61–69 of 69 posts
The journal publishing model may have made sense before the Internet became widespread, but now it's just a business that allows a few publishers to make bank from academics who are both doing the work (writing papers) and curating the content (peer review), all for free !
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, incidentally, they say the Springer CEO's details aren't published on Springer's website. That may be the case, but they are published on the Pharmaceutical Marketer's Directory here: http://www.thepmd.com/directory/publisher/springer/listing/4... Chief Executive Officer: Derk Haank Email: derk.haank@springer.com Phone: 011-31-314-37-60-40
Polite speech is persuasive speech. Don't Trump this one up.
I wish universities would take the lead in forcing open the journal monopoly. It would be really great if a major university like Stanford or Harvard said to its professors: You may publish anywhere, but you must also publish it for free to the academic community. Until a major university or five takes a stand on this, the rest of us must continue to fight.
> You may publish anywhere, but you must also publish it for free to the academic community. Is this possible? When publishing in a journal, I think you transfer your copyright to them; thereby preventing you from publishing the article any other way. Although as far as I know many journals allow a "pre-print version" to be published by the authors on their personal website.
Money's short, thus expenses have to be cut somewhere. Very understandable.
> UdeM Libraries will renew access to 150 of the 2,266 journals included in this collection. The price we will pay for these individual subscriptions in 2016 is the same we were willing to pay for the entire collection.
So... you save literally zero zilch nichts, except you now hold 85% less things. In other words, this whole action is meaningless.
Also,
> A survey conducted recently with the university community established that only 256 titles (or 11.6%) within the Springer collection are needed for research and teaching at UdeM.
That rubs me in a wrong way, you don't know wether you can use a paper for your own research or teaching until you've read it, meaning until your need for it has been satisfied. (edit) Lucky stumbles do happen, and I generally don't like the idea of scaling a scientific library down. Strictly speaking, UdeM's library actually continues to grow, only at 15% of the previous rate, since old issues aren't being thrown out. But we seem fine relying on (economic) growth as an accurate measure of well-being, so why not apply it here? Then remember the non-existant economic advantage (which should be around an 85% payment cut), and the whole thing stops making any sense.
Depending on which and how many branches a university has, 256 journals can mean a whole lot or ridiculously little literature about each subject. I don't know UdeM, so I can't judge them.
Add the little sentence
> Springer’s articles end up being 225% more expensive at UdeM compared to Elsevier’s.
and this whole move starts stinking like there's no tomorrow.
(edit) That last sentence may be a bit harsh, but I do believe this should not be taken at face value (something's missing).
(rewordings)
The journal publishing model may have made sense before the Internet became widespread, but now it's just a business that allows a few publishers to make bank from academics who are both doing the work (writing papers) and curating the content (peer review), all for free !
So the peer reviewers usually aren't paid? I thought many were.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Since a few years ago, any EU or UK public funded research (which is most university research) must be published as open-access. It is a requirement of the funding. So this is already happening. However, it will need to be done by a greater proportion of the world to be effective. The only problem is that the method of open access publishing is usually to pay a few grand to the publisher for the privilege.
Are you sure? I think it's only funders like Wellcome that require open access. My UK collaborators (in physical sciences) don't publish in open access journals.
Any papers you plan to use in the Research Excellence Framework for 2020 (for those not acquainted, an exercise every few years where UK universities get to say "look how good we are, we published this many papers, please keep funding us") must be available as open access. It isn't necessary for these papers to have gone the gold open access route (where you pay a *!&^%-ton to the publisher), so you could instead upload the non-published version to a preprint server (which is a lot cheaper).
The journal publishing model may have made sense before the Internet became widespread, but now it's just a business that allows a few publishers to make bank from academics who are both doing the work (writing papers) and curating the content (peer review), all for free !
So the peer reviewers usually aren't paid? I thought many were.
There have been attempts to speed up publication by offering cash bonuses ($20-$50) if you return your review in a timely fashion (as you can imagine some reviews take a really long time since there is no hard incentive to do it) but these amounts still pale in comparison to the several hours or more that you are asking of an expert's time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh, incidentally, they say the Springer CEO's details aren't published on Springer's website. That may be the case, but they are published on the Pharmaceutical Marketer's Directory here: http://www.thepmd.com/directory/publisher/springer/listing/4... Chief Executive Officer: Derk Haank Email: derk.haank@springer.com Phone: 011-31-314-37-60-40
Polite speech is persuasive speech. Don't Trump this one up.
"UdeM Libraries will renew access to 150 of the 2,266 journals included in this collection. The price we will pay for these individual subscriptions in 2016 is the same we were willing to pay for the entire collection." So Springer still gets all the moneys they could have gotten anyway. I totally understand why the library has to make such a compromise, but that's not a very strong bargaining position.