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But surely, one might think, that some of the price goes to offset the expensive costs of peer review?

The author neglected to mention that peer reviewers work for free, and that the editorial boards are also made up of scholars who work for next to nothing. (edit: see reply below, this was in the article and I missed it)

It used to be that it fell to the publishers to typeset the articles, but with the advent of TeX they don't have to do that either. (in my field anyway)

Speaking as an academic, these companies do nothing for us. The sooner we agree on an alternative model which doesn't go through them, the better.




"[T]hese companies do nothing for us."

I agree 99%. The one thing they do for us, and the one thing that any alternative system would have to replicate, is provide a signal of quality through their history and prestige. The whole constellation of scientific publications, grant writing, grant reviews, tenure committees, faculty searches, and dissertation committees revolve around publications. But it seems nobody can, or desires, to read all of an individual's publications, synthesize the content of what they've produced, and compare it to the other work in increasingly specialized sub-fields.

Instead, to evaluate the quality of work and the scientists themselves, we rely on the number of articles published multiplied by the journal's impact factor (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor), roughly speaking. This we've used as a proxy for scientific quality. And besides lazy, it's insidious, too. Before even sitting down to read an article, I've already absorbed which journal this article appeared in. If a prestigious journal, how can I help being predisposed to think favorably of it?

It's a seductive shortcut. This is why the academic journals are so entrenched. And it shows what any alternative system must replicate. It is relatively easy to create a website that unites authors, peer reviewers, editors, and a publishing/editing system. What is not straight-forward is to create a system with that last 1%: the external quality signal.


To maintain the psychological impact it could be possible to have different outlets (websites) where to publish based on a ranking by the editorial committee...


Speaking as an academic, these companies do nothing for us

Start the revolution at home. Put PDFs on your university website. Ask your collegues to do likewise, ask the rest of university to do likewise. Start the ball rolling.


That doesn't really fulfill the "quality signal" aspect of journals, though -- the replacement would be some sort of open journal that still had peer review.

There was an Elsevier math journal where the entire editorial staff got fed up, quit, and then simply founded a new journal on the same subject. That's the sort of thing most likely to bring the big journals down, not self publication by individuals. (Well, that or direct government intervention.)


You're probably right that there's a good value add to come from journals. However the internet works well, and that's a pile of individual pages/web sites, so I think it'll all work out.


I do. But I also publish them in expensive journals, because senior people have told me this is good for my career.

Once I get tenure (knock on wood), I intend to be more selective about which journals I publish in.


FTA:

> Murdoch pays his journalists and editors, and his companies generate much of the content they use. But the academic publishers get their articles, their peer reviewing (vetting by other researchers) and even much of their editing for free.




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