A colleague of mine is involved in a small non-profit journal, and he figures he needs to charge less than half of what the mainstream journals do in order to cover his costs. Considering that the big journals will benefit from a substantially larger subscription/content ratio, they really are making out like bandits.
Bandits is way too generous.
I've worked for two of the top three publishers on earth, and I suspect that your colleague could charge 1/10th of what a major publisher would charge and still recover the costs for a well paid staff.
My only point was that some money will need to change hands in order to support professional peer review. The costs aren't the costs of reviewers, they are articulation costs (see CSCW literature) associated with coordination, communication, etc.
ow42
Open content is a good idea because it makes information freely available to a larger number of people for no additional cost (compared with limited distribution). However, there is still some fixed cost to be absorbed somewhere in the chain to support the administration and management of legitimate peer review. Presently, publishers absorb this cost. Frankly, it's a pittance compared with the profits they reap from electronic journals, but the service is nonetheless essential for preventing the confusion that would arise if non-peer-reviewed electronic media were not distinguished in a meaningful way from peer reviewed media.
Similar observations can be made regarding academic book publishing.
We live in an age where knowledge and information may be distributed more broadly and democratically than ever before. The corollary is that anti-knowledge and disinformation travel through that same, free pipe.
The free distribution of politically purposed disinformation ought to be guarded against. For that to occur, the established infrastructure of peer-review must be leveraged. Or replaced with something run by the researchers themselves. A better option for the world we live in, but one that requires funding from somewhere.
These are the times that try mens souls. Can we design, engineer, and realize technology that makes us more of the best of what we are, and less of the worst? Our government wants to eliminate privacy by suggesting a difference between privacy and anonymity. How absurd. It is the red herring of our Orwellian age.
Those who exchange liberty for security deserve neither - B. Franklin
Security is not a natural state of being. - H. Keller
WTF?! - This should be the official slashdot response to this story.
OW42
Framing java as "not open sourced" misses some significant shades of gray in the software development community. The useful tools for java development have been constructed by a community, and are available for download from sourceforge, apache, sun and other 'vendors'/bazaars.
The useful tools for competing languages are highly proprietary, and the availability of mature, useful communities and code for extending those languages is far more limited than with java.
Criticizing OpenOffice for being built with Java, which isn't "open", is kind of silly, in this broader context. It amounts to cutting off our nose to spite our face.
Slashdot Mirror
A colleague of mine is involved in a small non-profit journal, and he figures he needs to charge less than half of what the mainstream journals do in order to cover his costs. Considering that the big journals will benefit from a substantially larger subscription/content ratio, they really are making out like bandits.
Bandits is way too generous.
I've worked for two of the top three publishers on earth, and I suspect that your colleague could charge 1/10th of what a major publisher would charge and still recover the costs for a well paid staff.
My only point was that some money will need to change hands in order to support professional peer review. The costs aren't the costs of reviewers, they are articulation costs (see CSCW literature) associated with coordination, communication, etc. ow42
Open content is a good idea because it makes information freely available to a larger number of people for no additional cost (compared with limited distribution). However, there is still some fixed cost to be absorbed somewhere in the chain to support the administration and management of legitimate peer review. Presently, publishers absorb this cost. Frankly, it's a pittance compared with the profits they reap from electronic journals, but the service is nonetheless essential for preventing the confusion that would arise if non-peer-reviewed electronic media were not distinguished in a meaningful way from peer reviewed media.
Similar observations can be made regarding academic book publishing.
We live in an age where knowledge and information may be distributed more broadly and democratically than ever before. The corollary is that anti-knowledge and disinformation travel through that same, free pipe.
The free distribution of politically purposed disinformation ought to be guarded against. For that to occur, the established infrastructure of peer-review must be leveraged. Or replaced with something run by the researchers themselves. A better option for the world we live in, but one that requires funding from somewhere.
These are the times that try mens souls. Can we design, engineer, and realize technology that makes us more of the best of what we are, and less of the worst? Our government wants to eliminate privacy by suggesting a difference between privacy and anonymity. How absurd. It is the red herring of our Orwellian age. Those who exchange liberty for security deserve neither - B. Franklin Security is not a natural state of being. - H. Keller WTF?! - This should be the official slashdot response to this story. OW42
Framing java as "not open sourced" misses some significant shades of gray in the software development community. The useful tools for java development have been constructed by a community, and are available for download from sourceforge, apache, sun and other 'vendors'/bazaars.
The useful tools for competing languages are highly proprietary, and the availability of mature, useful communities and code for extending those languages is far more limited than with java.
Criticizing OpenOffice for being built with Java, which isn't "open", is kind of silly, in this broader context. It amounts to cutting off our nose to spite our face.