Academic publishing once more brews up a storm

BLOT: (05 Feb 2012 - 02:54:54 PM)

Academic publishing once more brews up a storm

A blog post showed up a week or two ago on Tim Gowers' "Gowers's Weblog—Elsevier - my part in its downfall—a call to boycott being published in Elsevier's many, many peer-reviewed journals. Where does it end? I don't know. I'd wager that no one knows.

Academic/Scholarly publishing has been building up to a point of boiling over for a while. Not only are there more journals than any institution can hope to subscribe, but many of them are quite expensive—expensive in a way that seems like a practical joke or misprint the first time you sit down and look at the prices—with the consideration that the research, the writing, the reviewing, and the editing of the journals is often voluntary and therefore unpaid [outside of prestige, etc]. On practical terms, we are looking at per-print-issue cost [with about 10 articles] often running in the hundreds of dollars and the per-article purchase if you are buying outside of a school subscription) being easily $35-$65. Now that bundling is a bigger deal this means some publishers require or at least prefer you to not buy just one $1500 subscription with 4-6 issues per year but a bucket deal in the five digits range including a dozen other ones. As library budgets stay flat year after year due to a number of economic crunches, the rapidly increasing subscription prices are creating immense pressure.

And all this is aimed at academics where publish-or-perish often means going after those very journals, all mired together with hints of impact factors and citation webs and bibliometrics.

Besides these issues, Gowers also points out out a few others, including a few that specifically paint Elsevier in a troublesome light AND he talks about this little diddy: The Research Works Act.

And then clarifies with this:

To explain. Some research, not sure of what percentage, is done with public money: federal grants, etc. Some of those federal grants, like those that originate in part from the NIH—National Institute for Health—include conditions that you have to allow at least a degree of your publication to be open-access. In a lot of ways, this is a good thing [open-access means research, which is already bought and paid for and is not private or they wouldn't be publishing it to begin with] will be more out-there, more cited, and so forth, and more available for other researchers to make use of. However, it also means that you might, as a publisher, have trouble selling a $200 an issue journal if all the good articles are published online. This law seems to be aimed to remove any government program from requiring open-access requirements.

This could result in open-access dependent sources like PubMed will being strangled off, though technically the publishers can still allow open-access, but it requires the authors, possibly their employers, and the publisher to all play along. More or less a miring technique, and since citations and dissemination is nine-tenths the value of prestige when it comes to publishing such things, it is doubtful that this is meant to help the researcher or author at all, since citations far outweigh monetary consideration for their half in the publishing, and therefore this is more to help promote entities that publish the peer-reviews solely. Maybe I am wrong. If so, feel free to drop me an email and let me know.

Of course, we now live in a world where web-publishing is not too hard, with certain platforms practically for free and others being only slightly more expensive with a bit of support. If the research, writing, editing, and reviewing are things already donated, it seems like there is a solution that would allow those things to be channeled into free-to-publish, free-to-read resources that still maintains a higher-than-blog reliability ratio. A bit of care would have to crop up, but since an explosion of journals has long been underway, I am not sure it would much more bloated than what we already have, the increased open-access-cum-scrutiny might just help to keep some of the research a bit more honest. And then, those who want, would still have the academic journals of old to turn towards.

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: February 2012