On 23 September 2012 22:24, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/2012/09/21/how-do-you-recognize-a-c… http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/files/2012/09/Berstein-report-on-El… 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(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

the costs of peer review

On 24/09/2012 03:49, Risker wrote: I have academics complaining to me that they don't get paid for peer review, so I'm not sure what these costs are.

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 24 September 2012 21:20, Jussi-Ville Heiskanen <cimonavaro(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote: 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.

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

On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 2:52 PM, Richard Farmbrough <richard(a)farmbrough.co.uk> wrote: Someone has to edit the magazine, pre-accept papers, and handle the peer reviews.

On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 2:12 PM, Mark <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote: editorial then positions. nonexistent, journal. both other (funded by 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(a)gmail.com _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l

On Wed, Sep 26, 2012 at 12:08 AM, emijrp <emijrp(a)gmail.com> wrote: I'll have a tshirt with this.

Coordinating people to write encyclopedias was expensive. Well, until 2001.

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.

In the wiki-research mailing list we are talking about Open-Access

and new ways to publish and disseminate research results. A summary is available http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiki_Research_Ideas