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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?

#11

Post by [deleted] »

cstross wrote: post #7
jpallen wrote: post #3

> 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…

Unfortunately the implied reputation of being published in certain journals is still something that's too ingrained in academia. It's worse than that: this isn't just a matter of old fogies (who will eventually retire) clinging to out-moded ways. The problem is, academic career progression is dependent on publication. And these days, it's also contingent on citations. Your work is more likely to be cited if it's in a…

[deleted]

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#12

Post by dctoedt »

One 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 as preprints on SSRN and/or on other paper distribution networks such as RePEc before being submitted to an academic journal."

Quality and prestige metrics: SSRN ranks posted papers by number of downloads, and it also compiles citation lists---if I successfully find Paper X at SSRN, I can look up which other SSRN-available papers have cited Paper X. (Sounds like a job for Google's PageRank algorithm, no?)

According to SSRN's FAQ, it's produced by an independent privately held corporation. I assume that means they're a for-profit company. I don't know how they make their money, other than that they will sell you a printed hard copy of a paper, presumably print-on-demand.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#13

Post by impendia »

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 they don't have to do that either. (in my field anyway)

Speaking as an academic, these companies do nothing for us. The sooner we agree on an alternative model which doesn't go through them, the better.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#15

Post by impendia »

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 anyone can download them. I have many colleagues who do the same, and many colleagues who are more scrupulous about following the journals' rules. In any case, I don't know of any scholars who have gotten into trouble for distributing their own work.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#16

Post by RyanMcGreal »

A professor emeritus recently sent me an article to publish on my web magazine. The turnaround time was around 18 hours and he replied to express his surprise at how quickly his piece was published. In contrast, he has had an article pending at an academic journal for three years now.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#17

Post by RyanMcGreal »

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…

FTA:

> Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the academic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#18

Post by rmc »

University libraries are still mostly money grabbers aswell, but are slowly changing.

In the 1830s Ireland was mapped to a great detail (for tax purposes) of 1:6500ish. These maps would still be very helpful for OpenStreetMap, and are obviously outside copyright. A few Irish universities have them (e.g. Trinity Map Library, a copyright deposit library for Ireland & the UK), however they charge €50,000ish for a copy of the digitial scans of the full set. Other libraries are similar.

Universities really are not pro-sharing

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#19

Post by rmc »

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…

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.

Re: How did academic publishers acquire these feudal powers?

#20

Post by impendia »

I 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 department is going through a lot of money, then it must be prestigious, important, and doing good work.

I heard a joke once that mathematicians are the second-cheapest academics to hire because all we require is a pencil, paper, and a wastebasket. But, in fact, we require online access to all these journals, for which we have to spend a ton of money. Spending all this money makes us look good to our deans, and lends prestige and the look of importance to our department, and allows us to compete with other departments for resources.

I think it's a bunch of BS, frankly, but it's the one time I heard the existing system defended, so perhaps it's worth bringing up.

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