Thank you for clarifying the issue, I was not aware of the existence of
the non-profit non-open content journals. Their existence is certainly
not a crime, and people who help out with them are to be commended; I am
certainly not endorsing any attack on them (nor am I seeing any here...).
With regards to US funding of education, speaking from personal
experience, I hear my collegues at the University of Pittsburgh complain
a lot about how they are being affected (negatively) through recent cuts
in government funding. How much that can be generalized, I frankly don't
have time to research right now, but I am pretty sure that not an
insignificant portion of paychecks that Pitt's professors are drawing
comes from the taxes on US citizens. Given that, I do find it a problem
that their work may be locked behind a paywall, be it for-profit or not.
The main argument in criticizing such non-profits, as far as I
understand it, is idealistic: society (scholars, Wikipedians, etc.)
would benefit if all research would be free. Locking it behind a paywall
drains resources that could be invested in other pursuits, and limits
the content only to those who can afford it (a portion of scholars in
rich countries).
Now, here's a more constructive (if very theoretical) proposal to
consider. Let's assume that a non-profit journal like ''The Journal of
American History'' needs to put its content behind a paywall to generate
enough $ to stay afloat, in addition to the funds received from the
university (although I am a bit confused here, Richard mentined that the
staff is paid by the university, so what are the funds for? Office
rental?). Anyway, the funds the journal receives come either from the
university, or (through some intermediaries) from various other
universities (their libraries). It stands to reason that a more
efficient way to distribute the funds would be to direct them straight
to the journal, obtaining savings (no need for intermediaries), and at
the same time allow the journal to operate as an open content one. In
other words, in this model the journals are distributed free, and
sustained by the money that currently is given to the libraries to buy them.
To sum it up, what some people are criticizing, I believe, is the
assumption that the we cannot reform the current model to end up with
one where the journal content is freely available online. This can be
done, just like many other free things were created in cyberspace
(Linux, Wikipedia, many open content journals...).
--
Piotr Konieczny
"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on one's
laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski
On 5/22/2012 8:29 PM, David Golumbia wrote:
i'm sorry but this is a *complete* red herring with regard to the
discussion Richard has raised.
i know of *no* for-profit publishing in humanities journals, and a
very few and marginal ones (SAGE, John Benjamins) in social sciences.
that goes for books, too, which I am half-expecting to come under
attack here next.
what we are talking about here is /non-profit publishing/. that is
what I and presumably Richard see as under attack on this list, for
reasons that are both clear and very disturbing to me. not only not
making "billions": making/no profit at all/. JSTOR, previously
attacked here, is a complete non-profit, and nobody has yet cogently
argued that JSTOR wasted the funds it was paid to archive over 100
years of academic journals. I do not know why it is somehow morally
wrong for them to have been paid a reasonable, non-profit figure to do
good work, or why that work is only morally OK if it is done for free.
your arguments against Elsevier are probably sound, and I support the
boycott of Elsevier you cite below, but the original petition that
started this all did not name Elsevier, and on its face calls for the
US Government to intervene in the business of charging
for/not-for-profit/ academic publications. it could be taken to be
asking the US government to outlaw the charging of subscription fees
for non-profit journals. these things are not even in the same ballpark.
Richard Jensen's carefully considered post named the *costs* involved
with running an academic journal; i did not read any defense there of
the idea that the journal should earn a profit. I am 99% sure that
journal is a non-profit. I am at a loss to understand why the fact
that people are paid a reasonable wage to recompense their non-profit
labor should be a target of attack on this list. Is /any /wage labor
OK? Do all of you somehow magically pay your rent, clothes, and food
costs while earning no money whatsoever? If so, please show me where
that gravy train is, as I would dearly love to get on it.
On a side note, in the US, few if any colleges and universities are
funded much if at all through tax dollars. Many institutions (Harvard,
Yale) are almost entirely private; many public institutions (Michigan,
Chicago, Berkeley, U-Virginia) derive 10% or less of their funding
from taxes. Calling the work we professors do "taxpayer-funded" gives
a very inaccurate picture of where the money comes from. The NIH
policy cited earlier refers to research projects performed almost
entirely with NIH funding--an entirely different kettle of fish from
ordinary research done by professors on salary, the great majority of
which does not come from taxpayer funds.
there are crowd-sourced and self-organized journals; there are also
not-for-profit ones. why is that a crime?
On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 7:33 PM, Piotr Konieczny <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
On 5/22/2012 6:55 PM, FT2 wrote:
Is there any particular reason why high quality peer review
cannot be crowd sourced or self-organized?
Tradition / organizational inertia / vested interests who are
making billions of $ in the current model (yes, billions!*)
"In 2010, Elsevier reported a profit margin of 36% on revenues of
$3.2 billion."
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/science/researchers-boycott-elsevier-journal-publisher.html?_r=1
--
Piotr Konieczny
"To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and
rest on one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski
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David Golumbia
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