It's such a pity that Elsevier's attempt to legally block open access requirements [1] means that they must be destroyed utterly with not one stone left upon another and the ground salted. I'm crying real[2] tears here.
http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2012/09/21/how-do-you-recognize-a-ca... http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/files/2012/09/Berstein-report-on-Els...
The world's smallest violin is playing the world's quietest tune, at $39.50 a play for non-subscribers.
- d.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Works_Act [2] may not be 100% true.
On 23/09/12 05:24, David Gerard wrote:
It's such a pity that Elsevier's attempt to legally block open access requirements [1] means that they must be destroyed utterly with not one stone left upon another and the ground salted. I'm crying real[2] tears here.
http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2012/09/21/how-do-you-recognize-a-ca... http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/files/2012/09/Berstein-report-on-Els...
The world's smallest violin is playing the world's quietest tune, at $39.50 a play for non-subscribers.
According to the PDF, each published article costs them 1954 GBP, and brings in a revenue of 3256 GBP. A very nice business to be in. They already charge the authors a processing fee of 2000 GBP per article, so they could break even with open access, without increasing the author fee at all. That would be bad for investors, but the company would survive. So maybe it's not quite time to dance on Elselvier's grave.
-- Tim Starling
On 23 September 2012 22:24, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 23/09/12 05:24, David Gerard wrote:
It's such a pity that Elsevier's attempt to legally block open access requirements [1] means that they must be destroyed utterly with not one stone left upon another and the ground salted. I'm crying real[2] tears here.
http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2012/09/21/how-do-you-recognize-a-ca...
http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/files/2012/09/Berstein-report-on-Els...
The world's smallest violin is playing the world's quietest tune, at $39.50 a play for non-subscribers.
According to the PDF, each published article costs them 1954 GBP, and brings in a revenue of 3256 GBP. A very nice business to be in. They already charge the authors a processing fee of 2000 GBP per article, so they could break even with open access, without increasing the author fee at all. That would be bad for investors, but the company would survive. So maybe it's not quite time to dance on Elselvier's grave.
I tend to agree with Tim Starling that Elselvier (and other for-profit journal publishers) still have a place. The author's processing fee (which covers peer review and publication costs) that Elselvier currently charges would probably not even cover the cost of peer reviewing; they depend on sales to make up the difference. Remember that they bundle the less popular journals with the popular ones, to defray those costs across several publications. Thus, the scientist in the little-known field whose professional journals are read by hundreds doesn't pay significantly more for "processing" than the scientist whose professional journal is read by tens of thousands.
Even open access journals will need to ensure that they charge enough to cover the costs of peer review, or their publications will be essentially useless: even Wikipedia expects that sources used to back scientific/medical statements be from peer-reviewed journals. That cost will have to come from the researcher; the articles that David links to indicates that the "true" cost of peer review is more than double what most of these journals are currently charging as "processing fees". A decrease in the number of peer-reviewed journals in any scientific topic area can have fairly disastrous effects on research: almost all research grants require publication in peer-reviewed journals. If the number of journals available for consideration of publication is increasingly limited, scholars will have an increasingly difficult time publishing and may have to pay those "processing fees" to multiple journals before their report is accepted. That's money that's being taken away from the actual science. It also increases the motivation to seek out research grants from organizations with deep pockets (including those in the private sector), and we all know that scientists who accept research grants from Big Business tend to be considered "sell-outs".
There's no good answer here. In an ideal world, there would be lots of Open Access journals with low processing fees that would publish good peer-reviewed scientific studies regardless of their "popularity". There's a long way to go before this will make fiscal sense.
Risker/Anne
In the wiki-research mailing list we are talking about Open-Access journals and new ways to publish and disseminate research results. A summary is available http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Research_Ideas
2012/9/24 Risker risker.wp@gmail.com
On 23 September 2012 22:24, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 23/09/12 05:24, David Gerard wrote:
It's such a pity that Elsevier's attempt to legally block open access requirements [1] means that they must be destroyed utterly with not one stone left upon another and the ground salted. I'm crying real[2] tears here.
http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2012/09/21/how-do-you-recognize-a-ca...
http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/files/2012/09/Berstein-report-on-Els...
The world's smallest violin is playing the world's quietest tune, at $39.50 a play for non-subscribers.
According to the PDF, each published article costs them 1954 GBP, and brings in a revenue of 3256 GBP. A very nice business to be in. They already charge the authors a processing fee of 2000 GBP per article, so they could break even with open access, without increasing the author fee at all. That would be bad for investors, but the company would survive. So maybe it's not quite time to dance on Elselvier's
grave.
I tend to agree with Tim Starling that Elselvier (and other for-profit journal publishers) still have a place. The author's processing fee (which covers peer review and publication costs) that Elselvier currently charges would probably not even cover the cost of peer reviewing; they depend on sales to make up the difference. Remember that they bundle the less popular journals with the popular ones, to defray those costs across several publications. Thus, the scientist in the little-known field whose professional journals are read by hundreds doesn't pay significantly more for "processing" than the scientist whose professional journal is read by tens of thousands.
Even open access journals will need to ensure that they charge enough to cover the costs of peer review, or their publications will be essentially useless: even Wikipedia expects that sources used to back scientific/medical statements be from peer-reviewed journals. That cost will have to come from the researcher; the articles that David links to indicates that the "true" cost of peer review is more than double what most of these journals are currently charging as "processing fees". A decrease in the number of peer-reviewed journals in any scientific topic area can have fairly disastrous effects on research: almost all research grants require publication in peer-reviewed journals. If the number of journals available for consideration of publication is increasingly limited, scholars will have an increasingly difficult time publishing and may have to pay those "processing fees" to multiple journals before their report is accepted. That's money that's being taken away from the actual science. It also increases the motivation to seek out research grants from organizations with deep pockets (including those in the private sector), and we all know that scientists who accept research grants from Big Business tend to be considered "sell-outs".
There's no good answer here. In an ideal world, there would be lots of Open Access journals with low processing fees that would publish good peer-reviewed scientific studies regardless of their "popularity". There's a long way to go before this will make fiscal sense.
Risker/Anne _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
There are also other kinds of business models: http://scoap3.org/
The topic is complex, I know and Open Access is about a shift of an entire system, is not about Elsevier (which is important but (just) a main actor in a big play).
Peer review is crucial, of course, but I wonder who is being paid: afaik, reviewers are almost never paid for their work (I understaind that organizing it must be diffuclt and expensive).
Moreover, I think it is is fairly easy to see that there is something wrong when a system make the citizen pay 2 times for research (first time paying academics to do research, second paying journals through libraries to read that research). And when academics are the producers, the reviewers and the customers of the company itself. Thus, there *must* be a more clever system for research publishing :-)
Aubrey
On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 4:49 AM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
On 23 September 2012 22:24, Tim Starling tstarling@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 23/09/12 05:24, David Gerard wrote:
It's such a pity that Elsevier's attempt to legally block open access requirements [1] means that they must be destroyed utterly with not one stone left upon another and the ground salted. I'm crying real[2] tears here.
http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2012/09/21/how-do-you-recognize-a-ca...
http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/files/2012/09/Berstein-report-on-Els...
The world's smallest violin is playing the world's quietest tune, at $39.50 a play for non-subscribers.
According to the PDF, each published article costs them 1954 GBP, and brings in a revenue of 3256 GBP. A very nice business to be in. They already charge the authors a processing fee of 2000 GBP per article, so they could break even with open access, without increasing the author fee at all. That would be bad for investors, but the company would survive. So maybe it's not quite time to dance on Elselvier's
grave.
I tend to agree with Tim Starling that Elselvier (and other for-profit journal publishers) still have a place. The author's processing fee (which covers peer review and publication costs) that Elselvier currently charges would probably not even cover the cost of peer reviewing; they depend on sales to make up the difference. Remember that they bundle the less popular journals with the popular ones, to defray those costs across several publications. Thus, the scientist in the little-known field whose professional journals are read by hundreds doesn't pay significantly more for "processing" than the scientist whose professional journal is read by tens of thousands.
Even open access journals will need to ensure that they charge enough to cover the costs of peer review, or their publications will be essentially useless: even Wikipedia expects that sources used to back scientific/medical statements be from peer-reviewed journals. That cost will have to come from the researcher; the articles that David links to indicates that the "true" cost of peer review is more than double what most of these journals are currently charging as "processing fees". A decrease in the number of peer-reviewed journals in any scientific topic area can have fairly disastrous effects on research: almost all research grants require publication in peer-reviewed journals. If the number of journals available for consideration of publication is increasingly limited, scholars will have an increasingly difficult time publishing and may have to pay those "processing fees" to multiple journals before their report is accepted. That's money that's being taken away from the actual science. It also increases the motivation to seek out research grants from organizations with deep pockets (including those in the private sector), and we all know that scientists who accept research grants from Big Business tend to be considered "sell-outs".
There's no good answer here. In an ideal world, there would be lots of Open Access journals with low processing fees that would publish good peer-reviewed scientific studies regardless of their "popularity". There's a long way to go before this will make fiscal sense.
Risker/Anne _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l
On 24 September 2012 22:52, Richard Farmbrough richard@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.
Apparently, peer review costs a fortune to organise. i wouldn't think so from the peer review requests I see in my email (yes, mine ... I don't even have a completed bachelor's degree), but obviously Elsevier do it in a manner that runs on gold dust.
- d.
On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 2:52 PM, Richard Farmbrough richard@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...
It's funny, most organizations point to our community as am example of how to manage such things with volunteers.
Another example: law reviews offer an excellent and widely reproduced model where the most esteemed publications are run by students. On Sep 24, 2012 6:33 PM, "George Herbert" george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 2:52 PM, Richard Farmbrough richard@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@gmail.com
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On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 3:33 AM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
It's funny, most organizations point to our community as am example of how to manage such things with volunteers.
Another example: law reviews offer an excellent and widely reproduced model where the most esteemed publications are run by students.
Another amusing example is The Economist current affairs magazine. I hear their contributors don't, as a rule, run to grey whiskers and tweed jackets.
On 24 September 2012 21:20, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.comwrote:
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 3:33 AM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
It's funny, most organizations point to our community as am example of
how
to manage such things with volunteers.
Another example: law reviews offer an excellent and widely reproduced
model
where the most esteemed publications are run by students.
Well, perhaps. But their "peer review" is courtrooms, where the decisions are made publicly and are produced by the justice system free of charge to the journals. Otherwise, the articles are written by students with faculty advisors reviewing their work. I don't think anyone wants medical studies to be "peer reviewed" by medical students.
Another amusing example is The Economist current affairs magazine. I hear their contributors don't, as a rule, run to grey whiskers and tweed jackets.
--
You're correct; a lot of them are paid journalists, and the rest are paid columnists.
Risker/Anne
On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 6:31 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
On 24 September 2012 21:20, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen cimonavaro@gmail.comwrote:
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 3:33 AM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
It's funny, most organizations point to our community as am example of
how
to manage such things with volunteers.
Another example: law reviews offer an excellent and widely reproduced
model
where the most esteemed publications are run by students.
Well, perhaps. But their "peer review" is courtrooms, where the decisions are made publicly and are produced by the justice system free of charge to the journals. Otherwise, the articles are written by students with faculty advisors reviewing their work. I don't think anyone wants medical studies to be "peer reviewed" by medical students.
FWIW, I was on a peer-reviewed law journal (there are a few) where students managed the reviewer-wrangling process, with the occasional aid and input of an also-unpaid faculty advisor.
-Kat
To be fair, organising academics is probably quite like herding cats. I can see it being expensive (but not quite as expensive as currently!) I wonder: would it be possible to make it so that in order to publish a paper, a person has to review two, three, four others as part of their payment?
Or is that a silly idea?[1]
Richard [1] It's probably a very silly idea
On 25 September 2012 16:19, Kat Walsh kat@mindspillage.org wrote:
On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 6:31 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
On 24 September 2012 21:20, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro@gmail.com wrote:
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 3:33 AM, Samuel Klein meta.sj@gmail.com
wrote:
It's funny, most organizations point to our community as am example of
how
to manage such things with volunteers.
Another example: law reviews offer an excellent and widely reproduced
model
where the most esteemed publications are run by students.
Well, perhaps. But their "peer review" is courtrooms, where the decisions are made publicly and are produced by the justice system free of charge
to
the journals. Otherwise, the articles are written by students with
faculty
advisors reviewing their work. I don't think anyone wants medical
studies
to be "peer reviewed" by medical students.
FWIW, I was on a peer-reviewed law journal (there are a few) where students managed the reviewer-wrangling process, with the occasional aid and input of an also-unpaid faculty advisor.
-Kat
-- Your donations keep Wikipedia free: https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate Web: http://www.mindspillage.org Email: kat@wikimedia.org, kat@mindspillage.org (G)AIM, Freenode, gchat, identi.ca, twitter, various social sites: mindspillage
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On 25 September 2012 16:24, Richard Symonds richard.symonds@wikimedia.org.uk wrote:
To be fair, organising academics is probably quite like herding cats. I can see it being expensive (but not quite as expensive as currently!) I wonder: would it be possible to make it so that in order to publish a paper, a person has to review two, three, four others as part of their payment? Or is that a silly idea?[1] [1] It's probably a very silly idea
It's sort of accepted as the implicit deal: you want your papers reviewed, you should participate in the reviewing.
- d.
FYI
Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2012 20:33:29 -0400 From: meta.sj@gmail.com To: wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] (semi-OT) Open access "catastrophic" for Elsevier
It's funny, most organizations point to our community as am example of how to manage such things with volunteers.
Another example: law reviews offer an excellent and widely reproduced model where the most esteemed publications are run by students. On Sep 24, 2012 6:33 PM, "George Herbert" george.herbert@gmail.com wrote:
On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 2:52 PM, Richard Farmbrough richard@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@gmail.com
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On 9/25/12 12:32 AM, George Herbert wrote:
On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 2:52 PM, Richard Farmbrough richard@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.
The actual organization of peer reviews generally isn't paid even at for-profit journals, at least in my field. The editor-in-chief and editorial board are usually responsible for finding and assigning reviewers, and then making a decision based on their reviews, and those aren't paid positions. There are indeed editing/layout costs at some journals, though it varies widely. In computer science, the costs are typically lower to nonexistent, because of an expectation that authors will be able to deliver publication-ready PDFs, using LaTeX and a template provided by the journal.
The two top journals these days in my field (artificial intelligence) both run on fairly low budgets, one a rounding error away from $0, and the other a modest nonprofit:
* http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/ -- donated server space from MIT, and a completely volunteer editorial process * http://jair.org/ -- nonprofit organization with a small budget (funded by donations and grants) pays for server space and a small staff
-Mark
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 2:12 PM, Mark delirium@hackish.org wrote:
On 9/25/12 12:32 AM, George Herbert wrote:
On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 2:52 PM, Richard Farmbrough richard@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.
The actual organization of peer reviews generally isn't paid even at for-profit journals, at least in my field. The editor-in-chief and editorial board are usually responsible for finding and assigning reviewers, and then making a decision based on their reviews, and those aren't paid positions. There are indeed editing/layout costs at some journals, though it varies widely. In computer science, the costs are typically lower to nonexistent, because of an expectation that authors will be able to deliver publication-ready PDFs, using LaTeX and a template provided by the journal.
The two top journals these days in my field (artificial intelligence) both run on fairly low budgets, one a rounding error away from $0, and the other a modest nonprofit:
- http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/ -- donated server space from MIT, and a
completely volunteer editorial process
- http://jair.org/ -- nonprofit organization with a small budget (funded by
donations and grants) pays for server space and a small staff
-Mark
Computer Science seems to have taken the lead there, but my understanding (as an outsider, interested, but not participating much) is that physical and biological sciences, and most other engineering, usually pay a staffer and the editor-in-chief, but usually not reviewers or the editorial board.
I'm sure it's wildly across the map from field to field and publication to publication, though...
The important part of the discussion is to get on the table that there are real production EFFORTS involved in all of these journals; it's not just an email balancing act, a large part of people's work time is dedicated to coordination and reviewing reviews and finding reviewers and the like. Authors are asked to review. Lots of effort is happening.
Whether most of that is "free" - supported by institutions or done by people out of the goodness of their heart (or for prestige) - or paid, it's happening.
If I'm paying $1,000 a year for a journal I darn well expect that they're both paying the coordination and production staff and also exercising not academic interference, but having an organizational review board to make sure the editor and editorial committee aren't running off the rails (as has been known to happen in lesser known journals).
Coordinating people to write encyclopedias was expensive. Well, until 2001.
2012/9/25 George Herbert george.herbert@gmail.com
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 2:12 PM, Mark delirium@hackish.org wrote:
On 9/25/12 12:32 AM, George Herbert wrote:
On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 2:52 PM, Richard Farmbrough richard@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.
The actual organization of peer reviews generally isn't paid even at for-profit journals, at least in my field. The editor-in-chief and
editorial
board are usually responsible for finding and assigning reviewers, and
then
making a decision based on their reviews, and those aren't paid
positions.
There are indeed editing/layout costs at some journals, though it varies widely. In computer science, the costs are typically lower to
nonexistent,
because of an expectation that authors will be able to deliver publication-ready PDFs, using LaTeX and a template provided by the
journal.
The two top journals these days in my field (artificial intelligence)
both
run on fairly low budgets, one a rounding error away from $0, and the
other
a modest nonprofit:
- http://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/ -- donated server space from MIT, and a
completely volunteer editorial process
- http://jair.org/ -- nonprofit organization with a small budget
(funded by
donations and grants) pays for server space and a small staff
-Mark
Computer Science seems to have taken the lead there, but my understanding (as an outsider, interested, but not participating much) is that physical and biological sciences, and most other engineering, usually pay a staffer and the editor-in-chief, but usually not reviewers or the editorial board.
I'm sure it's wildly across the map from field to field and publication to publication, though...
The important part of the discussion is to get on the table that there are real production EFFORTS involved in all of these journals; it's not just an email balancing act, a large part of people's work time is dedicated to coordination and reviewing reviews and finding reviewers and the like. Authors are asked to review. Lots of effort is happening.
Whether most of that is "free" - supported by institutions or done by people out of the goodness of their heart (or for prestige) - or paid, it's happening.
If I'm paying $1,000 a year for a journal I darn well expect that they're both paying the coordination and production staff and also exercising not academic interference, but having an organizational review board to make sure the editor and editorial committee aren't running off the rails (as has been known to happen in lesser known journals).
-- -george william herbert george.herbert@gmail.com
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On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 12:08 AM, emijrp emijrp@gmail.com wrote:
Coordinating people to write encyclopedias was expensive. Well, until 2001.
I'll have a tshirt with this.
Aubrey
2012/9/26 Andrea Zanni zanni.andrea84@gmail.com:
On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 12:08 AM, emijrp emijrp@gmail.com wrote:
Coordinating people to write encyclopedias was expensive. Well, until 2001.
I'll have a tshirt with this.
Mee too, mee too.
Cristian
Cristian Consonni, 27/09/2012 00:40:
2012/9/26 Andrea Zanni zanni.andrea84@gmail.com:
On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 12:08 AM, emijrp emijrp@gmail.com wrote:
Coordinating people to write encyclopedias was expensive. Well, until 2001.
I'll have a tshirt with this.
Mee too, mee too.
-> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_merchandise#Call_for_designs (or the talk, but it seems abandoned?)
Nemo
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 3:08 PM, emijrp emijrp@gmail.com wrote:
Coordinating people to write encyclopedias was expensive. Well, until 2001.
"eventualism" and our reliable sources model are probably a very poor match to time-sensitive original research in the sciences or engineering, which is what journals are all about.
That is not to say that a pure open-content and organization model could not work, but I don't think ours does.
If you want to help figure out and organize one...
Their low circulation journals are not primarily journals in small fields, but low-quality journals in fields where there are better, some published by them, most by others. They are the sort of journals libraries would be very tempted to discontinue, and the journal packages were in part intended -- among other things -- to make it impossible or ineffective to do so.
The argument is made by them that it is necessary to maintain outlets in which second-rate scientists can publish, because even second-rate universities require publications. From the point of view of the progress of science, this is irrelevant, for the contributions there are essentially ignored and in most case rightfully so by those actually doing significant research. To the extent this is a real need, the availability of some very low cost Open access journals has solved the problem. After all, the second-rate colleges that have this requirement do not usually care about the quality of the journal, just that it be technically peer-reviewed. From the point of view of the higher education system as a whole, the difficulty is raised by the unrealistic expectations of the colleges, which they are able to enforce because of the super-abundance of faculty produced by some of the PhD programs, which care mainly about maintaining their own enrollment without regard to the employability of their graduates.
Most of my carer was in places with elite scientists, but some was in second or third rate institutions, so I think I'm unbiased. .
On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 10:49 PM, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
Remember that they bundle the less popular journals with the popular ones, to defray those costs across several publications. Thus, the scientist in the little-known field whose professional journals are read by hundreds doesn't pay significantly more for "processing" than the scientist whose professional journal is read by tens of thousands.
Tim Starling, 24/09/2012 04:24:
According to the PDF, each published article costs them 1954 GBP, and brings in a revenue of 3256 GBP. A very nice business to be in. They already charge the authors a processing fee of 2000 GBP per article, so they could break even with open access, without increasing the author fee at all. That would be bad for investors, but the company would survive. So maybe it's not quite time to dance on Elselvier's grave.
Indeed, this is not really about higher or lower costs and revenues: it's mainly about a new kind of market and business which Elsevier is not ready for. Other publishers, like Springer, have been wiser and experimented a lot with Open Access: not because they are philanthropists, but to be ready for everything and avoid the risk of being swept away by history.
emijrp, 24/09/2012 09:08:
In the wiki-research mailing list we are talking about Open-Access
journals
and new ways to publish and disseminate research results. A summary is available http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Research_Ideas
Thanks. I've asked a question on talk: it's also relevant for this topic/mailing list if you disagree with my assumption there.
Nemo
On 22 September 2012 20:24, David Gerard dgerard@gmail.com wrote:
It's such a pity that Elsevier's attempt to legally block open access requirements [1] means that they must be destroyed utterly with not
Of course, it's not all happy bunnies and rainbows and unicorns on the OA side. There's an obvious predatory model, and of course people trying it. Achal Prabhala pointed out this (excellent) article to me:
http://www.thehindu.com/sci-tech/technology/on-the-net-a-scam-of-a-most-scho...
I wrote up another example here:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Bentham_Science_Publishers
See also:
http://metadata.posterous.com/83235355 https://www.facebook.com/POA.Publishers#
- d.
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org