Hello all,
The following post on HN states the following:
About fifteen years ago I was working on a venture to make an open-content journal publishing system. It didn't pan out for various reasons, but the general argument we were making this. Here are various services, and who (or what) handles them:
- Peer review and top-level decision-making. This is handled entirely by the editorial board.
- Typesetting. We have a free system for this: it's called LaTeX.
- Copy-editing and typeset-checking. This is handled by the publisher.
- Publishing and archiving. This is handled by the publisher.
- Famous Name. This is controlled by the publisher and is pure rent-seeking.
It used to be that the publisher handled much more than this. But with a decent online publishing, workflow, and archiving system, and with a near-zero cost in publishing and archiving online nowadays, essentially the only useful service the publisher provides is copy-editing. That is very minor.
If a free online business model can figure out how to fund copy-editing and automatic standards enforcement (for example, people make awful bibtex entries, including Springer's auto-generation system), and a university institution willing to host the journal's archives, the entire utility of a publisher disappears
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11637251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11637251
In all seriousness, what would stop the WMF from attempting to setup journals?
With the WMF’s reputation, I can't see what would stop them from recruiting reputable people who can be reviewers on the panel. Copy editing could be done over the Wiki.
This would take the control of information away from for-profit companies, give maximum transparency, increase the stature of Wikimedia, allow for verified content and allow Wikipedia to keep its user generated, no original research model and allow for WMF expansion into area that it didn't have the ability to be part of before - like research!
Heck, it could then allow the WMF to serious consider funding pure research, or make it easier to run a reputable online university.
The case for disrupting the current business models of Elsevier is compelling. In 2015, Elsevier reported a profit margin of approximately 37% on revenues of £2.070 billion. [0] I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the economic benefit of allowing publication of free journals to countries such as Afghanistan. My calculation may be way off, but as an example according to Elsevier they charge an individual researcher "$31.50 per article or chapter for most Elsevier content [and] select titles are priced between $19.95 and $41.95 (subject to change).” [1]
My calculation, on the assumption that the median wage in Afghanistan is 50,000 AHD per year and the exchange rate for USD to AHD of 68.3 AHD to 1 USD shows that for one article it is about 2,150 AHD, or half the monthly wage of an Afghani with a median income!
We could step into this space. And we could do our disruption legally, and make things like Sci-Hub less necessary for those in countries who cannot afford the extraordinary prices of journal publishers!
So what do people think?
Chris Sherlock
0. "2015 RELX Group Annual Report" (PDF at http://www.relx.com/investorcentre/reports%202007/Documents/2015/relxgroup_a... http://www.relx.com/investorcentre/reports%202007/Documents/2015/relxgroup_ar_2015.pdf). RELX Group Company Reports. RELX Group. March 2016.
1. https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/sciencedirect/content/pay-per-view https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/sciencedirect/content/pay-per-view
We have two journals already as listed here
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Wikiversity_Journal
We are currently in the process of creating a user group to support them.
James
On Thu, May 5, 2016 at 8:17 PM, Chris Sherlock chris.sherlock79@gmail.com wrote:
Hello all,
The following post on HN states the following:
About fifteen years ago I was working on a venture to make an
open-content journal publishing system. It didn't pan out for various reasons, but the general argument we were making this. Here are various services, and who (or what) handles them:
- Peer review and top-level decision-making. This is handled entirely by
the editorial board.
- Typesetting. We have a free system for this: it's called LaTeX.
- Copy-editing and typeset-checking. This is handled by the publisher.
- Publishing and archiving. This is handled by the publisher.
- Famous Name. This is controlled by the publisher and is pure
rent-seeking.
It used to be that the publisher handled much more than this. But with a
decent online publishing, workflow, and archiving system, and with a near-zero cost in publishing and archiving online nowadays, essentially the only useful service the publisher provides is copy-editing. That is very minor.
If a free online business model can figure out how to fund copy-editing
and automatic standards enforcement (for example, people make awful bibtex entries, including Springer's auto-generation system), and a university institution willing to host the journal's archives, the entire utility of a publisher disappears
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11637251 < https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11637251%3E
In all seriousness, what would stop the WMF from attempting to setup journals?
With the WMF’s reputation, I can't see what would stop them from recruiting reputable people who can be reviewers on the panel. Copy editing could be done over the Wiki.
This would take the control of information away from for-profit companies, give maximum transparency, increase the stature of Wikimedia, allow for verified content and allow Wikipedia to keep its user generated, no original research model and allow for WMF expansion into area that it didn't have the ability to be part of before - like research!
Heck, it could then allow the WMF to serious consider funding pure research, or make it easier to run a reputable online university.
The case for disrupting the current business models of Elsevier is compelling. In 2015, Elsevier reported a profit margin of approximately 37% on revenues of £2.070 billion. [0] I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the economic benefit of allowing publication of free journals to countries such as Afghanistan. My calculation may be way off, but as an example according to Elsevier they charge an individual researcher "$31.50 per article or chapter for most Elsevier content [and] select titles are priced between $19.95 and $41.95 (subject to change).” [1]
My calculation, on the assumption that the median wage in Afghanistan is 50,000 AHD per year and the exchange rate for USD to AHD of 68.3 AHD to 1 USD shows that for one article it is about 2,150 AHD, or half the monthly wage of an Afghani with a median income!
We could step into this space. And we could do our disruption legally, and make things like Sci-Hub less necessary for those in countries who cannot afford the extraordinary prices of journal publishers!
So what do people think?
Chris Sherlock
- "2015 RELX Group Annual Report" (PDF at
http://www.relx.com/investorcentre/reports%202007/Documents/2015/relxgroup_a... < http://www.relx.com/investorcentre/reports%202007/Documents/2015/relxgroup_a...). RELX Group Company Reports. RELX Group. March 2016.
https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/sciencedirect/content/pay-per-view%3E _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
I would support investigating the possibility Cheers, Peter
-----Original Message----- From: Wikimedia-l [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Chris Sherlock Sent: Thursday, 05 May 2016 8:17 PM To: Wikimedia Mailing List Subject: [Wikimedia-l] Disrupting journal publishing
Hello all,
The following post on HN states the following:
About fifteen years ago I was working on a venture to make an open-content journal publishing system. It didn't pan out for various reasons, but the general argument we were making this. Here are various services, and who (or what) handles them:
- Peer review and top-level decision-making. This is handled entirely by the editorial board.
- Typesetting. We have a free system for this: it's called LaTeX.
- Copy-editing and typeset-checking. This is handled by the publisher.
- Publishing and archiving. This is handled by the publisher.
- Famous Name. This is controlled by the publisher and is pure rent-seeking.
It used to be that the publisher handled much more than this. But with a decent online publishing, workflow, and archiving system, and with a near-zero cost in publishing and archiving online nowadays, essentially the only useful service the publisher provides is copy-editing. That is very minor.
If a free online business model can figure out how to fund copy-editing and automatic standards enforcement (for example, people make awful bibtex entries, including Springer's auto-generation system), and a university institution willing to host the journal's archives, the entire utility of a publisher disappears
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11637251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11637251
In all seriousness, what would stop the WMF from attempting to setup journals?
With the WMF’s reputation, I can't see what would stop them from recruiting reputable people who can be reviewers on the panel. Copy editing could be done over the Wiki.
This would take the control of information away from for-profit companies, give maximum transparency, increase the stature of Wikimedia, allow for verified content and allow Wikipedia to keep its user generated, no original research model and allow for WMF expansion into area that it didn't have the ability to be part of before - like research!
Heck, it could then allow the WMF to serious consider funding pure research, or make it easier to run a reputable online university.
The case for disrupting the current business models of Elsevier is compelling. In 2015, Elsevier reported a profit margin of approximately 37% on revenues of £2.070 billion. [0] I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the economic benefit of allowing publication of free journals to countries such as Afghanistan. My calculation may be way off, but as an example according to Elsevier they charge an individual researcher "$31.50 per article or chapter for most Elsevier content [and] select titles are priced between $19.95 and $41.95 (subject to change).” [1]
My calculation, on the assumption that the median wage in Afghanistan is 50,000 AHD per year and the exchange rate for USD to AHD of 68.3 AHD to 1 USD shows that for one article it is about 2,150 AHD, or half the monthly wage of an Afghani with a median income!
We could step into this space. And we could do our disruption legally, and make things like Sci-Hub less necessary for those in countries who cannot afford the extraordinary prices of journal publishers!
So what do people think?
Chris Sherlock
0. "2015 RELX Group Annual Report" (PDF at http://www.relx.com/investorcentre/reports%202007/Documents/2015/relxgroup_a... http://www.relx.com/investorcentre/reports%202007/Documents/2015/relxgroup_ar_2015.pdf). RELX Group Company Reports. RELX Group. March 2016.
1. https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/sciencedirect/content/pay-per-view https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/sciencedirect/content/pay-per-view _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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On 5 May 2016 at 19:17, Chris Sherlock chris.sherlock79@gmail.com wrote:
If a free online business model can figure out how to fund copy-editing and automatic standards enforcement (for example, people make awful bibtex entries, including Springer's auto-generation system), and a university institution willing to host the journal's archives, the entire utility of a publisher disappears
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11637251 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11637251
In all seriousness, what would stop the WMF from attempting to setup journals?
The Directory of Open Access Journals currently lists 11,649 journals[1]. While some of those are junk[2] the world is currently in no way short of open access journals.
The only way a wikimedia backed open access journal would make sense is if either we aimed for a really high quality journal (probably by throwing money at the problem) or a journal that targets areas that wikipedians have identified as being hard to find citations (and this month's edition of citation needed features a number of papers on the initial sales price of games consoles and vessels used in local ferry services)
[1]https://doaj.org/ [2]https://doaj.org/article/ebed893bfc3748d58695b2851c8270e9
Yes there are more than 10,000 open access journals. Ours are different in that we do not charge the authors fees for publication. I am not sure of another OA journal like this.
James
On Sun, May 8, 2016 at 2:46 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 5 May 2016 at 19:17, Chris Sherlock chris.sherlock79@gmail.com wrote:
If a free online business model can figure out how to fund copy-editing
and automatic standards enforcement (for example, people make awful bibtex entries, including Springer's auto-generation system), and a university institution willing to host the journal's archives, the entire utility of a publisher disappears
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11637251%3E
In all seriousness, what would stop the WMF from attempting to setup
journals?
The Directory of Open Access Journals currently lists 11,649 journals[1]. While some of those are junk[2] the world is currently in no way short of open access journals.
The only way a wikimedia backed open access journal would make sense is if either we aimed for a really high quality journal (probably by throwing money at the problem) or a journal that targets areas that wikipedians have identified as being hard to find citations (and this month's edition of citation needed features a number of papers on the initial sales price of games consoles and vessels used in local ferry services)
[1]https://doaj.org/ [2]https://doaj.org/article/ebed893bfc3748d58695b2851c8270e9
-- geni
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On 8 May 2016 at 21:51, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
Yes there are more than 10,000 open access journals. Ours are different in that we do not charge the authors fees for publication. I am not sure of another OA journal like this.
The majority of OA journals do not charge publication fees to authors. (They only represent a minority of articles published - they tend to include the smaller ones).
I would agree that there is no shortage of journals in the world.
@ Andrew per "The majority of OA journals do not charge publication fees" Which ones are you thinking of?
The entire PLOS family charges, so does JMIR. Not sure if I have come across one that has no attached fees. Some will waive fees in specific circumstances but that is very different than no fees generally.
Best James
On Sun, May 8, 2016 at 3:37 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
On 8 May 2016 at 21:51, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
Yes there are more than 10,000 open access journals. Ours are different
in
that we do not charge the authors fees for publication. I am not sure of another OA journal like this.
The majority of OA journals do not charge publication fees to authors. (They only represent a minority of articles published - they tend to include the smaller ones).
I would agree that there is no shortage of journals in the world.
--
- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
On 8 May 2016 at 22:56, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
@ Andrew per "The majority of OA journals do not charge publication fees" Which ones are you thinking of?
DOAJ lists 10294 without article processing charges and 1355 with. Taking the far more limited DOAJ seal stuff (BTW if we really want something to throw money at funding DOAJ to employ someone to exclude more junk from their database would be useful). We get 173 with and 199 without.
Okay so the link we are looking at is this one
https://doaj.org/search?source=%7B%22query%22%3A%7B%22filtered%22%3A%7B%22fi...
It lists 10,294 with no "article processing charges". So I clicked on the first one "The Journal of Problem Solving" publication charge $500 http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/jps/policies.html
Unable to locate "Conference Papers in Medicine" unclear if it is still being published
JCDA is listed but does not appear to actually be open access per here http://www.jcda.ca/about
The Annals of Intensive Care while listed as no fee actually has an "article-processing charge of £1255/$1965/€1600 for each article accepted for publication" http://annalsofintensivecare.springeropen.com/submission-guidelines/fees-and...
Basically the DOAJ search function is not returning accurate information. James
On Sun, May 8, 2016 at 4:06 PM, geni geniice@gmail.com wrote:
On 8 May 2016 at 22:56, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
@ Andrew per "The majority of OA journals do not charge publication fees" Which ones are you thinking of?
DOAJ lists 10294 without article processing charges and 1355 with. Taking the far more limited DOAJ seal stuff (BTW if we really want something to throw money at funding DOAJ to employ someone to exclude more junk from their database would be useful). We get 173 with and 199 without.
-- geni
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On 8 May 2016 at 23:28, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
Basically the DOAJ search function is not returning accurate information. James
Well the good news is that they've just deleted 3.3K journals to try and improve on that:
https://doajournals.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/doaj-to-remove-approximately-33...
Now if we can just find a way to get stuff accurately listed by language it will be a lot more usable.
Hi James,
"Majority" is a little contested (it depends whether you count all the hybrid titles, and that's a different digression), but the fact that a lot of journals do not charge APCs is fairly well understood. Discounting the complicated issue of hybrids, Walt Crawford found last year that 74% of DOAJ listed journals were free, but they published only 43% of the papers overall. http://citesandinsights.info/civ15i9.pdf
Basically, the OA journals make a classic long-tail. The megajournals at one end (PLOS, Scientific Reports, etc) all charge. They publish a *lot*. Many of the middling journals charge. Then the majority of journals are the ones that publish a handful of papers a year, and these are the ones which are most likely to have no publication charges. They are more common in humanities/social science fields and often tend to be lower-profile, niche, or regional.
So, the majority of journals do not levy a charge; the majority of journals only publish a minority of papers; the majority of papers involve a charge; many individuals will never notice a non-charging journal.
Andrew.
On 8 May 2016 at 22:56, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
@ Andrew per "The majority of OA journals do not charge publication fees" Which ones are you thinking of?
The entire PLOS family charges, so does JMIR. Not sure if I have come across one that has no attached fees. Some will waive fees in specific circumstances but that is very different than no fees generally.
Best James
On Sun, May 8, 2016 at 3:37 PM, Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk wrote:
On 8 May 2016 at 21:51, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
Yes there are more than 10,000 open access journals. Ours are different
in
that we do not charge the authors fees for publication. I am not sure of another OA journal like this.
The majority of OA journals do not charge publication fees to authors. (They only represent a minority of articles published - they tend to include the smaller ones).
I would agree that there is no shortage of journals in the world.
--
- Andrew Gray andrew.gray@dunelm.org.uk
Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
-- James Heilman MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian
The Wikipedia Open Textbook of Medicine www.opentextbookofmedicine.com _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
On 8 May 2016 at 21:51, James Heilman jmh649@gmail.com wrote:
Yes there are more than 10,000 open access journals. Ours are different in that we do not charge the authors fees for publication. I am not sure of another OA journal like this.
DOAJ lists 10,294 (including one I've actually cited the Journal of Lithic Studies)
geni
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