To Alicia:Here are what I consider the positive contributions by commercial publishers. For any of the positive qualities I mention, it is easy find counterexamples. What matters is that, on the average, the major publishers have done a good job on the following:
- Select good editorial boards of leading scholars. - Develop effective systems for organizing peer review. - Produce articles/journals that look professional commensurate with the importance of the scholarship. - Produce an archivable historical record of scholarship. Publishers only receive a marginally passing grade for producing searchable databases of the scholarly record and journals. In the age of iTunes, Netflix, etc., it is inexcusable that to search through scholarship one must buy separate products like the Web of Knowledge in addition to the journal subscriptions. Publishers need to work together to produce alternative comprehensive systems. Most commercial publishers and some society publishers (like ACS) receive failing grades on cost containment. Because of their importance to academia, scholarly publishers have been blessed with the opportunity to reinvent themselves for the future without the devastating disruption other kinds of publishers faced (newspapers, magazines, etc.). However, instead of taking advantage of this opportunity, scholarly publishers are squandering it for temporary financial gain. Every price increase brings severe disruption closer. On the current path, your CEOs are betting the existence of the company every year. About the only company who understands the current information market is Amazon, and everything they do is geared towards driving down costs of the infrastructure. Your competition will not come from Amazon directly, but from every single academic who will be able to produce a high-quality electronic journal from his/her office. There may be only one success for every hundred failed journals in this system, but suppose it is so easy 100,000 try... Â Your brand/prestige/etc. will carry you only so far. (Amazon is focusing on e-books production now, but it is only a matter of time when they come out with a journal system.) To Jean-Claude: Blaming commercial enterprises for making too much money is like blaming scholars for having too many good ideas. Making money is their purpose. They will stop raising prices if doing so is in their self-interest. The real question is why the scholarly information market is so screwed up that publishers are in a position to keep raising prices. I am blaming site licenses(http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com/2011/07/what-if-libraries-were-problem.html and http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com/2011/09/publishers-dilemma.html), but I am open to alternative explanations. Â --Eric. http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com Google Voice: (626) 898-5415Telephone: Â Â Â (626) 376-5415 Skype chat, voice, or web-video: efvandevelde E-mail: [email protected] On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 9:56 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <[email protected]> wrote: Jean-Claude, This is a great analysis and says almost exactly some of what I was planning to say. We cannot de facto trust the publishers to work in our interests. There was a time when this was posssible - but no longer. -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069 _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal [ Part 2: "Attached Text" ] _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
