first published…
From that same SSRN FAQ page, http://www.ssrn.com/update/general/ssrn_faq.html:
"We have entered into a variety of relationships with the publishers to provide access to their fee-based research through the SSRN eLibrary. These papers are identified by this icon: Incl. Fee Electronic Paper (a red dog-eared page with a "$"). If you are purchasing a fee-based paper, you will click the 'Add to Cart' link and be linked to your Shopping Cart."
So they run as affiliates for paid-for papers.
They also run a job listings service.
You noted already the ability to get a printed and bound copy of a paper on demand.
Edit: without looking in detail it seems those running the service are probably supported by academic institutions [for other work that they do?].
Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?
#43This is simply a consequence of the fiscalization of academic values, and doesn't just apply to libraries. Professors need "high-impact" papers to justify their grants so they can get more grants. The fiscal imperative to acquire grants is very strong, because grant overhead is a major revenue stream for the host institution (probably THE major stream.) It's much easier to have a high-impact paper if you publish in a famous journal, so everyone shoots for Science, then Nature, and on down the hierarchy as their field sees it. And they will eat just about any kind of shit to get published there, including having their papers locked behind a paywall. Because they are plugged into a system where getting grant money takes priority over advancing knowledge. Don't get me started on how this skews research priorities and experimental designs...
Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?
#44A lot of it is that academics are the most atomized and individualistic group of people that you'll find. If there's any part of society where "Aproi Moi Le Deluge" is the slogan, it's academia.
Cornell has about 18 libraries and is slowly implementing a "Fahrenheit 451" plan to eliminate them. First they eliminated the Physical Sciences Library, next the Engineering Library, and they'll eliminate most of the others, one at a time, until there's nothing left but a remote storage unit, lots of computers, and a few pretty library buildings for show. Since it's happening slowly and only affecting one community at a time, they'll avoid a general uproar.
If I blame anything, I blame the institution of tenure, which can be seen more clearly as a cause of moral decay than ever.
Workers and capitalists alike will fight to the death to protect the interests of groups they are a part of because shifts in the rules can cause their personal destruction. A man with tenure knows he can't be ruined, so he's got no reason to ever take a stand.
Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?
#45I 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…
Sorry, so the argument is: other research costs are expensive in some fields, thereby high spending is prestigious, thereby access to publications ought to be expensive so that fields that lack more direct expenses can seem comparable ? This doesn't seem to make sense, because fields where direct research expenses are high also require access to publications. Maybe I'm missing your point? If so, please clarify.
Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?
#46Yes this is a problem. Occasionally I have to to resort to emailing authors directly and asking for a copy of the paper - in most cases they have been obliging. As far as I am concerned publicly funded research papers should (must) be freely available. If the public are funding it then the public has a right to the fruits of this investment. And newspapers must be able to link to or reference a source when they quote…
I can only assume that they are not allowed to, due to copyright imposed by the journals. This is probably true. Whenever I have published articles (I am a mathematician), I have been asked to sign some long agreement which I only skimmed. We have some rights to publish and distribute our work... but not unlimited... something complicated... In practice, I just put copies of all of my papers on my website where anyon…
I work for a university computing service and we sometimes have to deal with copyright takedown demands from academic publishers aimed at the websites of the authors of the papers. It's a disgraceful situation.
Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can only assume that they are not allowed to, due to copyright imposed by the journals. This is probably true. Whenever I have published articles (I am a mathematician), I have been asked to sign some long agreement which I only skimmed. We have some rights to publish and distribute our work... but not unlimited... something complicated... In practice, I just put copies of all of my papers on my website where anyon…
What's the advantage over just using the arxiv? A bit better typesetting?
Credibility. Reading a mathematical paper takes a huge amount of effort, and people won't go through that unless there is a high chance to believe the paper is good/correct. Usually this is determined by 1) The author is famous 2) The journal is respected.
Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?
#48See also discussion in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2373030
Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?
#49Yes this is a problem. Occasionally I have to to resort to emailing authors directly and asking for a copy of the paper - in most cases they have been obliging. As far as I am concerned publicly funded research papers should (must) be freely available. If the public are funding it then the public has a right to the fruits of this investment. And newspapers must be able to link to or reference a source when they quote…
As the article mentioned, in the US, much publicly-funded research already is required to be freely available.
Specifically, anything funded by the NIH-- which means pretty much all biomedical research-- has to end up in the National Library of Medicine's PubMed Central repository. It's actually the author's responsibility to submit it, but most publishers take care of it for you.
While this model is not without its problems, I think it's a pretty amazing start and has proved itself to be well worth the hassle. The NLM has put into place a great deal of infrastructure to make it easy for authors and publishers to submit their content, and the PubMed Central site itself is a great resource for researchers.
Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?
#50I 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?
This is not how universities work. Remember, they're not for profit, so reducing costs means nothing unless your budget is slashed.
Universities make money on grants, what is called the "overhead" -- it ranges from 40% to even more of all grant money received. In such an environment, it makes sense to charge as much as possible for the research. That's is exactly what most class A universities do.
And that is why the true stars of any university are the departments that charge more for their research. E.g., if you have professors that can justify building a hugely expensive particle physics' lab, that is a big point for you.