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

[George Herbert]

On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 2:12 PM, Mark <delirium at 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 at 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 at gmail.com