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Library Journal Board Resigns On "Crisis of Conscience" After Swartz Death
c0lo writes "The editor-in-chief and entire editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration announced their resignation last week, citing 'a crisis of conscience about publishing in a journal that was not open access' in the days after the death of Aaron Swartz. The board had worked with publisher Taylor & Francis on an open-access compromise in the months since, which would allow the journal to release articles without paywall, but Taylor & Francis' final terms asked contributors to pay $2,995 for each open-access article. As more and more contributors began to object, the board ultimately found the terms unworkable. The journal's editor-in-chief said 'After much discussion, the only alternative presented by Taylor & Francis tied a less restrictive license to a $2995 per article fee to be paid by the author. As you know, this is not a viable licensing option for authors from the LIS community who are generally not conducting research under large grants.'"
Thank you for standing up for what you believe in, guys! Commencing replacement with yes-men who will heed the siren call of their corporate profiteering overlords in 5...4...3...
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Lets hope the same editorial board is sool working at a 'new' journal, the Open Journal of Library Administration, available only online/free.
Wouldnt that be a somewhat simple solution?
Publishers want to protect 'their' cash cow, but its not theirs to protect. not much of a surprise really.
...but how do you pay for the Journal?
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I understand that you need some quality control and facilitate peer review and whatnot, but is there really no way to make that work in some way that doesn't involve these journals/publishers?
Maybe I'm missing something but really, how fucking hard is it to self-publish articles?!
Got nothing but good thoughts for these blokes. Some one in position did something good.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
Fire your publisher and get a better one. There are numerous options available.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Why did they only make it $2995? Why didn't they make it $190,000 and a free ride in a helicopter to Disneyworld? Ask for the real money. On the other hand, they did come in under $3000, which the Ronco corporation knew was the key to selling lots of Ginsu knives. Only $19.95.
Um, it doesn't take a genius to see that you're not exactly making a great offer: "Our journal will publish your article into the public domain! Now fork out $3000 for the privilege!" I don't think board needed many reasons of conscience to resign. They were probably more like: "Hey, let's stop working for these idiots!"
Simple solution. GET A FUCKING ACCOUNT and stop posting as anonymous coward.
... wait, what?
Researchers...you have to pay us to publish.
Then we sell your published works to others.
***
Seriously, the scientific journal world makes RIAA look like good guys. (Just goes to show, scientists are not so bright).
Seriously, Wikipedia should launch a peer review parallel site.
That deal is kind of like a sore peter... hard to beat.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I would prefer to solve the problem of publishing research in an open, free, non-commercial environment, but don't know of one. I wonder, if it wouldn't be workable to self-publish on Amazon.com, which has the bandwidth, storage, and infrastructure to support the publishing of the research and associated reviews.
So scientists give their work to a journal for publication, and have to pay to get more favorable license terms?
I knew that scientific publication is a strange world, but this seems somewhat preposterous.
People could also stop responding to any and all APK posts, real or forged.
There is so much talk about how cost are minuscule and any reasonably sized institute could bear the load. If that was true then why has it not been done already? I am sure most institutes would love to get rid of the costs of journal subscriptions. Perhaps it is not as easy or low cost as some people think.
Here's the way I imagine society works: Some among us produce food. Later, some start producing stuff (as in industry). Then we all notice we need knowledge to keep the economy going. So we set up higher education, and pay people (professors) so they can focus just on education, and leave the moneymaking to the rest of us.
So why is that that we have people still trying to make money off of education, when we're already paying for it anyway?!
When the taxpayers have already funded research, what's the justification for not having that research available to anybody and everybody?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I took a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MathWorld to remind myself about how CRC press treated Eric W. Weisstein (creator of MathWorld). CRC press is a division of Taylor and Francis. Whenever I get a request to referee for a Taylor and Francis publication, I decline and point the editor at the MathWorld story.
Don't do business with Taylor and Francis.
So, here's the other reason to force people to pay to submit to the journal. This weeds out the cranks and trolls...
While this seems reasonable, I would like to point out that:
1) Cranks and trolls are not a problem in academic publishing, it never was a problem, and it isn't expected to be a problem in the future.
2) Cranks and Trolls are well filtered by other aspects of the system. Few cranks and trolls have PHDs, teach at uni, or are working under a grant. Those that manage to overcome these barriers and are easily dealt with on a case-by-case basis.
3) By switching to a "pay to publish" model, your filter is targeting cash-poor researchers, not cranks. Corporations could afford to have their studies published, which would skew overall trends. Drug companies, tobacco companies, and oil companies would have a competitive edge over a uni or grant researcher.
Once we accept that getting rid of the trolls has value to the author, the question is ...
4) You are an astroturfer - a paid shill trying to sway the collective opinion by hand-waving and solipsism.
This is Slashdot. We're smarter than that.
Copyrights are being abused. The law must change. Sooner or later politicians will see that a LOT of people support copyright reform with moderate intensity. Then we'll see reform . . .
So, the point is, keep up the dialog!
I'm buying the Mickey Mouse Copyright theory. In other words copyright duration equals Mickey Mouse's age.
It's SERIOUS BULLSHIT.
Peer review is supposed to weed out the cranks and trolls. Is it really so hard to READ anymore? I hate Youtube only because of the generation of video-dependent people that have stemmed from it. Most people would rather watch 20 video tutorials over the course of two days than spend 2 hours to read a complex document. I can only hope future scientists are immune to it.
While I agree that increasing transaction costs reduces the overall number of submissions, its not as if there is a significant problem with spurious entries to begin with. That type of disincentive is most effective in preventing DoS-like problems, and the charge doesn't need to be large. Imagine what a $0.01 charge to place/cancel an offer would do to high frequencey trading. What you propose is more along the lines of regulatory capture, creating the type of barrier to entry we collectively like to complain about here on /.
That group of bovine standing over there appears quite portentous. That's right it's an ominous cow herd.
So, here's the other reason to force people to pay to submit to the journal. This weeds out the cranks and trolls.
No, it weeds out the poor cranks. And researchers, say in climate change, or pharmaceuticals, or diet... who are friendly to corporations, would find the money easily enough. Leaving science that was inconvenient to business unpublished. Imagine how this would have affected research on the effects of smoking.
Peer review is supposed to weed out the cranks and trolls.
Unfortunately, it sometimes doesn't work. Ask Alan Sokal (troll), Andrew Wakefield (liar and murderer by proxy), Diederik Stapel (liar), Jan Hendrik Schön (liar) or the other trolls, pranksters and liars that got through peer review without so much as a raised eyebrow from the reviewers or the editors.
However, if another journal is able to keep out the trolls for $1K (and likely, they can, that's what editors are for), that's the end of that. The big problem the publishers are facing is that on one side readers are realizing that they really shouldn't have to pay for research they already funded through tax money, and on the other researchers are realizing that now that you no longer have to own a massive printing press to publish something, the publishers are asking for an awful lot of money.
... that was made specifically for publishing scientific articles. Or something like iBookstore and Kindle Store, with DIY publishing options for anyone with moderate Mac skills.
I'd like to see some evidence that publishing a journal requires each article to be costed at 2995 dollars (a suspicious looking figure to me).
I'm an academic. I get asked to peer review articles for free. We do it as part of our workload. I have colleagues who edit journals. They do this for free. I author articles: I do this within the costs of my project, the journal gets my article for free. Authors work for free, reviewers work for free, editors work for free. It's just the production and publicity team that get paid (the publishing house). We don't even expect them to roll the presses and produce paper versions these days, we are happy with web links to PDFs.
So we need to think hard about what the costs are in putting an online journal live onto the internet.
Why do academics continue to publish in closed journals? because generally they are still the high impact ones (with a very few exceptions). So I, and many other contract researchers like me, tend to publish in closed journals because these look better on the cv. Philosophical high ground is all well and good but when you've got a child to feed and a house to pay for you have to be pragmatic and keep in a job.
I can imagine this might change over the next 20 years or so as more and more folk start open access journals and they are gradually given greater impact ratings.
Personally I think we're going to see a few universities taking the lead with open access journals and this might break into the monopoly held by a small number of publishers right now. If you're doing it not-for-profit you can do it cheaper than a commercial publishing house that has to show profit to its shareholders.
People could also stop responding to any and all APK posts, real or forged.
What we really need is a "tl;dr" rating so that this interminable tripe can be independently displayed pre-collapsed without censoring others who are merely -1. It's a pain to scroll past this stuff and all the moreso since it's double-spaced, which apparently games the "view more" mechanism.
There would be less reason to respond if the "Read the rest of this comment..." functionality lopped -1 posts off after 2 lines. Anyone desirous of reading in full what this mad bastard / troll had to say could click the link and otherwise it's impact would be minimal.
Science is a human endeavor, and prone to all the failings that humans possess. Stuff does fall through the cracks because it isn't perfect. It just happens to be the best system we've got that, in general and over the course of years, stumbles along towards progress. If you have a better alternative, please don't keep it a secret.
I'll also note that all the counterexamples you list were, eventually, found out through the scientific process and repudiated by their original publishers.
Lick the inside of goatse's anus, it's delicious!
Captcha, rectums
Noted and agreed.
Passive-aggressive much?
Eventually, yes. How many are still out there unrepudiated....? It took The Lancet years to finally retract Wakefield's criminally fraudulent paper. I know some of my colleagues that have tried to get papers down for several reasons, but most attempts just bogged down in an epistolary war of attrition with editors lasting sometimes years.
PLEASE stop modding biters up. Anyone who responds to an abvious troll, especually one of these APK trolls, should autometically get the same -1 troll as the damned troll. Any response to a troll only makes the troll do more trolling.
Come on, guys, use your brains -- it isn't that hard. Stop feeding the damned trolls!