
Or Perish - The Hacker Factor Blog - Garbage
http://www.hackerfactor.com/blog/index.php?/archives/474-Or-Perish.html
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unimpressive
> "But what if you want to make money? I mean, it took time and effort to
> write that whitepaper. Well, self-published ebooks are a good option. If the
> paper is really good and useful, I'll pay a few dollars for it. "

I am reminded of a quote from the preface of a book that was eventually CC'd
and distributed as a PDF because it was too niche to publish.

"Our decision to publish on the internet came from a long and tedious course
of attempting to work with both university and commercial academic publishers
who failed to publish it. Bringing this manuscript to publication was an epic
adventure in itself, so we decided to share our experience here, along with
some commentary on academic publishing today and its inevitable demise." -
"Pioneers of Soviet Computing" (<http://www.sigcis.org/?q=node/85>)

While I haven't personally been involved in any academic publishing. It
doesn't exactly inspire confidence that they've had to push so hard against
open-access journals. The "No open-access publishing" clauses a lot of the
major clearing houses tried sneaking into their agreements with researchers is
a sign of weakness, no matter how successful. (And you could argue that it
backfired spectacularly.)

So no, I don't think you're being unreasonable not to expect the things you
don't expect from academic publishing. From an outsiders perspective the
bullets you listed appear to be accurate.

