There seems to be a great deal of misunderstanding among Wikipedians how academe actually works. Piotr thinks a grad student can produce a scholarly journal. Look at history. In reality it takes hundreds of scholars working together (almost all of whom are paid professional salaries by universities.) Printing and mailing costs are only a fraction of the total expenses for a scholarly journal, so the advantage of going electronic is small in terms of production costs.
I talked just now with the editor of ''The Journal of American History'' --I used to be on its editorial board. It has dozens of editorial board members and hundreds of unpaid scholars who evaluate articles and write for it. They are paid not by the Journal but by their own universities to do this kind of high prestige "service." (History professors are paid for research, teaching and service--the average salary in USA for a full professor of history is $83,000 plus 25% benefits.) The Journal has 14 in-house staff members, who are paid salaries at rates standard for Indiana University. Most have PhD's or are PhD candidates--that's eight years of specialized, expensive post-graduate education. Book reviews are a main role. They read 3000 new books a year and select the most important 600 for actual review, using a database of 11,000 available scholars. 300 full-length manuscripts a year are submitted and the senior editors and outside reviewers narrow that to the best 10%. The staffers do intensive quality control on the accepted articles and are backed by a major university library (which is expensive.) They occupy nice offices with phones & computers etc that are also paid for. The Journal pays travel expenses for meetings. The output is 4 issues a year with 1300 pages of high quality scholarship delivered to about 10,000 historians and libraries.
Indeed anyone can try to publish a junk history journal single-handed and give it away free; almost nobody does so. The software is there but the necessary expertise is very expensive and takes decades to develop. It costs real money to produce the "reliable secondary source" that Wikipedia wholly depends upon. The question is who pays for it.
Richard Jensen
I've seen professional scholarship go off track.
I wrote wiki to give a voice to programmers who were struggling under the bad advice offered by academic computer science and software engineering. That's worked pretty well for us, no thanks to ACM or IEEE.
From this perspective, everything Richard says seems rather romantic.
I encourage everyone to consider all the complexities that come with long-lived institutions. However, for those looking for a quick answer, its hard to go wrong with free.
Best regards. -- Ward
On May 22, 2012, at 12:13 PM, Richard Jensen wrote:
There seems to be a great deal of misunderstanding among Wikipedians how academe actually works. Piotr thinks a grad student can produce a scholarly journal. Look at history. In reality it takes hundreds of scholars working together (almost all of whom are paid professional salaries by universities.) Printing and mailing costs are only a fraction of the total expenses for a scholarly journal, so the advantage of going electronic is small in terms of production costs.
I talked just now with the editor of ''The Journal of American History'' --I used to be on its editorial board. It has dozens of editorial board members and hundreds of unpaid scholars who evaluate articles and write for it. They are paid not by the Journal but by their own universities to do this kind of high prestige "service." (History professors are paid for research, teaching and service--the average salary in USA for a full professor of history is $83,000 plus 25% benefits.) The Journal has 14 in-house staff members, who are paid salaries at rates standard for Indiana University. Most have PhD's or are PhD candidates--that's eight years of specialized, expensive post-graduate education. Book reviews are a main role. They read 3000 new books a year and select the most important 600 for actual review, using a database of 11,000 available scholars. 300 full-length manuscripts a year are submitted and the senior editors and outside reviewers narrow that to the best 10%. The staffers do intensive quality control on the accepted articles and are backed by a major university library (which is expensive.) They occupy nice offices with phones & computers etc that are also paid for. The Journal pays travel expenses for meetings. The output is 4 issues a year with 1300 pages of high quality scholarship delivered to about 10,000 historians and libraries.
Indeed anyone can try to publish a junk history journal single-handed and give it away free; almost nobody does so. The software is there but the necessary expertise is very expensive and takes decades to develop. It costs real money to produce the "reliable secondary source" that Wikipedia wholly depends upon. The question is who pays for it.
Richard Jensen
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
I'm sure encyclopedias used to have a similarly dedicated staff before Wikipedia came forward as the superior (overall) model of information dissemination.
On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 2:13 PM, Richard Jensen rjensen@uic.edu wrote:
There seems to be a great deal of misunderstanding among Wikipedians how academe actually works. Piotr thinks a grad student can produce a scholarly journal. Look at history. In reality it takes hundreds of scholars working together (almost all of whom are paid professional salaries by universities.) Printing and mailing costs are only a fraction of the total expenses for a scholarly journal, so the advantage of going electronic is small in terms of production costs.
I talked just now with the editor of ''The Journal of American History'' --I used to be on its editorial board. It has dozens of editorial board members and hundreds of unpaid scholars who evaluate articles and write for it. They are paid not by the Journal but by their own universities to do this kind of high prestige "service." (History professors are paid for research, teaching and service--the average salary in USA for a full professor of history is $83,000 plus 25% benefits.) The Journal has 14 in-house staff members, who are paid salaries at rates standard for Indiana University. Most have PhD's or are PhD candidates--that's eight years of specialized, expensive post-graduate education. Book reviews are a main role. They read 3000 new books a year and select the most important 600 for actual review, using a database of 11,000 available scholars. 300 full-length manuscripts a year are submitted and the senior editors and outside reviewers narrow that to the best 10%. The staffers do intensive quality control on the accepted articles and are backed by a major university library (which is expensive.) They occupy nice offices with phones & computers etc that are also paid for. The Journal pays travel expenses for meetings. The output is 4 issues a year with 1300 pages of high quality scholarship delivered to about 10,000 historians and libraries.
Indeed anyone can try to publish a junk history journal single-handed and give it away free; almost nobody does so. The software is there but the necessary expertise is very expensive and takes decades to develop. It costs real money to produce the "reliable secondary source" that Wikipedia wholly depends upon. The question is who pays for it.
Richard Jensen
______________________________**_________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.**wikimedia.orgWiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wiki-**research-lhttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
We have about as much talent and personnel as one journal. And an operation of about the same order of magnitude.
Fred
There seems to be a great deal of misunderstanding among Wikipedians how academe actually works. Piotr thinks a grad student can produce a scholarly journal. Look at history. In reality it takes hundreds of scholars working together (almost all of whom are paid professional salaries by universities.) Printing and mailing costs are only a fraction of the total expenses for a scholarly journal, so the advantage of going electronic is small in terms of production costs.
I talked just now with the editor of ''The Journal of American History'' --I used to be on its editorial board. It has dozens of editorial board members and hundreds of unpaid scholars who evaluate articles and write for it. They are paid not by the Journal but by their own universities to do this kind of high prestige "service." (History professors are paid for research, teaching and service--the average salary in USA for a full professor of history is $83,000 plus 25% benefits.) The Journal has 14 in-house staff members, who are paid salaries at rates standard for Indiana University. Most have PhD's or are PhD candidates--that's eight years of specialized, expensive post-graduate education. Book reviews are a main role. They read 3000 new books a year and select the most important 600 for actual review, using a database of 11,000 available scholars. 300 full-length manuscripts a year are submitted and the senior editors and outside reviewers narrow that to the best 10%. The staffers do intensive quality control on the accepted articles and are backed by a major university library (which is expensive.) They occupy nice offices with phones & computers etc that are also paid for. The Journal pays travel expenses for meetings. The output is 4 issues a year with 1300 pages of high quality scholarship delivered to about 10,000 historians and libraries.
Indeed anyone can try to publish a junk history journal single-handed and give it away free; almost nobody does so. The software is there but the necessary expertise is very expensive and takes decades to develop. It costs real money to produce the "reliable secondary source" that Wikipedia wholly depends upon. The question is who pays for it.
Richard Jensen
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
"Piotr thinks a grad student can produce a scholarly journal."
Please don't misquote me, Richard. What I said is that a grad student (in the capacity of assistant/managing editor) is the only person who needs to be paid specifically for their work on the journal. Of course I agree that it takes hundreds of scholars to produce an issue, but they are not paid specifically for that.
You say that "Printing and mailing costs are only a fraction of the total expenses for a scholarly journal". Well, I am very curious what are the costs then? Let me repeat: editors, authors and reviewers are not paid, so labor is not an issue. Online publishing can be easily achieved for no cost. You say, as quoted above, that printing and mailing costs are small. So, what is that money needed for?
Your example of a ''The Journal of American History'' is quite interesting. I am in fact quite familiar with another book review journal, the "International Sociology Review of Books". It reviews several dozen books per year; reviews are done by volunteer scholars, and the only person getting paid is the (part-time) grad student who does most of the labor-intensive organizational/record-keeping job. I am afraid I cannot quote the output number in terms of pages and printed issues, so let's assume for argument sake that it is about half or a quarter of the journal you cite. From your example, I am a bit unclear on who writes the review - the journal staff? Or is their role to select which books will be reviewed? Review the reviews? Copyediting?
I will now make two assertions.
First, I assume that the model you describe - where journal has dedicated offices and several full time staff members - form a small minority of all academic journals. Most academic journals are run with no dedicated offices, and with no full-time staff members. I would gladly accept any statistics confirming or rejecting the above.
Second, while I applaud the high quality content produced by such a journal, I am not convinced that you need all of that (dedicated offices, dozen or so full time staff) to produce "non-junk" academic content. It is, IMHO, an illustration of an obsolete business model, one with too many running costs, as demonstrated by the existence of a free (open content) alternative. I'd compare this model, in the context of our group theme here, to the difference between Britannica and Wikipedia. Britannica relied on offices, full time staff, and was the model encyclopedia - and than the Internet came and showed us all the same product can be made in higher quality for next to no cost. For another example, look at the transformation of the newspaper business, with numerous papers going under, as the new, Internet-based net news services are taking over.
I will note, ending, that I am not saying that the open content model is fully superior. Ideally, a journal should ensure quick turn around times, and quality control (copy-editing, and so on). I don't have a perfect solution for all, but what I am pretty sure is that at the very least, the price charged for most of the traditional journals is significantly inflated. Whoever funds the journals, should do so fully, so that their content is free to the reader. I don't know who operates ''The Journal of American History", but at least for many traditional, big-name publishers, we (tax-payers and scholars) are subsidizing enormous profits of a small group. For example, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier : "In 2010, Elsevier reported a profit margin of 36% on revenues of $3.2 billion" Think a moment about where that money is coming from, and where is it going...
-- Piotr Konieczny
"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski
On 5/22/2012 3:13 PM, Richard Jensen wrote:
There seems to be a great deal of misunderstanding among Wikipedians how academe actually works. Piotr thinks a grad student can produce a scholarly journal. Look at history. In reality it takes hundreds of scholars working together (almost all of whom are paid professional salaries by universities.) Printing and mailing costs are only a fraction of the total expenses for a scholarly journal, so the advantage of going electronic is small in terms of production costs.
I talked just now with the editor of --I used to be on its editorial board. It has dozens of editorial board members and hundreds of unpaid scholars who evaluate articles and write for it. They are paid not by the Journal but by their own universities to do this kind of high prestige "service." (History professors are paid for research, teaching and service--the average salary in USA for a full professor of history is $83,000 plus 25% benefits.) The Journal has 14 in-house staff members, who are paid salaries at rates standard for Indiana University. Most have PhD's or are PhD candidates--that's eight years of specialized, expensive post-graduate education. Book reviews are a main role. They read 3000 new books a year and select the most important 600 for actual review, using a database of 11,000 available scholars. 300 full-length manuscripts a year are submitted and the senior editors and outside reviewers narrow that to the best 10%. The staffers do intensive quality control on the accepted articles and are backed by a major university library (which is expensive.) They occupy nice offices with phones & computers etc that are also paid for. The Journal pays travel expenses for meetings. The output is 4 issues a year with 1300 pages of high quality scholarship delivered to about 10,000 historians and libraries.
Indeed anyone can try to publish a junk history journal single-handed and give it away free; almost nobody does so. The software is there but the necessary expertise is very expensive and takes decades to develop. It costs real money to produce the "reliable secondary source" that Wikipedia wholly depends upon. The question is who pays for it.
Richard Jensen
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Piotr says "Let me repeat: editors, authors and reviewers are not paid" That's completely false. They are all paid professional salaries by their home universities, and the kind of work they do is counted in terms of getting jobs, promotions, pay raises and tenure. Furthermore for the authors of the articles published and books being reviewed, the coverage they get in the journals is a major factor in their own getting jobs and promotions. That is how the American system works.
Indiana U sponsors a number of major journals and they are very pleased indeed with the international recognition this brings.
Why so many highly skilled professionals are required is a matter of quality control. Th Journal of American history accepts only 20% of the history books submitted for review, and publishes only 10% of the articles submitted.
Yes you can buy cheap "natural cures" for what ails you as recommended by a friend, or you can pay $$$ for prescriptions written by a real MD and prepared by a real pharmaceutical company. It's the same with scholarship.
Richard Jensen
Piotr says "Let me repeat: editors, authors and reviewers are not paid" That's completely false. They are all paid professional salaries by their home universities, and the kind of work they do is counted in terms of getting jobs, promotions, pay raises and tenure. Furthermore for the authors of the articles published and books being reviewed, the coverage they get in the journals is a major factor in their own getting jobs and promotions. That is how the American system works.
Indiana U sponsors a number of major journals and they are very pleased indeed with the international recognition this brings.
Why so many highly skilled professionals are required is a matter of quality control. Th Journal of American history accepts only 20% of the history books submitted for review, and publishes only 10% of the articles submitted.
Yes you can buy cheap "natural cures" for what ails you as recommended by a friend, or you can pay $$$ for prescriptions written by a real MD and prepared by a real pharmaceutical company. It's the same with scholarship.
Richard Jensen
She said, "Let them eat cake!"
Very inflammatory words; in effect, you set out a revolutionary manifesto.
Fred
As has already been discussed, journals have real costs that can be covered *either* by charging readers *or* by charging writers. Scientific publications general have *optional* page charges, which of course few people pay. But they could easily switch to requiring them.
Such a switch would be "cost neutral" for scholars overall: what is now spent on reading charges would instead be spent on writing charges. There would be some cost shifting for individuals: prolific authors would see their costs rise relative to others'. This seems quite reasonable, as the prolific authors are likely to be the ones getting grants, which they can use to fund their authoring. One might worry that this is a deterrent to publication. But on the flip side, it removes a deterrent to reading others' work; I'm not going to guess whether we net a gain or a loss. Making publication cost something might reduce the prevalence of low-quality publication, which would be a big win for all---I think we're much better off filtering at the source than forcing our readers to weed out the junk.
Author charges are also much easier to manage than reader charges: they are a single, predictable large sum that can be set to what is necessary to cover the cost of publication *at the time of publication*, as opposed to reader charges which must be set based on speculation about the number of readers of an article.
On 5/22/2012 11:01 PM, Richard Jensen wrote:
Piotr says "Let me repeat: editors, authors and reviewers are not paid" That's completely false. They are all paid professional salaries by their home universities, and the kind of work they do is counted in terms of getting jobs, promotions, pay raises and tenure. Furthermore for the authors of the articles published and books being reviewed, the coverage they get in the journals is a major factor in their own getting jobs and promotions. That is how the American system works.
Indiana U sponsors a number of major journals and they are very pleased indeed with the international recognition this brings.
Why so many highly skilled professionals are required is a matter of quality control. Th Journal of American history accepts only 20% of the history books submitted for review, and publishes only 10% of the articles submitted.
Yes you can buy cheap "natural cures" for what ails you as recommended by a friend, or you can pay $$$ for prescriptions written by a real MD and prepared by a real pharmaceutical company. It's the same with scholarship.
Richard Jensen
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
The work of a reviewer does not count towards tenure, or any other reviews; nobody puts "I reviewed articles" on their CV, and reviewing books counts for very, very little. I don't think any number of book reviews would equal a peer reviewed journal publication in an academic job hunt. Therefore, why there may be some expectation that academics are paid for activities that include review, this cannot be controlled, and many academics refuse to do reviews, or do it poorly.
Whether the authors are paid is a more complex issue. First, not all authors published in the US journals are full-time academics at research position. I don't have numbers to cite, but I'd assume that a significant minority (20-30%) of articles come from grad students, scholars holding primarily teaching positions, independent scholars (including those on the job market), and from places outside US (thus foreign taxpayers are subsidizing US scholarship; that probably includes a tiny but sad percentage of people who publish works in publications they cannot afford to read - the anecdotal scholar from Africa, for example - or many of my colleagues in Poland, who don't have access to numerous journals which their library does not subscribe to, and whose wage of about 10,000 a year makes purchasing journal subscriptions or even individual articles very difficult).
Now, for the sake of the argument, I will accept that most (but not all) authors are paid by universities to publish ''somewhere''. The more prestigious the journal, the better, but there is requirement to publish behind restrictive paywalls, giving away one's copyright. There is an increasing number of prestigious open content journals, and publishing in those is a more ethical thing to do (but I accept the fact that they are still a minority, and often one may not have an easy choice).
As I mentioned earlier, I also accept the argument that it is good for a journal to have paid staff. If journals went free, the money the universities pay for subscriptions could be redirected to the journals, with a net benefit for the society, particularly the less privileged groups (scholars at poorer institutions/countries, and people outside academia, like Wikipedians).
I am not going to discuss whether editors are paid or not as I am relatively unfamiliar with that. Data would be appreciated.
PS. With regard to your medical analogy, I have one word for you: generics. (At least, patents last 20 years, scholarly knowledge is copyrighted and locked for about a century...).
-- Piotr Konieczny
"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski
On 5/22/2012 11:01 PM, Richard Jensen wrote:
Piotr says "Let me repeat: editors, authors and reviewers are not paid" That's completely false. They are all paid professional salaries by their home universities, and the kind of work they do is counted in terms of getting jobs, promotions, pay raises and tenure. Furthermore for the authors of the articles published and books being reviewed, the coverage they get in the journals is a major factor in their own getting jobs and promotions. That is how the American system works.
Indiana U sponsors a number of major journals and they are very pleased indeed with the international recognition this brings.
Why so many highly skilled professionals are required is a matter of quality control. Th Journal of American history accepts only 20% of the history books submitted for review, and publishes only 10% of the articles submitted.
Yes you can buy cheap "natural cures" for what ails you as recommended by a friend, or you can pay $$$ for prescriptions written by a real MD and prepared by a real pharmaceutical company. It's the same with scholarship.
Richard Jensen
Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
Piotr is misinformed. In History it is false that "The work of a reviewer does not count towards tenure, or any other reviews; nobody puts "I reviewed articles" on their CV." There are about 4000 universities in the country--I've taught at a bunch of them from high to low (and my spouse has been the dean at several others) so I have seen the high respect that administrators have for faculty who achieve national visibility by being asked to review. At the U of Illinois I and every other professor was asked to list the service roles we played.
As for the authors--indeed a lot of authors are grad students or underemployed PhDs who publish because that's the path to getting an academic job. They are taught how to do this in graduate seminars led by very highly paid professors. Making them pay $1000 to $5000 so their article is open access is a very unwise way to promote their scholarship. (Few if any prestigious history journals are now open access; this seems more an issue in sciences.)
As for the problem of journal access in poor countries. Well that is indeed a problem, but surely this loose talk about American taxpayers suggests that ALL the access outside the US to American funded research should be blocked . Happily that won't happen. The problem is perhaps counterbalanced by the amazingly high # of foreign students who get a free ride from American graduate schools.
Richard Jensen
On 23 May 2012 14:47, Richard Jensen rjensen@uic.edu wrote:
Making them pay $1000 to $5000 so their article is open access is a very unwise way to promote their scholarship. (Few if any prestigious history journals are now open access; this seems more an issue in sciences.)
Some open access journals waive the fees for any authors who are not able to pay, removing this argument as a downside to the producer pays model for open access.
In the user pays model there are similar fees *per institution* for having the privilege of limited *access* to some single journals for a single year, so the argument can easily be reversed. I guess you already know what happens when you actually try to download all of the articles for a journal you have *access* to on JSTOR.
Peter
"Anyone can try to publish a junk X single-handed and give it away free; almost nobody does so. The software is there but the necessary expertise is very expensive and takes decades to develop."
Similar words were also uttered by newspaper editors, encyclopedia publishers, proprietary software developers, and any number of other knowledge robberbarons standing athwart history imagining they and their institutions alone, had the requisite skills and expertise to engage in knowledge production.
Until they didn't. Enjoy your new neighbors in trash heap of history. On May 22, 2012 3:13 PM, "Richard Jensen" rjensen@uic.edu wrote:
There seems to be a great deal of misunderstanding among Wikipedians how academe actually works. Piotr thinks a grad student can produce a scholarly journal. Look at history. In reality it takes hundreds of scholars working together (almost all of whom are paid professional salaries by universities.) Printing and mailing costs are only a fraction of the total expenses for a scholarly journal, so the advantage of going electronic is small in terms of production costs.
I talked just now with the editor of ''The Journal of American History'' --I used to be on its editorial board. It has dozens of editorial board members and hundreds of unpaid scholars who evaluate articles and write for it. They are paid not by the Journal but by their own universities to do this kind of high prestige "service." (History professors are paid for research, teaching and service--the average salary in USA for a full professor of history is $83,000 plus 25% benefits.) The Journal has 14 in-house staff members, who are paid salaries at rates standard for Indiana University. Most have PhD's or are PhD candidates--that's eight years of specialized, expensive post-graduate education. Book reviews are a main role. They read 3000 new books a year and select the most important 600 for actual review, using a database of 11,000 available scholars. 300 full-length manuscripts a year are submitted and the senior editors and outside reviewers narrow that to the best 10%. The staffers do intensive quality control on the accepted articles and are backed by a major university library (which is expensive.) They occupy nice offices with phones & computers etc that are also paid for. The Journal pays travel expenses for meetings. The output is 4 issues a year with 1300 pages of high quality scholarship delivered to about 10,000 historians and libraries.
Indeed anyone can try to publish a junk history journal single-handed and give it away free; almost nobody does so. The software is there but the necessary expertise is very expensive and takes decades to develop. It costs real money to produce the "reliable secondary source" that Wikipedia wholly depends upon. The question is who pays for it.
Richard Jensen
______________________________**_________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.**wikimedia.orgWiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wiki-**research-lhttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
As Richard Jensen said, the old style dead tree journals rely on "dozens of editorial board members and hundreds of unpaid scholars who evaluate articles and write for it. They are paid not by the Journal but by their own universities to do this kind of high prestige service." No one disputes that we still need the universities and the academics. We just need to upgrade them to a different publishing model. There are many uncertainties as to how this model will look and how quick the revolution will be. But one thing we can be certain of, the unpaid scholars upon which it depends will be no worse off when their employers realise that prestige is moving online and open source.
WSC
On 22 May 2012 20:13, Richard Jensen rjensen@uic.edu wrote:
There seems to be a great deal of misunderstanding among Wikipedians how academe actually works. Piotr thinks a grad student can produce a scholarly journal. Look at history. In reality it takes hundreds of scholars working together (almost all of whom are paid professional salaries by universities.) Printing and mailing costs are only a fraction of the total expenses for a scholarly journal, so the advantage of going electronic is small in terms of production costs.
I talked just now with the editor of ''The Journal of American History'' --I used to be on its editorial board. It has dozens of editorial board members and hundreds of unpaid scholars who evaluate articles and write for it. They are paid not by the Journal but by their own universities to do this kind of high prestige "service." (History professors are paid for research, teaching and service--the average salary in USA for a full professor of history is $83,000 plus 25% benefits.) The Journal has 14 in-house staff members, who are paid salaries at rates standard for Indiana University. Most have PhD's or are PhD candidates--that's eight years of specialized, expensive post-graduate education. Book reviews are a main role. They read 3000 new books a year and select the most important 600 for actual review, using a database of 11,000 available scholars. 300 full-length manuscripts a year are submitted and the senior editors and outside reviewers narrow that to the best 10%. The staffers do intensive quality control on the accepted articles and are backed by a major university library (which is expensive.) They occupy nice offices with phones & computers etc that are also paid for. The Journal pays travel expenses for meetings. The output is 4 issues a year with 1300 pages of high quality scholarship delivered to about 10,000 historians and libraries.
Indeed anyone can try to publish a junk history journal single-handed and give it away free; almost nobody does so. The software is there but the necessary expertise is very expensive and takes decades to develop. It costs real money to produce the "reliable secondary source" that Wikipedia wholly depends upon. The question is who pays for it.
Richard Jensen
______________________________**_________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list Wiki-research-l@lists.**wikimedia.orgWiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wiki-**research-lhttps://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org