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The Exploitative Economics of Academic Publishing
v3rgEz sends this piece from the Boston Globe:
"Taxpayers in the United States spend $139 billion a year on scientific research, yet much of this research is inaccessible not only to the public, but also to other scientists. This is the consequence of an exploitative scientific journal system that rewards academic publishers while punishing taxpayers, scientists, and universities. Fortunately, cheap open-access alternatives are not only possible, but already beginning to take root, as this article explores in-depth: 'Why is it so expensive to publish in these open-access journals? According to the journals, these fees defray their publication and operating costs. However, this argument is undermined by the existence of open-access journals that charge authors nothing and have negligible operating costs. One prominent example is the Journal of Machine Learning Research (JMLR), one of the top publications in the field of machine learning. JMLR has a similar editorial process to many other journals, with a volunteer editorial board and an automated system for managing the peer-review process. Unlike many closed-access publishers, it does not take any advertising. MIT provides the web server for hosting JMLR, which would otherwise cost around $15 per year. The biggest expense is paying for a tax accountant to deal with paperwork so JMLR can maintain its tax-exempt status. Altogether, the total cost of running JMLR since it was founded in 2000 is estimated to be less than $7,000, or $6.50 per article published. This proves that cheap open-access publishing is possible.'"
Shouldn't machine learning experts be able to get their systems to learn the tax code and so replace the accountants?
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
JMLR is a fantastic journal, with high quality papers, high quality reviews, and completely open. The dream of many come true. I've always wondered why the idea did not spread to other fields.
If someone is willing to start a Journal of Computer Vision Research based on the same principles, count me in. I'll be happy to do editing/reviewing for such journal instead of well known IEEE/Elsevier/Springer journals.
Video of some good progressive thrash music
My father-in-law is a retired mechanic, he fixes our cars much much cheaper than any commercial service centre. This obviously means commercial centres are rip-offs.
It turns out when you dont pay for staff, dont pay for buildings, dont pay taxes etc etc you can do a job cheaper.
DUH!
Taxpayers in the United States spend $139 billion a year on scientific research, yet much of this research is inaccessible not only to the public
The largest - by dollar amount - government funding agency is The National Institutes of Health (NIH). For some time now they have required that research they fund is published in publicly-accessible ways. This means that all new grants they have handed out have been required to make their published results viewable by anyone, from anywhere.
Similarly, the National Science Foundation (NSF) is planning to go the same way very soon.
So while the for-profit publishing model is generally bad, it is being chipped away at. And with each passing year, more of what taxpayers fund is made publicly accessible immediately; we are already at the point where only the oldest and longest-running NIH grants (and there aren't many left as very few grants go more than 5 years) are exempt from this policy.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Aren't scientists able to publish their work wherever they want? They choose to publish it in academic journals because, whatever downsides (loss of copyright), the value that the journals provide it is worth it to them. Otherwise they wouldn't do it and would simply publish it on a website or something. Same as recording artists complaining that labels give them only 5% of the sales while at the same time queuing up and begging labels to take them on.
Negative moral value of force outweighs the positive value of good intentions.
I largely agree that journals charge far too much for subscriptions but they do provide value added. Latex is great for physics and math, but provides little help to biologists. Frankly, after writing grants, doing the work, analyzing it, writing it up, and defending it at conferences, I feel I don't have a lot of time left over to play with margins and get the typesetting and hyperlinked references all working. The layout work actually is valuable. Yes, new tech makes it easier, but there's still the research to do. Additionally, some journals have staff that help with the review process. Peer review is done by people busy with other things who often miss a lot, espeically well executed fraud. Many of the biology-related publishers perform text and image analysis of submitted articles to look for evidence of fraud. They find duplications, square edges where square edges are never found (introduced through deletions), etc. Not EVERY journal falls into ALL of the stereotypes, and Elsevier is by far the worst offender. I also find it funny when people blast open access journals for having page charges to authors as if this is a new affront. Virtually all journals (at least in the biochem/biology space) have HUGE page charges and often charge hundreds of dollars extra for each color figure. A lot of color ISN'T used to save money. When the Public Library of Science opened in 2003 they got blasted because they had a flat $1500 publishing charge and then it was free open access from there. That charge was less than half that charged by other journals for just the base price. Publishing WELL includes editorials, perspective, handling fraud and retractions, etc., and keeping the legacy data available in supplements available to modern computers. I suppose this COULD be done by a volunteer army by it's important enough to pay to have it done well. These are the archives of our knowledge. This may look cheap and easy to the IT crowd but other disciplines don't fall so easily into having 1 server at MIT and some volunteers. It doesn't and shouldn't be as expensive and bound up in copyright as it is (PLoS lets me keep the copyright and it's so nice not to have to ask for permission to use my own figures) but there is probably a happy middle ground as is already been explored by more and more open access journals.
It's worth noting that while many open access journals charge for publication, so do many closed access journals. I can't find the link now, but a comparison a few years ago found that the average cost was actually higher across closed journals than open access ones. And of course, they "double-dip" by also charging libraries and readers high fees for carrying the journals.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Someone needs to create a platform which uncouples the discrete services that academic publishing houses do for authors:
1) Organized peer review process - a platform can automate the process of this. Peer recognition can be adequate compensation for some academics to lead the review process (made easier by the automation), and/or a relatively small fee can be charged to authors for freelance review-organizing editors found through a reputation network.
2) Final pre-publication copy editing - a distinct, freelance service (perhaps required to be used, to publish in prestige e-journals).
3) Layout refinement
4) Community/social management of dissemination of and commenting on the publication (mostly or entirely automated).
5) Hardcopy publication (if at all necessary)
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
The main cause of scientific publishers charging excessive fees is their monopoly. While there are many different scientific publishers, a reader is usually interested in specific articles he cannot find elsewhere (publishing same results in more than one journal is nothing more than plagiarism). This puts university librarians into a weak position since they have to provide access to basically almost all journals publishing useful papers.
With open access publishing, sooner or later we should get some healthy competition. Scientists will be the ones who pay and will have a choice where to publish. Probably journals with high impact factors (yeah, I know...) will be in a comfortable position to charge more. There's not much competition yet (scientists generally don't care/understand that OA=higher visibility) so we will have to wait for lower prices till most articles in major journals become open.
"However, this argument is undermined by the existence of open-access journals that charge authors nothing and have negligible operating costs. "
yes, and they host any bad, bad studies.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
$15 a year is barely enough to pay to register a domain. Any decent ISP is going to charge more like $20/month, not $15/year.
Just because MIT can do it for $15/year does not mean that is a reasonable cost for anyone else to expect to get away with.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Public Access to Publicly funded research was what got Aaron Swartz killed. That and a very grabby MIT and a prosecutor turned persecutor. Rat bastards all.
How about the cost of elementry text books. What a scam that is.
I saw a talk once by someone at a meeting years ago in which they said that they were trying to get politicians to use specific phrases and sentance constructs so they could more easily parse what the hell the tax code is actually supposed to be.
(I think it was the IDCC in Chicago, which looking at the program suggests it was Kate Zwaard, US Gov't Printing Office, but it might've been at an ASIS&T meeting around that same time, or an ISO/TC 37 meeting, as all of 'em could've covered issues in parsing semantics)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Starting a journal is a good idea but will take time to make it a respected, viable option. Why not strike at the heart of the issue and push for copyright reform; say giving academic authors rights to publish their articles on a university or personal page while still letting the journal retain all other rights if they sign over the copyright? Then, all it takes is a good way to search for relevant papers without all the random garbage Google introduces.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
The model of an all volunteer editorial board does not work for most organizations. You still need a good editor to provide consistency. A webmaster has to maintain the overall content of the web site. The servers hosting web site have to be maintained. Software updated. Site uptime, reliability and performance monitored. Problems alerting 24x7 staff to resolve. Security verified and monitored. This level of service is a lot more than $25 a month unless you have staff to do it for the organization. But the yearly cost is well within the scope of a modest grant.
The other problem is that many professional organizations rely on pay to view revenue to support the organization. The organization needs money to do the things an organization does. Articles are a profit center. If we can figure out how to replace lost funding. . .
Every academic is entitled to his / her own webpage. If you can upload serious pictures of you that make you look respected and important, surely uploading PDFs of your research papers shouldn't be too hard.
Case in point:
I wanted to write an article on WWII British airborne radar systems. Found a source, oddly, on the IEEE. Reprint in PDF format is $39.95.
The economic value of this article is a number best represented as zero. The distribution cost is perhaps a few pennies. But they want to charge $40 because that's what they used to charge for a monkey to go and photocopy it and mail it to you, so why change now?
If the article had been 99 cents I would have purchased it no questions asked.
yet much of this research is inaccessible not only to the public, but also to other scientists.
If you are a researcher, you will have access to the journals relevant to you from your institution. If you don't, it is a simple email or phone call to the author to request a copy of the paper you want.
The above isn't very accurate in terms of what the Government actually does..
1) for any research funded by the government that is performed by an educational institution, the Bayh-Dole act makes the IP and/or data the property of the institution, and the government has a fully paid, non-exclusive license to use the IP and/or data for government purposes. So the causal citizen does NOT get rights, but another government project does.
2) My experience with NASA property is that they actually spend too much time and money tracking government assets spread far and wide. Since the government doesn't depreciate equipment values, there's lots of *junk* equipment out there being carried on the books at full acquisition cost from 20 years ago. And the process to "excess" that equipment is fairly clunky, so a lot of times, it's easier just to hang onto than get rid of it. That said, my experience has been that hunting through the list for useful gear actually works fairly well.
3) Unlimited data rights doesn't guarantee that the data is in a usable form. Researcher generates report as pdf file with some graphs, delivers it to the government. "data rights" does NOT mean every scrap, jot, and tittle generated in the course of the work. It means "deliverables called out in the contract/grant". If I grind out some preliminary analyses using Matlab to guide future work on the contract, I'm under no obligation to deliver the data I used, unless that's called out. For the data I do deliver, yes, the government has unlimited data rights. Most government contracts don't specify the format or usability of that data. So I give you a pile of raw data collected from lab instruments, because I don't have budget to go and build a nifty retrieval engine, or provide translators to your preferred data form. What I will provide is whatever documentation I've developed on the format of that data.
But recognize that for the vast majority of government research, the final product is only the final report.
Why should a not-for-profit organization like the IEEE which is mainly funded by memberships, be required to give away their content to you?
If the content has no economic value, why did you want it? Either you wanted to know, learn, or enjoy the content implying it does have value, or you simply wanted to clutter your hard drive with bits, which I think you can find plenty of freely available content (legal or otherwise) out there to do that.
Or in others words, why should my IEEE membership dues be spent funding your research reading, whether for your pleasure or your profit? I don't know if the article you wanted to write was to be sold, or part of your job or a resume building exercise.
The IEEE, the IEEE Computer Society, and ACM are not the bad guys, they do tackle the issues of accessibility and affordability and have discussed these issues for over twenty years long before I joined. They may not be perfect, largely because they still have contracts with external for-profit publishing / printing companies like Springer-Verlag left from when journals were only paper based, but they are migrating to open-access in an increasing number of cases while maintaining a self-sustaining organization that does have real overhead like having editors, and staff; in other words real people doing work to produce that content and maintain its availability.
Yes they do receive government funding, and that money is spent on making resources like digital content and conferences available to students and academics at reasonable cost, as well as grants and scholarships awards. Not that something like 1 dollar per citizen per annum goes far when funding all science and medical research nationally.
Governments own/run the Mint with tax dollars too, that doesn't mean I'm entitled to all the money they print / distribute either. The premise starts with a faulty assumption and goes downhill.
I think most everyone has missed the major point here... This is Bullshit! Information should be free. This is precisely why 2014 looks like what 2004 should have looked like and 2001 doesnt look like what 2001 looked like in 2001 a space odyssey. People in general do not have access to information they may need. Isn't this what the internet and the EFF were invented to fix?