Re: science_publishers

[Michael Barr <barr@math.mcgill.ca>]

This is interesting, but should not be news to any of us.  Anyone who is
not aware of this situation in academic publishing simply has not been
paying attention or doesn't care.  I have a colleague who publishes all
his papers in high-prestige high-cost journals.  He was receptive to my
plea to use cheaper or free journals but said his coauthors were not.

But governments are complicit too.  It took TAC 15 years to get ISI to 
agree to index it.  I have forgotten, but there was something funny about 
AMS Reviews indexing TAC papers, although they do at least review them. In 
Europe they use indicators such as ISI to determine what they call "impact 
factors".  Non-indexed journals have, ipso facto, no impact.  I don't know 
about NSF, but NSERC committees make their own judgments (or did when I 
was on the grant selection committee, 92-95).

It is not well known, but Elsevier at least will accept a one-time license
in lieu of a full copyright transfer.  At least they did in 1995, which is
the last time I published in a journal of restricted access (JPAA).  I
don't know if anyone has paid to download one of the two papers I
published then, but if so they owe me the copy fee.  Naturally, they've
made no such attempt.

As you know TAC is free to all.  There are no charges to authors or
readers.  The editors and reviewers are not paid, but no journal pays
them.  The only costs are the storage space at Mt. A. (a totally trivial
cost which Mt. A. donates) and time and effort Bob spends on it, which is
his contribution.  I know from Peter Freyd when he was managing editor of
JPAA that he got enough money from them to pay a part-time assistant.  So
much for their costs.  Once upon a time, it was certainly the case that
typesetting was costly.  Now the authors do that.  And author-submitted
TeX has vastly improved over the years and now most submissions need only
a trivial amount of copy editing.

As it happens, my daughter used to work for Wiley.  She started out with a
small (she was employee #8) publisher in a niche market.  When she needed
a new copy editor or proofreader, she went to the owner, made her case,
and got an instant yes or no answer.  They occupied a brownstone in
Brooklyn and made a tidy profit.  But the owner needed capital to expand
and raised it by selling half the company to Wiley.  After disagreements,
Wiley took it over and (mis)managed it their own way.  When the lease
expired, they moved the operation to their Manhattan offices (later the
whole operation moved to Hoboken).  But a funny thing happened.  Even
though they saved on the Brooklyn lease (which could not have been less
than $10,000 a month--it was all four floors of what had been a large
house near Prospect Park) the division was accounted as losing money.
Why?  Well, they got charged a proportionate share of the costs of being
downtown and similarly a share of administrative costs.  When my daughter
needed something, it had to go through five levels of management above her
and took weeks or months.  Then there were corporate jets to pay for,
executive bonuses, all the diseconomies of scale.  Managers are fond of
going on about economies of scale, but nore reticent over the
diseconomies.

What is to be done.  First the libraries should drop the subscriptions to
the big academic journals.  This will be painful at first, but eventually
researchers will learn that no one is reading their articles and maybe
choose cheaper, if temporarily lower, prestige.  Start our own online
publications.  Many in other fields charge authors page charges; this
seems to be less needed in math because we mostly don't need costly
illustrations.  For diagrams we have xy-pic (and, dare I mention it,
diagxy) which do everything I need.  Second, get the libraries to use the
money they save on the outrageous subscriptions and give a bit of it to
subsidize these new journals.  Also there are print journals that are
relatively inexpensive, a few hundred a year.  Use them.  Finally convince
granting agencies to find better ways of measuring impact.  At least
temporarily until this all gets sorted out.  How do we get there from
here?  Damfino!

Michael

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