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How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

monbiot.com

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Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#81

Post by trevi »

jessriedel wrote: post #38
impendia wrote: post #15

Earlier 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?

The arxiv is not refereed. I usually read those pre-prints with (extra) extra caution, especially if they are outside my area of competence.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#82

Post by zszabo »

mateo42 wrote: post #69
electrichead wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's really sad that this is the case, but in the lab I worked for at a UC many of our costs were complete BS made up so that we could use up the full amount of our grant. The system encourages this behavior. The logic is completely flawed: If you don't use the money, then you obviously don't need it. Next time you won't receive the full amount from your grant. When your grant is millions of dollars over a few years,…

Incidentally, that's how the federal government operates. At the end of every fiscal year, if there was money left, it _had_ to be spent.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#83

Post by dagw »

eldina wrote: post #34
jpallen wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently published in JHEP and when I tried to view my paper outside the university I was greeted with a pay wall :(. They wanted the going rate of about £30. All of my research to date and the work in that paper has been funded by the UK taxpayer. There is something very wrong with that.

There is indeed something very wrong with that. You pay your taxes which help fund research and then you are charged exorbitant prices for access to the resulting articles. At the time I quit maths there were a smaller uprising among some mathematicians trying to break away from the large old, but unfortunately also still prestigious, journals. "Algebraic and Geometric Topology", an online journal, was formed when th…

You want to make money on a book you likely created most of while supposedly doing your paid job? GFY.

All the academics I know who have written books have done so on their own time, either by taking a sabbatical, going down to part time or during evenings and vacations. Sure the university let them use their office and the university library and stuff, but they didn't directly pay them to write their book.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#84

Post by rmc »

impendia wrote: post #15
retube wrote: post #4

Yes 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…

You should read all legal contracts you enter into. Remember that you can edit a contract, strike out parts, etc. You should get the other party to sign off on it aswell. You could edit the contract to allow you to put your paper on your website. Problem solved.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#85

Post by danmaz74 »

bl wrote: post #29
impendia wrote: post #13

But 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,…

To maintain the psychological impact it could be possible to have different outlets (websites) where to publish based on a ranking by the editorial committee...

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#86

Post by forensic »

arethuza wrote: post #28
ldite wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Philosophy - they don't need the wastebasket [JOKE]

I had to restrain myself from saying that about economists.

The economists have an incinerator where everything left-wing goes.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#87

Post by yiyus »

rmc wrote: post #84
impendia wrote: post #15

Earlier 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…

You should read all legal contracts you enter into. Remember that you can edit a contract, strike out parts, etc. You should get the other party to sign off on it aswell. You could edit the contract to allow you to put your paper on your website. Problem solved.

The problem is you won't get the other party to sign it off.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#88

Post by rmc »

yiyus wrote: post #87
rmc wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should read all legal contracts you enter into. Remember that you can edit a contract, strike out parts, etc. You should get the other party to sign off on it aswell. You could edit the contract to allow you to put your paper on your website. Problem solved.

The problem is you won't get the other party to sign it off.

Yes, you need the other person to agree to the changes. So you send it back to them and ask them to sign it.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#89

Post by darshan »

stevenbedrick wrote: post #49
retube wrote: post #4

Yes 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…

My experience with PubMed is that I almost always only get the abstract and a link to buy the article from the publisher. Sometimes I get a link for the free full text article, but this is a strong minority.

Is this because so many of the listed articles are not funded by the NIH?

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#90

Post by tylerneylon »

shasta wrote: post #77
tylerneylon wrote: post #56

The obvious negative this has on folks outside of research-level academia is a significant contribution to tuition prices, which seem to be rising at about 5% per year. But a less obvious - and personally very painful - consequence of greedy publishers is the inability to do serious academic research outside of academia/industry. I have the ability (math PhD) and the will (have published a few papers post grad school…

I guess you don't live near a decently sized university?

I do, and they require $500/year for library use by non-students/staff.

Even if some people are lucky enough to have university library access, the problems caused by a broken publishing system still pose a barrier to many independent people.

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