[Wikimedia-l] (semi-OT) Open access "catastrophic" for Elsevier

[George Herbert]

On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 2:52 PM, Richard Farmbrough
<richard at farmbrough.co.uk> wrote:
> On 24/09/2012 03:49, Risker wrote:
>>
>> the costs of peer review
>
> I have academics complaining to me that they don't get paid for peer review,
> so I'm not sure what these costs are.

Someone has to edit the magazine, pre-accept papers, and handle the
peer reviews.

Peer review logistics is non-trivial - identifying reviewers, ensuring
the reviewers review, on time, and making sure they did their work and
sorting it out if the answer is neither unambiguously yes or no, etc.

I just went through this process on a system administration paper for
the LISA conference this year; their peer reviews were significantly
lower impact (few paragraphs per reviewer) and done with anonymity and
visibility to the author via a web tool.  They still have a couple of
people at HQ handling the logistics of the system and related
paperwork, plus the conference chair, plus the paper's individual
Shepherd (introduced recently).  I think they only pay their HQ staff,
but still non-trivial effort.  Hundreds of dollars a paper, at least,
and much less than other more scientific papers would take (I think).

They're not charging authors or authors' companies/universities, and
the papers are open-access.  They appear to handle it as conference
overhead, and charge for the conferences.

Probably can't do that for most journals, and ads with a conflict of
interest are taken badly...


-- 
-george william herbert
george.herbert at gmail.com