Open-access maths journals
Jan. 22nd, 2013 01:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackhttp://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/01/14/why-ive-joined-the-bad-guys/
http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/why-ive-also-joined-the-good-guys/
Prof Tim Gowers recently posted about two new open-access maths journals he's involved with.
History
There was recently an ongoing fuss about academic journals. The general sentiment seemed to be, that academics did a lot of the significant work in preparing journals, in refereeing papers for technical accuracy, sitting on editorial boards, etc, and the remainder, of copyediting, formatting, physically printing and distributing, while valuable, wasn't worth as much as it had come to cost.
Fingers were pointed especially at Elsevier, who many people claim to represent the end of the publishing industry who have bought the most small journals, and squeezed the most money for them with the least commitment to actually supporting the acadmic community. Especially by charging inflated prices for necessary journals, spuriously justified by bundling them with a lot of other less-necessary journals. And by forbidding academic libraries from discussing what they have to pay to subscribe to the journals, which isn't inherently bad, but is generally a pretty clear indication that you're doing something dodgy.
In fact, comparisons to smallpox were thrown around. Even if Elsevier's capitalism wasn't evil, it was stupid, in that if you kill of the host, your parasitic infection is inherently doomed. I don't know if this was justified (but I assume that Tim Gowers was right).
Journals are not funded by people who buy individual issues. They're funded by university libraries who subscribe. And universities all do have to subscribe, since you can't do much research without reading other people's research. So lots of people said, "since almost everyone pays for them and almost everyone can read them, why can't we cut out the middle men, fund the journals directly without the fiction of subscribing, and just throw them open to everyone?"
The trouble is, what do the existing journals have? They have a reputation. Academics all know that if you're published in Nature, that's good. Going begging asking for money to set up a new journal less famous than nature doesn't get very far, if everyone ALSO still has to pay subscription fees to the existing journals.
The only way to break the deadlock is to make a sufficiently high-profile break with the previous system that at least one new journal instantly acquires enough reputation to be unignorable. Which is why people have been making a fuss about it.
I only know about maths, because I read Tim Gowers' blog. Maths is a bit of a weird edge case because mathematicians have to pay pretty much only for journals: otherwise, you just need an office, a pen, a wastepaper basket, and some grad students, and those generally turn up in universities.
Forum of Mathematics
There is a new author-pays open-access family of mathematics journals set up by Cambridge University Press. The idea is, instead of being charged to read a journal, you're charged to publish in a journal (since both are equally necessary to an academic career). And anyone at all can just read it.
And that institutions will set aside a pot of money to pay for the publication, just as they previously set aside a pot of money for journal subscriptions. I think some other subjects already work like this?
The controversy is, Tim Gowers says the journal will continue to accept anyone's submissions if they're good enough, and won't be rejected if the applicant can't pay. And that any sufficiently prestigious university will just automatically pay the fees.
Which sounds reasonable to me -- presumably most publications come from big universities, which will automatically do the done thing.
However, detractors assume any author-pays model will be like more vanity publishing, and automatically deter authors who can't pay and don't work for a big university, or people from smaller or less rich institutions.
The comments section
Prof Gowers' post, and the detracting blog post he linked to are obviously sensible. I sort of assume Gowers is right, but I don't actually know.
But the comments section is so depressing. People going out of their way to comment on a the blog of a high-profile research mathematician are better formatted, but just as puerile, as those of many other blogs. Everyone talks past each other, saying, author-pays WILL AUTOMATICALLY be vanity publishing, or author-pays will just be business as usual for large institutions, and assume the other is being wilfully evil by deliberately ignoring the obvious truth, while never actually proposing any evidence for what it will actually be like.
Next time
Next time: the ArXiv-only journal.
http://gowers.wordpress.com/2013/01/16/why-ive-also-joined-the-good-guys/
Prof Tim Gowers recently posted about two new open-access maths journals he's involved with.
History
There was recently an ongoing fuss about academic journals. The general sentiment seemed to be, that academics did a lot of the significant work in preparing journals, in refereeing papers for technical accuracy, sitting on editorial boards, etc, and the remainder, of copyediting, formatting, physically printing and distributing, while valuable, wasn't worth as much as it had come to cost.
Fingers were pointed especially at Elsevier, who many people claim to represent the end of the publishing industry who have bought the most small journals, and squeezed the most money for them with the least commitment to actually supporting the acadmic community. Especially by charging inflated prices for necessary journals, spuriously justified by bundling them with a lot of other less-necessary journals. And by forbidding academic libraries from discussing what they have to pay to subscribe to the journals, which isn't inherently bad, but is generally a pretty clear indication that you're doing something dodgy.
In fact, comparisons to smallpox were thrown around. Even if Elsevier's capitalism wasn't evil, it was stupid, in that if you kill of the host, your parasitic infection is inherently doomed. I don't know if this was justified (but I assume that Tim Gowers was right).
Journals are not funded by people who buy individual issues. They're funded by university libraries who subscribe. And universities all do have to subscribe, since you can't do much research without reading other people's research. So lots of people said, "since almost everyone pays for them and almost everyone can read them, why can't we cut out the middle men, fund the journals directly without the fiction of subscribing, and just throw them open to everyone?"
The trouble is, what do the existing journals have? They have a reputation. Academics all know that if you're published in Nature, that's good. Going begging asking for money to set up a new journal less famous than nature doesn't get very far, if everyone ALSO still has to pay subscription fees to the existing journals.
The only way to break the deadlock is to make a sufficiently high-profile break with the previous system that at least one new journal instantly acquires enough reputation to be unignorable. Which is why people have been making a fuss about it.
I only know about maths, because I read Tim Gowers' blog. Maths is a bit of a weird edge case because mathematicians have to pay pretty much only for journals: otherwise, you just need an office, a pen, a wastepaper basket, and some grad students, and those generally turn up in universities.
Forum of Mathematics
There is a new author-pays open-access family of mathematics journals set up by Cambridge University Press. The idea is, instead of being charged to read a journal, you're charged to publish in a journal (since both are equally necessary to an academic career). And anyone at all can just read it.
And that institutions will set aside a pot of money to pay for the publication, just as they previously set aside a pot of money for journal subscriptions. I think some other subjects already work like this?
The controversy is, Tim Gowers says the journal will continue to accept anyone's submissions if they're good enough, and won't be rejected if the applicant can't pay. And that any sufficiently prestigious university will just automatically pay the fees.
Which sounds reasonable to me -- presumably most publications come from big universities, which will automatically do the done thing.
However, detractors assume any author-pays model will be like more vanity publishing, and automatically deter authors who can't pay and don't work for a big university, or people from smaller or less rich institutions.
The comments section
Prof Gowers' post, and the detracting blog post he linked to are obviously sensible. I sort of assume Gowers is right, but I don't actually know.
But the comments section is so depressing. People going out of their way to comment on a the blog of a high-profile research mathematician are better formatted, but just as puerile, as those of many other blogs. Everyone talks past each other, saying, author-pays WILL AUTOMATICALLY be vanity publishing, or author-pays will just be business as usual for large institutions, and assume the other is being wilfully evil by deliberately ignoring the obvious truth, while never actually proposing any evidence for what it will actually be like.
Next time
Next time: the ArXiv-only journal.