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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.
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.
the thing is, that the for-profit journals don't pay most of their staff either, and actually they've tricked the 'buildings' (=universities) into paying them through ridiculous subscription fees.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
As an academic, part of the problem with starting wonderful open journals and conferences is the fact that there are very few incentives for us to spend our time to build up the reputation of the publication. Although being editor-in-chief or associate editor of a journal is nice to have for a tenure review, some universities weight it less than the number of publications produced, the prestige of the publication venue, how many students you have advised, how much grant money has been brought to the university, and how much publicity your work has received. Since so many of my colleagues are focused on maximizing these metrics, they have very little time for much else when starting their careers. Moreover, even when they have tenure, they still have to chase grant money to sponsor all of the students in their labs; when I was in graduate school, my adviser seemed to be flying around every two or three weeks to meet with program managers to get even more money.
Another item of note is that it is much easier to get support to start a conference if you align yourself with one of the major academic publishers, e.g., IEEE or Springer. Provided you can meet your attendance quota, these publishers provide much of the infrastructure and initial funding to host such events.
Academics aren't paid for writing those papers by the journals, the reviewers are also unpaid, the members of the editorial board, the academic editors aren't paid either (the technical editor is paid but he's an employee of the journal and not a member of the editorial board anyway). The journals no longer employ professional typesetters and proofreaders. They outsourced it all to the lowest bidder in India or China, and the typesetting and proofreading is abysmal, the published papers have more typos than the preprints.
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.
Not precisely.
Yes, they are free. But the scientific world revolves around the notion of the different metrics to your work. And it's not only prestige: Often, your income level will be determined mainly by the impact factor of the magazines you publish in.
But... Guess who dictates the values for said impact factors in the international indexes?
Of course! The publishers of closed sciencie magazines.
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.
$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.
Impact factor is determined by the average number of citations a contribution to a journal gets. They aren't dictated by the publishers.
There are sleazy things that publishers can do to boost their impact factor, and it's not really the best metric to use anyway, but it's not subjective or made-up like you imply.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
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.