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

[Andrea Zanni]

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 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 23 September 2012 22:24, Tim Starling <tstarling at 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-catastrophe/
> > >
> >
> http://blogs.library.duke.edu/scholcomm/files/2012/09/Berstein-report-on-Elsevier.pdf
> > >
> > > 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
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