Cracks Are Widening in the Fortress of Academic Publishing
“We have to publish in these journals, since our reputation is linked to prestigious publications. The problem is that… we are working for the publishers as reviewers (for free), we run the scientific parts of journals (often for free), we provide the content (for free) and they charge us enormous amounts for distributing the stuff.”
Interesting idea, but at least some peer review would seem to be necessary to ensure minimum standards are met.
Science is Science, but Academic publishing is Big Business.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist
Academic publishers make Murdoch look like a socialist
Peer Review of global warming papers has already been corrupted. Climate-gate e-mails exposed that authors and editors were trading favors back and forth to get the pro global warming papers approved and skeptical papers buried.
Speaking of scams, another one is textbooks.
Textbook prices are now so outrageous that it is only a matter of time before something has to change.
Take a typical 1st year engineering calculus textbook. The material has hardly changed at all in decades, yet the book will now cost a first year student $200.00 (or more). It is positively absurd.
Textbook companies behave similarly to music labels in their approach to intellectual property. They want to overcharge so that the bureaucracies within their respective organizations can continue to get fatter and make more money year after year.
It’s a great gig if you can get it. Get yourself a job as a government researcher. Get a grant from the government to research something. Write a paper and get it published. Anyone not in the government or part of a university has to pay $29.95 to read your research. The biggest scam was Harper muzzling scientists. Their work isn’t even publicly available because the periodicals they publish in charge the readers for access to the publicly funded research. Never heard the unions complaining about that one.
The last time I checked, Elsevier published over 1700 journals and had a 40% profit margin. Yes, 40%.
Engineers in Canada make matters worse by maintaining that only engineers can teach engineers. Hence their calculus texts have to be written by engineers etc. It is an attitude which permeates engineering education. If you pick up a text on engineering mechanics it may contain no mention of Newton (perhaps beyond his laws of motion), and certainly none of Lagrange, Laplace, or Hamilton. An engineering work on electromagnetism may not mention Maxwell or Faraday.
And yet in a given year the winners of the IEEE prizes may contain fewer engineers than physicists, computer scientists, and mathematicians.
B.C. – I have a number of hardbound copies of various Engineering texts in Calculus, Physics, the CRC Tables, Thermogoddamicks, etc, etc. Not much has changed in those fields since Newton. I realize that my books about 1980 microprocessor interface techniques may not be as relevant in the future.
I am not really inclined to dispose of them since many years ago (after reading “Lucifer’s Hammer” (by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, dealing with a seriously negative global event due to a comet)) I read that one of the characters was a diabetic (which required a sheep a month sacrifice for his survival) had as his bargaining tool some ziplocked bags of “How Things Work”. My Master’s research involved interprovincial power transfers to stabilize the local grid.
I am stockpiling survival foods and energy sources and increasing my reputation in the neighbourhood as a crazy old geek with no respect for criminals. I am also building a mobile linear accelerator to pin my opponents to the wall with framing nails,powered by LiPo batteries from laptops.
Anybody want to buy schematics?
I’ve long thought textbooks should be in looseleaf format. So, when the author makes changes on ten pages, you just buy those ten pages. Of course, that would cut off a major source of money for the author; only getting paid for his actual work in changes, rather than being able to create – with minimal effort – instant obsolescence. And they say manufacturers are bad for this.
It’s a great idea. Even better if each paper is published as a blog post, with the entire world as peers. Citation would be by hyperlink and trackback. It’s kind of the original reason for the internet.