Reclaiming Academic Publishing
October 21, 2015
Researchers and writers are at the mercy of academic publishers who control the venues to print their work, select the content of their work, and often control the funds behind their research. Even worse is that academic research is locked behind database walls that require a subscription well beyond the price range of a researcher not associated with a university or research institute. One researcher was fed up enough with academic publishers that he decided to return publishing and distributing work back to the common people, says Nature in “Leading Mathematician Launches arXiv ‘Overlay’ Journal.”
The new mathematics journal Discrete Analysis peer reviews and publishes papers free of charge on the preprint server arXiv. Timothy Gowers started the journal to avoid the commercial pressures that often distort scientific literature.
“ ‘Part of the motivation for starting the journal is, of course, to challenge existing models of academic publishing and to contribute in a small way to creating an alternative and much cheaper system,’ he explained in a 10 September blog post announcing the journal. ‘If you trust authors to do their own typesetting and copy-editing to a satisfactory standard, with the help of suggestions from referees, then the cost of running a mathematics journal can be at least two orders of magnitude lower than the cost incurred by traditional publishers.’ ”
Some funds are required to keep Discrete Analysis running, costs are ten dollars per submitted papers to pay for software that manages peer review and journal Web site and arXiv requires an additional ten dollars a month to keep running.
Gowers hopes to extend the journal model to other scientific fields and he believes it will work, especially for fields that only require text. The biggest problem is persuading other academics to adopt the model, but things move slowly in academia so it will probably be years before it becomes widespread.
Whitney Grace, October 21, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Fighting the Academic Publishers Gets You Fired
September 11, 2015
Academic publishers, such as Springer and Elsevier, have a monopoly on academic publishing and they do not want to lose their grasp. In the Slashdot science forum, a report from The Guardian was posted “Paywalled Science Journals Under Fire Again” describing how the academic publishers won a battle in Australia.
The Medical Journal of Australia (MJA) fired their editor Professor Stephen Leeder, when he expressed his displeasure over the journal outsourcing its functions to Elsevier. Leeder might have lost his job, but he will speak at a symposium at the State Library of NSW about ways academic communities can fight against the commoditization of knowledge.
What is concerning is that academic publishers are more interested in turning a profit than expanding humanity’s knowledge base:
“Alex Holcombe, an associate professor of psychology who will also be presenting at the symposium, said the business model of some of the major academic publishers was more profitable than owning a gold mine. Some of the 1,600 titles published by Elsevier charged institutions more than $19,000 for an annual subscription to just one journal. The Springer group, which publishes more than 2,000 titles, charges more than $21,000 for access to some of its titles. ‘The mining giant Rio Tinto has a profit margin of about 23%,’ Holcombe said. ‘Elsevier consistently comes in at around 37%. Open access publishing is catching on, but it requires researchers to pay up to $3000 to get a single open access article published.’”
Where does the pursuit of knowledge actually take place if researchers are at the mercy of academic publishers? One might say that researchers could publish their work for free on the Web, but remember that anyone can do that. Being published under a reputable banner adds to study’s authenticity and also helps it get used to support other research. The problem lies in the fact that big academic publishers limit who accesses their content to subscription holders and often those subscriptions are too expensive for the average researcher to afford on their own. Researchers want to have access to more academic content, but it is being locked down.
Whitney Grace, September 11, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Juvenile Journal Behavior
May 5, 2015
Ah, more publisher excitement. Neuroskeptic, a blogger at Discover, weighs in on a spat between scientific journals in, “Academic Journals in Glass Houses….” The write-up begins by printing a charge lobbed at Frontiers in Psychology by the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (JNMD), in which the latter accuses the former of essentially bribing peer reviewers. It goes on to explain the back story, and why the blogger feels the claim against Frontiers is baseless. See the article for those details, if you’re curious.
Here’s the part that struck me: Neuroskeptic supplies the example hinted at in his or her headline:
“For the JNMD to question the standards of Frontiers peer review process is a bit of a ‘in glass houses / throwing stones’ moment. Neuroskeptic readers may remember that it was JNMD who one year ago published a paper about a mysterious device called the ‘quantum resonance spectrometer’ (QRS). This paper claimed that QRS can detect a ‘special biological wave… released by the brain’ and thus accurately diagnose schizophrenia and other mental disorders – via a sensor held in the patient’s hand. The article provided virtually no details of what the ‘QRS’ device is, or how it works, or what the ‘special wave’ it is supposed to measure is. Since then, I’ve done some more research and as far as I can establish, ‘QRS’ is an entirely bogus technology. If JNMD are going to level accusations at another journal, they ought to make sure that their own house is in order first.”
This is more support for the conclusion that many of today’s “academic” journals cannot be trusted. Perhaps the profit-driven situation will be overhauled someday, but in the meantime, let the reader beware.
Cynthia Murrell, May 5, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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