I've seen professional scholarship go off track. I wrote wiki to give a voice to programmers who were struggling under the bad advice offered by academic computer science and software engineering. That's worked pretty well for us, no thanks to ACM or IEEE.
>From this perspective, everything Richard says seems rather romantic. I encourage everyone to consider all the complexities that come with long-lived institutions. However, for those looking for a quick answer, its hard to go wrong with free. Best regards. -- Ward On May 22, 2012, at 12:13 PM, Richard Jensen wrote: > There seems to be a great deal of misunderstanding among Wikipedians how > academe actually works. Piotr thinks a grad student can produce a scholarly > journal. Look at history. In reality it takes hundreds of scholars working > together (almost all of whom are paid professional salaries by universities.) > Printing and mailing costs are only a fraction of the total expenses for a > scholarly journal, so the advantage of going electronic is small in terms of > production costs. > > I talked just now with the editor of ''The Journal of American History'' --I > used to be on its editorial board. It has dozens of editorial board members > and hundreds of unpaid scholars who evaluate articles and write for it. They > are paid not by the Journal but by their own universities to do this kind of > high prestige "service." (History professors are paid for research, teaching > and service--the average salary in USA for a full professor of history is > $83,000 plus 25% benefits.) The Journal has 14 in-house staff members, who > are paid salaries at rates standard for Indiana University. Most have PhD's > or are PhD candidates--that's eight years of specialized, expensive > post-graduate education. Book reviews are a main role. They read 3000 new > books a year and select the most important 600 for actual review, using a > database of 11,000 available scholars. 300 full-length manuscripts a year are > submitted and the senior editors and outside reviewers narrow that to the > best 10%. The staffers do intensive quality control on the accepted articles > and are backed by a major university library (which is expensive.) They > occupy nice offices with phones & computers etc that are also paid for. The > Journal pays travel expenses for meetings. The output is 4 issues a year > with 1300 pages of high quality scholarship delivered to about 10,000 > historians and libraries. > > Indeed anyone can try to publish a junk history journal single-handed and > give it away free; almost nobody does so. The software is there but the > necessary expertise is very expensive and takes decades to develop. It costs > real money to produce the "reliable secondary source" that Wikipedia wholly > depends upon. The question is who pays for it. > > Richard Jensen > > > > _______________________________________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l _______________________________________________ Wiki-research-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l
