Fair enough, my bad.
1 Like
I am with @LutherBlisset on this one. “Enhance the experience” is marketing bullshit trying to dress up the rent-seeking pig with useless accessories.
Make full text + images and data freely available and searchable, and contemporary web archiving (e.g. archive.org, PubMed) and indexing (e.g., Google Scholar, PubMed) will take care of the rest.
1 Like
Cool idea, but who is going to pay to maintain that information, and more importantly, maintain and manage the peer review process?
Publishing isn’t free, despite what everyone thinks.
1 Like
But you’re point that each field is different does matter. I can really only speak to the humanities and most especially history, where books still dominate.
3 Likes
Mmm … k. I’m gonna go out on a limb here and suggest that your journal probably didn’t reinvent the internet in order to distribute its content.
It’s great that the journal is keeping cost as low as practical. But you’re still on the wrong side of the fence in this conversation; you are viewing content distribution as a business model, and looking for ways to minimise costs and ‘add value’. The content - the science - is just something you get for free and then redistribute as the vehicle by which you get paid. In that respect you’re kinda similar to Facebook or Twitter; free content repacked to a captive audience to extract value. You presumably aren’t extracting as much rent as Elvsevier et al, but that’s a difference of degree rather than a difference of kind. You are both in the same business. That’s why you’re getting so much push back on your claims.
1 Like
We did have an web based online only Open Access journal since the mid-90s, so we have made an effort to be forward thinking in our distribution model. And I’m not saying the content distribution should cost money, but instead that distributing content is only a slim part of what a reputable journal publisher provides.
If the world goes entirely Open Access so authors have to pay to publish, that’s fine. But someone still has to pay for publishing to happen. There needs to be groups that properly manage a reputable peer review process, something that is transparent, and promotes valid articles. That management of peer reviewers, and managing rejections and error is what differentiates a reputable journal from some fly-by-night operation out of India or China.
And remember, Twitter and Facebook are not free. They are free to most consumers, but someone is still making money somewhere. A good publisher is more open about who is paying that bill, versus companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter who are selling their data to whomever they want.
I never said we shouldn’t make everything accessible for free, just that money has to come from somewhere to keep things working. Everything “Free” still has a cost, to someone and somewhere.
3 Likes
2 Likes
Flew over my head, too tired to think 
But if things aren’t truly free, who is going to pay? That’s the answer no one wants to answer, everyone just demands everything to be free. I won’t lie, I could be missing something, I just can’t find anyone providing this answer for this.
It’s a classical public good, and should be funded as such. By the taxpayers [1].
.
[1] Which, in my ideal world, includes taxing the crap out of the commercial interests that benefit from research.
4 Likes
Agreed 100%! Until that happens, and yes it is getting better with most funding plans for Open Access costs, then things will be a challenge to get changed.
FWIW, “author pays” is gradually losing ground to “Diamond” open access in the OA world. (Which is a good thing, since “author pays” created the incentives for all the predatory junk journals out there.) That said, even as the editor-in-chief of a diamond OA journal I have to agree that the larger revenue streams of commercial journals can bring concrete benefits to both the authors and the readers.
Before I took over this position I was pretty clueless as to how much more there is to journal publication than most authors (or even editorial board members) are aware of.
1 Like
To be very clear on this: no-one says everything in publishing should be free. There are ends to make. However, making a profit out of a system which is paid mostly out of public funds is questionable, at least.
Making a huge profit on the back of researchers who do most of the work for you is just plain evil genius.
Fuck this shit.
I’m sick of it.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
