This reminds of a recent LA Times article: "...Last year, two entomologists, one from Cornell University and the other from the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, figured that a $60-billion-a-year chunk of the U.S. economy is supported by wild bugs such as dung beetles and bees that pollinate plants, hasten the decomposition of manure, feed on crop pests and end up as dinner for birds, small mammals and fish..."
This is true. The cost of journal publishing is very high and we're not just talking about editing.
If you've ever spent time choosing referee's for highly technical papers, chasing late reports, managing recalcitrant authors and unhelpful editorial board members while doing your best to promote a journal and attract quality papers, you'll know that the editorial process itself is long and expensive. This doesn't take into account the time-taken for editing, production and basic admin.
All of it costs money and though I tend to agree that certain companies make far too much from selling journals, you'll notice that its invariably the bigger businesses who benefit; from huge economies of scale - and the simple fact that they can overprice their journals because they represent a huge and critical part of the market.
One problem is with management of the publishing process itself. Nice as it would be to think that authors and reviewers could all happily work together and come up with a finished product, the truth is that authors and reviewers can only work part time on journals and mostly they're in the process for their own ends. On the whole they just don't have the time, inclination or expertise to properly engage in the publishing process. That's where the publishers come in.
Someone show me a high quality journal produced and managed on a pure community / collaborative basis and I'll be amazed. My feeling is that's the only way we'll see the dominance and stranglehold of the big publishers lessened. They currently 'own' the process but if it was possible to redefine that process and manage it on a community basis, then we'll see the prices come down.
Of course, redefining the process is an issue itself - and it's one that will require a fairly major cultural shift in the attitudes of academics and others involved in publishing.
One final thing, Publishers are spending huge amounts of money implementing editorial systems which allow them to manage conventional peer-review processes as effectively as possible. Someone should start work on an open source system which allows for variation from the standard model. Emerging journal publishers could then have a good technical basis for competition and subversion!
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This reminds of a recent LA Times article: "...Last year, two entomologists, one from Cornell University and the other from the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, figured that a $60-billion-a-year chunk of the U.S. economy is supported by wild bugs such as dung beetles and bees that pollinate plants, hasten the decomposition of manure, feed on crop pests and end up as dinner for birds, small mammals and fish..."
If you've ever spent time choosing referee's for highly technical papers, chasing late reports, managing recalcitrant authors and unhelpful editorial board members while doing your best to promote a journal and attract quality papers, you'll know that the editorial process itself is long and expensive. This doesn't take into account the time-taken for editing, production and basic admin.
All of it costs money and though I tend to agree that certain companies make far too much from selling journals, you'll notice that its invariably the bigger businesses who benefit; from huge economies of scale - and the simple fact that they can overprice their journals because they represent a huge and critical part of the market.
One problem is with management of the publishing process itself. Nice as it would be to think that authors and reviewers could all happily work together and come up with a finished product, the truth is that authors and reviewers can only work part time on journals and mostly they're in the process for their own ends. On the whole they just don't have the time, inclination or expertise to properly engage in the publishing process. That's where the publishers come in.
Someone show me a high quality journal produced and managed on a pure community / collaborative basis and I'll be amazed. My feeling is that's the only way we'll see the dominance and stranglehold of the big publishers lessened. They currently 'own' the process but if it was possible to redefine that process and manage it on a community basis, then we'll see the prices come down.
Of course, redefining the process is an issue itself - and it's one that will require a fairly major cultural shift in the attitudes of academics and others involved in publishing.
One final thing, Publishers are spending huge amounts of money implementing editorial systems which allow them to manage conventional peer-review processes as effectively as possible. Someone should start work on an open source system which allows for variation from the standard model. Emerging journal publishers could then have a good technical basis for competition and subversion!