PUBLISHERS PUBLISHING AND PUBLICATIONS: ACADEMIC AND RESEARCH PUBLISHING : RESEARCH : PERIODICALS: ACADEMIC AND RESEARCH JOURNALS: Opinion: Academic Publishing Is Broken
David P. Dillard
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PUBLISHERS PUBLISHING AND PUBLICATIONS: ACADEMIC AND RESEARCH PUBLISHING :
RESEARCH :
PERIODICALS: ACADEMIC AND RESEARCH JOURNALS:
Opinion: Academic Publishing Is Broken
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Opinion: Academic Publishing Is Broken
The current system by which academics publish their scientific discoveries
is a massive waste of money.
By Michael P. Taylor
March 19, 2012
The Scientist
http://the-scientist.com/2012/03/19/
opinion-academic-publishing-is-broken/
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A shorter URL for the above link:
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Academic publishers are currently up in arms about the Federal Research
Public Access Act (FRPAA)a bill that has the perfectly reasonable goal of
making publicly funded research available to the public that funded it.
Tom Allen, president of the American Association of Publishers, described
it rather hysterically as intellectual eminent domain, but without fair
compensation. Why are he and his colleagues so desperate to retain the
current business model?
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snip
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Lets take a look at the flow of money in the production of research. The
government takes tax revenue from citizens and uses it to fund university
research groups and libraries. Researchers obtain government grants and
use the money to conduct experiments. They write up the results in
manuscripts that are destined to become published papers. Manuscripts are
submitted to journals, where they are handled by other researchers acting
as unpaid volunteer editors. They co-ordinate the process of peer-review,
which is done by yet other researchers, also unpaid. All these
rolesauthor, editor, reviewerare considered normal responsibilities of
researchers, funded by grants.
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At this point, researchers have worked together to produce a
publication-ready, peer-reviewed manuscript. But rather than posting it on
the Web, where it can contribute to the worlds knowledge, form a basis for
future work, and earn prestige for the author, the finished manuscript is
then donated gratis to a publisher: the author signs away copyright. The
publisher then formats the manuscript and places the result behind a
paywall. Then it sells subscriptions back to the universities where the
work originated. Well-off universities will have some access to the paper
(though even they are denied important rights such as text-mining). Less
well-off universities have access to varying selections of journals, often
not the ones their researchers need. And the taxpayers who funded all
this? They get nothing at all. No access to the paper.
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snip
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So subscription-based journals continue to thrive, bringing in record
revenues and profits year after year, because at the moment the status quo
still represents a local maximum. We can see that theres a much higher
peak just across the way, but we fear the journey because it will take us
through a swamp. Happily, two things are happening to change that. One
is that the land surrounding our peak is inexorably rising: open-access
publishing options are becoming more common and more attractive. And at
the same time, the peak itself is diminishing, as the ever-increasing
costs of subscriptions make the current arrangement less and less
appealing.
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The complete article may be read at the URL above.
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Sincerely,
David Dillard
Temple University
(215) 204 - 4584
jw...@temple.edu
http://workface.com/e/daviddillard
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