I have had cynical thoughts often about the academic publishing world. One has a system in which I do the work, write up the work, fellow workers do the vetting, and all control/profit of my work goes to a for-profit company.
At one point, when electronic pdf reprints were just appearing on the scene, an academic publisher wanted to charge me, the author, a lot of $$ for a pdf of an article I had written. In addition, the contract to obtain this pdf, which was written by the type of lawyers who write user agreements for commercial software, forbade me from making the pdf available to someone, like you, who could pay for the article.
There is a wide-range of publishing houses and a number of low-cost publications from small academic groups. The problem is that those groups are turning over their publications to the big publishers because of time and effort issues.
Ken --------------------------------------------------------------- Kenneth M. Steele, Ph.D. [email protected] Professor Department of Psychology http://www.psych.appstate.edu Appalachian State University Boone, NC 28608 USA --------------------------------------------------------------- On 8/31/2011 6:40 AM, Allen Esterson wrote:
On the high cost of academic articles for non-subscribers: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+theguardian/commentisfree/rss+%28Comment+is+free%29 or: http://tinyurl.com/3jb7sc3 As someone who has (reluctantly) coughed up on occasion, I'd be interested to hear views of TIPSters on this issue. Is there economic justification for the high cost of obtaining articles from academic journals? Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Department Southwark College, London [email protected] http://www.esterson.org
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