From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Msuck: nntp://news.gmane.io/gmane.science.mathematics.categories/6851 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: Michael Barr Newsgroups: gmane.science.mathematics.categories Subject: Re: science_publishers Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2011 08:34:11 -0400 (EDT) Message-ID: References: Reply-To: Michael Barr NNTP-Posting-Host: lo.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII; format=flowed X-Trace: dough.gmane.org 1314897695 18080 80.91.229.12 (1 Sep 2011 17:21:35 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@dough.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2011 17:21:35 +0000 (UTC) Cc: Categories , dbmumford@gmail.com To: "Eduardo J. Dubuc" Original-X-From: majordomo@mlist.mta.ca Thu Sep 01 19:21:30 2011 Return-path: Envelope-to: gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from smtpy.mta.ca ([138.73.1.128]) by lo.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1QzAxG-0001iY-6J for gsmc-categories@m.gmane.org; Thu, 01 Sep 2011 19:21:30 +0200 Original-Received: from mlist.mta.ca ([138.73.1.63]:53924) by smtpy.mta.ca with esmtp (Exim 4.76) (envelope-from ) id 1QzAsk-0003yB-OM; Thu, 01 Sep 2011 14:16:50 -0300 Original-Received: from majordomo by mlist.mta.ca with local (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1QzAsk-0001Ha-0r for categories-list@mlist.mta.ca; Thu, 01 Sep 2011 14:16:50 -0300 Precedence: bulk Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.science.mathematics.categories:6851 Archived-At: 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 [For admin and other information see: http://www.mta.ca/~cat-dist/ ]