Timeline for Why do tenured professors still publish in pay-walled venues?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
13 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Aug 22, 2015 at 23:53 | comment | added | CGCampbell | All: Please remember, as the Tour says: This site is all about getting answers. It's not a discussion forum. There's no chit-chat. and Use comments to ask for more information or clarify a question or answer. | |
| Aug 22, 2015 at 22:19 | comment | added | andybuckley | @BillBarth Profit margin of Elsevier academic publishing in 2013 was 39%: poeticeconomics.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/… I don't doubt that producing the huge dead-trees publications requires interference with submissions. The point is that there is still a profit margin that clearly indicates an inefficient market... and that those printed volumes are not the way that anyone I know actually reads articles anymore. For sure the thing keeping them in business is the connection between (self-sustaining) journal prestige and research funding. | |
| Aug 21, 2015 at 21:46 | comment | added | Bill Barth | @andybuckley, I see that as pretty minimally exploitative if the editors maintain good quality. I'm sure you have it or I could find it, but I'd love to see the cite for 40% profit margins. Also, you may think that the majority of the editing/typesetting/etc have been done by authors, but I've certainly seen the staff of a journal need to get heavily involved. I think that there are a lot of these anecdotal stories that the main journals suck, but something is holding them down as the main journals. | |
| Aug 21, 2015 at 20:35 | comment | added | Mason Wheeler | Yeah, like I said. Inherently exploitative and ugly. | |
| Aug 21, 2015 at 14:41 | comment | added | andybuckley | I haven't seen internal accounts. But I don't think it's necessary: in my field the reviewing and main typesetting (in the journal's format) are both conducted by academics for free. I always need to point out and fix errors introduced by a journal (or its contractor) which insists on needlessly modifying what's submitted. All costs are internal, but add zero value besides that from the (free) reviewers. And yet they still have a ~40% profit margin. Companies this inefficient & uncompetitive don't survive in a real market, and the public deserve unrestricted access to research they paid for. | |
| Aug 20, 2015 at 21:10 | comment | added | Bill Barth | @andybuckley, you've seen their cost accounting, or you're estimating? | |
| Aug 20, 2015 at 21:06 | comment | added | andybuckley | @reirab But what are those costs? They are desperately inefficient. The part of the process that should be most expensive -- reviewers -- is typically given for free. Too much is spent on formatting, printing & posting the big paper editions that no-one reads anymore... and on profit. In some subjects, where self-typeset publishing and arXiv uploading are the primary mode of research dissemination, "real" journals only hang on because of funding agency metrics, and those are slowly changing. That ecosystem also inverts the normal power structure, hence block "auto-OA" agreements like SCOAP3. | |
| Aug 19, 2015 at 20:57 | comment | added | reirab | @MasonWheeler Their business models vary quite a bit. Some of their business models are quite obnoxious, while others seem fine. One way or another, someone has to pay the bills of the publisher. | |
| Aug 19, 2015 at 20:53 | comment | added | Mason Wheeler | @BillBarth: Please pardon my bluntness, but if you don't think of non-open journals as inherently exploitative, you don't know enough about their business model. The more you learn about how they operate, the uglier it looks. | |
| Aug 19, 2015 at 20:48 | comment | added | Bill Barth | @MasonWheeler, someone cares where professors publish. Prestige is a catchall word for the problem that works need to be seen and where better to be seen that prestigious journals. Profs are judged post-tenure for raises and other reasons, so prestige is a good proxy. I can't think of an exploitative journal that's prestigious, but I don't think of non-open as exploitative necessarily. I'm all for openness, but something has to pay the bills, and we need archival publishing | |
| Aug 19, 2015 at 20:34 | comment | added | Mason Wheeler | So then the problem is prestige? If exploitative journals are viewed as more prestigious than non-exploitative journals, what can be done to fix this perception? | |
| Aug 18, 2015 at 18:52 | comment | added | Corvus | Agreed -- I try hard to publish in open access journals when possible and non-profit ones otherwise, but I rarely write a paper without a co-author at the career stage where he or she is seeking a job or pursuing tenure. | |
| Aug 18, 2015 at 17:13 | history | answered | Bill Barth | CC BY-SA 3.0 |