Cornell Will Reveal Secret Academic Journal Pricing
techdirt.com
techdirt.com
When you author a book, you earn some money. Not a lot, perhaps, but some. When you author a journal paper, not only do you not earn any money, but you pay the publisher several thousands USD in fees! For example, Nature: http://www.nature.com/ajg/open_access_faqs.html. Even worse, you must sign a copyright form that transfers ownership to the publisher.
I understand that there is a staff behind the scenes that puts these publications together -- editors, admin. staff, etc. -- and they need to be paid. But some journals have acquired such prestige over the years that they can name their price, and the manuscript submissions will keep coming. So perhaps these prices are not so surprising.
In the debate over which makes the most impact -- journal vs. conference paper -- most academics will say the same thing: journal, journal, journal. That message has been beaten into our heads. But in my opinion, we are entering a new period of transition similar to what newspapers have been facing. I think it is possible that conferences and journals with new subscription models will slowly usurp a share of manuscript submissions away from journals with traditional models. For example, in ACM and certain IEEE disciplines, conference papers already reign as the preferred publication format among researchers.
Of course, in other areas such as law and medicine, there is probably no hope. Things will remain the way they are.
I certainly hope so. I cannot for the life of me understand the economics of academic journals. They do a bit of editing and send out the papers for peer review. And that's about it, right? Where's all the money going?
"Curators" are important, certainly. I want respected people to select articles worthy of publication. I don't want them to then lock those articles up where they're only accessible to academics and those willing to pay obscene fees for individual access.
"In revenue, Elsevier accounts for 28% of the Reed Elsevier group (₤1.5b of 5.4 billions in 2006). In operating profits, it represents a bigger fraction of 44% (₤395 of 880 millions).[3] Adjusted operating profits have risen by 10% between 2005 and 2006."
This is not the only industry where education oriented companies account for a disproportionate percentage of the parent company's profits (hint: The Washington Post's Kaplan.)
This is not always the case. In Applied Maths and in many fields of Engineering, there are no publishing fees.
For example, Nature: http://www.nature.com/ajg/open_access_faqs.html
Open Access is an option for most of the journal I know of, whereby the author pays the publisher up front to have content accessed by anyone free of charge. If an author does not want Open Access, he/she won't have to pay, but the article is no longer free. [Edit: put quotes in the right place]
Even worse, you must sign a copyright form that transfers ownership to the publisher.
True, and that is quite ridiculous, but many publishers are OK with you keeping a copy of the article (e.g. a final draft) on your webpage or on some pre-print or re-print websites.
In the debate over which makes the most impact -- journal vs. conference paper -- most academics will say the same thing: journal, journal, journal.
In Computer Science, this is not true. Publishing on conferences such as STOCS or FOCS is sometimes much more desirable than on any CS journal.
I understand that there is a staff behind the scenes that puts these publications together -- editors, admin. staff, etc. -- and they need to be paid. But some journals have acquired such prestige over the years that they can name their price, and the manuscript submissions will keep coming. So perhaps these prices are not so surprising.
I agree. I dream of a totally open, web-based publishing system where papers are submitted and reviewed by volunteers, and accepted (i.e. put officially on a publication list) only when above a certain threshold. Perhaps the reviewers could also receive comments by both the authors and the public. If both the referees and the authors have a chance of receiving feedback, it could benefit the paper.
Admins and staff would be replaced by the web-based system, while editors (when suggested that the paper has poor wording or language) could be outsourced to the author. [edit: typo]
Actually, at least the editors, are almost always unpaid academics as well, almost all of the work for academic journals is "free" to the publisher
Perhaps in law that will remain the case, but medicine is already ahead of other fields in the area of open access because publications that are the result of NIH-funded research are required by law to be openly accessible one year after initial publication. The journals have had no choice but to comply.
The editors decided they didn't feel like playing along:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topology_(journal)
http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/jtopol/editorial_...
Students at MIT, Brown, and other schools labelled the journals in their libraries with pricetags showing the cost the university was paying for each journal. Nuclear Physics A&B <//elsevier.com/locate/nuclphysa> cost $25,888 in 2005.
Similarly, Students for Free Culture have been working on both the Open University Project and the Open Access Project, pressing universities to reform their use of journals. See http://freeculture.org/
Lastly, public universities have been known to disclose the cost of journals they subscribe to -regardless of NDA status- at the issuing of FOIA or CPRA type requests. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Public_Records_Act
It's like California getting worked up about the number of free donuts they give state employees. I mean, OK, I get it: high symbolism, makes for a good headline. But come on, one look at salaries, pensions, or health care shows where the actual problems are.
Similarly, if one wanted to look at the influence of money on the scientific community, it is highly nonobvious to me that academic journals are where the money is uniquely concentrating.
Plus, it's fine to think that Cornell can afford it; but can a second-rank public university? It probably doesn't, it has neither the money nor the bargaining power. Which means that its academics have limited access to advances in their fields. How can that be fine?
Cornell runs arXiv. You can't fight a group as entrenched and pernicious as academic journal publishers on a single front.
It would be a fairly slow process, so surely only a small proportion of papers could be put through it. But if the work were focussed on the most important/high-impact papers which are under restrictive copyrights, might it not have a meaningful effect?
In practice, this sort of already exists. And the process can take years. For example, some IEEE journals take six months per review round! (I know; I've just been through one!) Why does it take so long? I have no idea; reviewers just wait until the last minute, anyway.
Another problem is the definition of an "important" paper. That, itself, sparks debate.
One more problem is corruption. When reviews are not blind, bias can sneak into the review process. It happens. And it can distort all notions of what "important" papers are.
As to which papers are important, for an effort like this to accomplish its objectives - bring some direct relief to the public, and bring some hurt to journal publishers - it's necessary to have a generally good sense of which papers are important or highly in demand, but not a perfect one. In particular, the objective in this case isn't to second-guess which papers ought to get published by journals or become popular with readers, but to give readers some papers they most want and take control of those papers from the journals.
Copyright law protects interests from the effects of copying. Derivative works are not the original expression but nonetheless are restricted by copyright laws and treaties.
In your example A is committing copyright infringement. They're creating a derivative work by copying the original (albeit not slavishly copying). Person B is arguably committing contributory infringement (commercially enabling A) and is certainly copying a work created tortuously; consider it like handling stolen goods.
It's a nice idea but I don't think that copyright law is naive enough to allow this sort of workaround in practice. If it were then foreign language copies wouldn't be infringing and I'm pretty sure that they are.
IANACL
(IANALAA)
I like it because it will add some much needed competition into the journal pricing. Most likely, Nature is not going to change their pricing. If you have an article worthy of being published there, most people are going to pay a few grand and be happy to do so just to have their paper published. Assuming publishing prices do become transparent, I don't think it will drastically change the pricing system, but it will allow people to evaluate the value of such a publication.
The best analog I can think of are colleges themselves (and not just because of the academic connection). The value of both colleges and journals are significantly affected by their reputation. The price of the colleges have not leveled out, nor have they gone to zero (closer the opposite of both), but the prices do reflect the perceived "value" of that education. Hopefully the same will happen for journals.
Who needs a paper journal anymore?