WOW, Julie--I hope I didn't encourage you to stick your finger into the
meat-grinder! But bless you. (If you get the slightest hint of blowback, you
may be building up a storehouse of evidence by posting.)
I (but what do I know?) strongly suspect (fervently hope?) that it's just a
matter of time before enough authors catch on, that most journals are
over-priced, with respect (irony in the language) to authors and customers
alike (especially university libraries) as well as scholars. I don't pretend
to know what the solution is in terms of funding sources (let's explore
this) but I suspect that printing vestigial abstracts and charging tens of
dollars for 24-hour access to single articles is not in accord with
classical pricing theory. This means that the journals don't get any money
at all from poor un-instutionalized slobs like me, including academics in
so-called third-world countries whose universities can't or won't pay the
exorbitant subscription fees charged by many traditional journals that
apparently consider the Internet a tool for harvesting a lot of poor fish
that have no options. On top of that, science is retarded rather than
advanced--except for those who have passed through the portals and can get
articles for free because their institutions have already been ripped off
big time by (some of?) the major journals.
But this is just the tip of the shark fin, lassie! Students, like the sick,
have been ripped off for ages--well, decades anyway. I remember having to
pay ten dollars for a mimeographed and stapled "textbook" authored by the
head of the department at the little college I attended in 1956--that would
be over $80 in 2010 dollars. University administrators are paid obscene
six-figure sums (the actual income generated may be even more), while
students are gouged for more and more in a flat economy. Students are really
ripped off big-time for student loans (tiny bubbles?) and usury rates, and
can't include them in a bankruptcy. THAT'S an even greater scandal!
Put that in the stovepipes and smoke it!
Or maybe I'm all wrong, and the journals and other institutions are as pure
as the driven snow. If so, no change is needed. But one thing is
certain--they're ON TOP and we're on the bottom. Inertia and power are on
their side. We are like pesky gnats to them.
WT
----- Original Message -----
From: "Julie Messier" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, September 03, 2011 7:10 PM
Subject: [ECOLOG-L] Is academic publishing a racket?
Dear Ecologers,
A lab mate sent me a link to a newspaper article that I feel deserves
further discussion. In Brad Boyle's own words, it is 'a provocative and
important article in The Guardian on the racket of academic publishing':
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-
murdoch-socialist.
Also, see the original blog by George Monbiot:
http://www.monbiot.com/2011/08/29/the-lairds-of-learning/ for more
discussion on the topic.
Are we really all being ripped off, or is this just another paranoia? If
academic publishers are indeed parasites, how do we break the vicious
cycle
given that we do build our careers on publishing in high-end journals? Can
open access journals ever become 'high-end'?
Julie Messier
--
PhD Candidate,
Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
University of Arizona
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