15 ms·

Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy

216 points by samclemens 11y ago

DrNuke 11y ago
Broadly speaking, cheap e-books from non-stellar academics are an incredible amount of data leaked for free: top peer-reviewed journals are not cheap at all and relevant conferences proceedings are often run on a pay-for-view scheme. The non-stellar academic from Windy Hill University, Nowhere, will sell a good summary of his/her field and an up to date literature review for less than $20. Bargain.
- 1971genocide 11y ago
  I can tell you are not a millennial student or else you wont have that view. We are made to buy extremely expensive books and waste time reading crap books all the time. The best books in my field were written randomly over the last 300 years. I think ALL information should be free in the digital age. its the maximum rate of efficiency. There are 6 billion people in the world without a proper high class uni education like myself. How is it that we are okay supplying free weapons to poor people but go to great deal to restrict the supply of information ?
  - wolfgke 11y ago
    Relevant: Aaron Swartz - Guerilla Open Access Manifesto https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...
  - dalke 11y ago
    "we are made to buy extremely expensive books" One of the thing about young people is they rarely have a sense of history. The relevant question is, how does that compare to, say, a Gen X student? We have plenty of archival evidence for that. One such is this newspaper article from 1988, titled "Students pay a high price for college textbooks" at https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1298&dat=19881110&id=qvpNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=fIsDAAAAIBAJ&pg=7074,1871947&hl=en https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1298&dat=19881110&id=... . It starts off "The price of textbooks will make you cry." The end of the first column continues "For the last 50 to 60 years students said exactly the same thing about book prices." Yes, Baby Boomers made the same complaint you just did. The larger context is that starting in the 1980s cultural views shifted so that college should be seen as prerequisite job training, and not as a way to expand the mind, understand the world, and better oneself. Thus, colleges could justify price hikes by saying it would lead to a better jobs in the future, which could pay off the increased debt. Where Boomers could work for the summer to pay off a year of school, modern students must pay back loans for the next decade. But that has relatively little to do with the price of textbooks. Even if the textbooks were free, it would only mean the colleges would hike the prices elsewhere to maximize profit extraction.
  - kwhitefoot 11y ago
    > How is it that we are okay supplying free weapons to poor people but go to great deal to restrict the supply of information ? I hope that was a rhetorical question.
m-i-l 11y ago
Reminds me of Business Secrets of the Pharaohs [0]. But does anyone actually enter in to this process without understanding what it is? Looks like is is a widely known practice [1]. [0] http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/entertainment/articles/2012-12/05/peep-show-mark-corrigan-business-secrets-of-the-pharaohs http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/entertainment/articles/2012-12/... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_open_access_publishing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_open_access_publishi...
- caminante 11y ago
  Editor: Nothing's happening and you guys are behind on ad impressions. Anyone have content ideas? "Freelance" Journalist: Oh! I could do a creative writing prompt as an "Anonymous Academic," sexing up the ordinary academic publishing world with an expose. Bitter college kids will eat that up on social media. Editor: Guess that works. Run it!
patio11 11y ago
Academics spend years writing books nobody will buy. That's practically the definition of academic writing. They go into incredible amount of depths for a very, very niche audience: other academics interested in, e.g., the experience of women in Japanese detective novels of the 19th century. (n.b. Actually a book, assuming I am remembering all the details correctly. An advisor spent years on it.) This is exactly the result the market should hope for: a profitable method which gets academics to write down very-incredibly-niche ideas and then put copies of them exactly where someone would expect to find very-incredibly-niche ideas. The alternative to these $150 books is not $7.50 books. It is "no book." They do not meaningfully trade off with equally-in-depth blog posts, because academics are not scored on, and hence do not as a matter of practice actually sit down and write, book-length blog posts.
- jakobegger 11y ago
  I think you drastically overestimate the quality of the books this article talks about. These publishers will publish any rubbish you give them just to profit from selling to librarians who do not understand enough of the subject matter to know they are being scammed. I've been contacted on Facebook by these scam publishers, inquiring if I'd like to publish some of my university essays. There are plenty of alternatives. Most of the niche knowledge is distributed via scientific journals and conference proceedings. And many scientific publishers will happily publish books on any obscure topic, if you pay for printing. Scientific publishing has plenty of problems, but these kinds of "publishers" are the worst; they leech off already stretched library budgets for short term profits without providing any value to society at all.
  - patio11 11y ago
    I don't think we disagree very much about the likely level of subject-specific due diligence these publishers will do. I think we disagree very much about the likely level of subject-specific due diligence done by any publisher on any title picked at random from a university library. Peer review is, like Santa, a story we tell to motivate little children; academics (particularly in the humanities) are their own QC departments. And many scientific publishers will happily publish books on any obscure topic, if you pay for printing. I feel like I have to say "I do not understand the relevance of this fact to the claim that the academic press is a staunch bulwark against incorrect facts receiving its imprimatur."
anta40 11y ago
£80 is definitely not cheap. I'm curious what factors make those textbooks so pricey.
- patio11 11y ago
  They're like software: really cheap at the margin to make the 100,000th copy, really expensive to make the first one. Textbooks are pricey and Harry Potter is not because textbooks sell hundreds of copies and Harry Potter sells hundreds of millions. (With a wee bit of portfolio theory going on where HP also has to pay for advance checks written to all the talented single mothers on welfare who write books in obscurity but who are not J.K. Rowling and do not become billionaires because their books have more typical outcomes and sell ~X00 copies worldwide.)
hellofunk 11y ago
This article could easily be expanded to include software developers as well as academics. I've seen several excellent developers with strong reputations contributing to the open source community get "hoodwinked" into rushing out shallow books for companies like Apress. I've seen other developers also get sucked into the game, only to see less income from the work in one year as you'd need to buy a modest used car -- after months of at least half-time effort. The market and problem for these books is a bit different than the market described in this article, but the symptoms on the writers is often the same.
- maaaats 11y ago
  Alot of publishers also do a shotgun approach to find developers to write a book for them. I've been contacted several times to act as reviewer or even write the book myself about a framework named Libgdx. All because I have a Github repo with some example code for a single feature, that's somewhat popular. The repo is many years old, and I no longer write mobile games. So I'm not a good match as an author for such a book. Still, if I'd say yes, they would've published a shitty book. And I can't say I didn't think about it, vanity..
  - leaveyou 11y ago
    To me this is a sign that the end of traditional publishing is very near. They milk the last drops from a dying field ?
    - hellofunk 11y ago
      I'm not sure what you mean by "traditional publishing" but in many cases the books that are being written are primarily sold as ebooks, and part of the larger scam is that consumers can actually buy these books months before they are written with the promise of constant updates. I bought an Apress ebook once that was barely started when I purchased it, but that was not clear at the time. The actual finished book was nearly one year later. But if by "traditional publishing" you include electronic publishing, then I'd agree, something is probably going to change soon. It's clear that you can get much more education in today's world in ways other than books.
raverbashing 11y ago
And of course the question is, how much would the academic make with those sales? (I'm guessing not much)
- PeterisP 11y ago
  Possibly a negative amount - some of these publishers do, in essence, a classic "who's who"/vanity publishing scam where the profit comes from the author paying for a bunch of expensive copies, and they usually won't even be sold to anyone else.
tarekkurdy 11y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M68wcB6L0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M68wcB6L0s
madaxe_again 11y ago
And students are being hoodwinked into buying them. The books also often include minutiae which change from edition to edition, so you have to get the nth edition in order to take your class - because in physics, for instance, there are Q&A in the books which differ between editions. The main book we had to get was written by two of the lecturers, and was £300. It was so half-assedly bound that you had to cut the pages open.
- harry8 11y ago
  name the book, author and publisher. If what you say is true they don't deserve protection.
  - Thriptic 11y ago
    It sounds like what they are referring to is a course reader published by their own university.
- kwhitefoot 11y ago
  Did you complain to the university? Which university? Sounds like a low grade institution to me. When I studied physics at Exeter in the mid 70s there was a lively trade in second hand books and I don't think that any of the books specified that they had to be the absolutely latest edition. Nor did the faculty write a book and demand that we bought it; I think that might have caused a lot of trouble then but students now seem to be more docile than we were. We mostly didn't do exercises from textbooks, we had tutors who set work so it didn't matter which edition you used so long as the contents were correct.
  - madaxe_again 11y ago
    Durham. Definitely not low grade - was top in the country for Physics while I was there. Most tutors set work outside of books, but there were definitely a few who were rinsing students for all it was worth. Edit: seems they've gone further down the textbook route - here's their justification on the matter - https://www.dur.ac.uk/physics/students/textbooks/ https://www.dur.ac.uk/physics/students/textbooks/
brohoolio 11y ago
The article states people are getting hoodwinked but then goes on to blame academics. "So why don’t academics simply stay away from the greedy publishers? The only answer I can think of is vanity." Or that the publishers are misrepresenting how the books might sell.
- harry8 11y ago
  Why didn't the author name the publisher? So librarians, unfamiliar with esoteric fields can put a black mark next to that publisher's name and only buy from that publisher if requested or approved by an academic in that field. Surely the reputation damage that should be inflicted would stop such practises if they exist. But we have a claim with no evidence at this point.
  - librvf 11y ago
    I agree, the original article doesn't hold up well under scrutiny. Anonymous source and no verifiable, relevant facts-- even facts that should be easy to obtain.
    - dalke 11y ago
      Perhaps the author of an editorial in a British newspaper is aware of the draconian libel laws in the UK, and doesn't want to name names to avoid a likely lawsuit?
      - librvf 11y ago
        Perhaps. I think it's equally likely the story is low-effort clickbait that's fooled over 200 readers at Hacker News.
georgeek 11y ago
One quality specialized publisher is Now Publishers : http://www.nowpublishers.com/ http://www.nowpublishers.com/ Quality is managed by having leading academics have a say in the editorial decisions. Their conditions are somehow better than more established ones. Authors still hold the copyright over the material, and according to the librarians at my institution, their campus and course packs are much cheaper to other publishers.
n0us 11y ago
One of the best emails I've received in a while was from the UVA alumni association letting me know that I would retain library access, including access to JSTOR, because there is no way I could afford to outright purchase everything I want to read.
librvf 11y ago
These may sound like stories of concern to academics alone. But the problem is this: much of the time that goes into writing these books is made possible through taxpayers’ money. And who buys these books? Well, university libraries – and they, too, are paid for by taxpayers. Meanwhile, the books are not available for taxpayers to read – unless they have a university library card. In the US, taxpayers are said to be spending $139bn a year on research, and in the UK, £4.7bn. Too much of that money is disappearing into big pockets. What is this garbage? Why not let an interesting article about a specific problem (academic publishing scams) stand on its own? Why pour on sensationalized, over-simplified, misleading "context?" According to to study where those numbers came from, the $139bn the federal government spends on "research" is a part of a larger pool of "funding for research" that includes non-government sources, which is like $450bn. Universities (not just the libraries) are getting about $60bn from the big pool. In other words: the study, at least the results referenced by The Guardian article, does not say ANYTHING about the flow of money from taxpayer wallets to university libraries. Based on the evidence presented, the fraction of university library funding from taxpayer dollars could be anywhere from 0% to 100%. This is blatant dishonesty from The Guardian. http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf14307 http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf14307 Oh and one more thing: The "good" part of the article is written by an anonymous source with no verifiable facts (no publisher names, no book names). I have no real reason to dispute its authenticity, the idea certainly seems plausible, but I can not verify any of the claims being made without basically starting my own study from scratch.
- jordanpg 11y ago
  Wow -- apparently The Guardian actually has a recurring section called "Academics Anonymous"??? That seems like an interesting story in its own right. Well done pointing this out. This supposed academic, is doing palpable damage to his/her own industry. This is the kind of article we can expect to be quoted by the right-wing crazies who want to shut down all universities.
  - notahacker 11y ago
    As a commenter beneath the article pointed out, it also rather clashes the Guardian's own one day seminars on "How to Write an Academic Paper and Get It Published", a snip at £249 per person...
jordanpg 11y ago
I wonder how much of this is simply a function of the massive overpopulation of graduate programs and the growing need to fill out CVs with publications? I know that this has been happening for years in the form of obscure journals that no one reads or cares about.
Goladus 11y ago
Has The Guardian Been Bought By The Onion? http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/09/05/the-guardian-been-bought-by-the-onion-only-no-one-noticed/ http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/09/05/the-guardian-been-b...
nebulous1 11y ago
Why wouldn't the answer be to have the libraries not buy books from unscrupulous publishers?
Zigurd 11y ago
This is why, if you want to be an author publishing through the more or less conventional publishing industry, you need a first-rate agent, and a knowledge of who is a first-rate publisher. There's a big difference between a global publisher placing your book in their professional publishing imprints versus an obscure publisher leaching a bit of money out of libraries. The first-rate publisher will also get your expensive book into their subscription programs that they market to corporate subscribers, for example. If you have a good agent, they will steer you toward the goals you are pursuing, if you communicate those goals clearly. That's where some knowledge of which publishers have the best and/or most widely read books in your field is important. If you want to get your book into the more-widely sold trade paperback format, you need to tune your proposal to that goal. Most publishers require you to do some competitive analysis in your proposal. That's going to be important guidance for where your book ends up.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
copsarebastards 11y ago
They aren't being hoodwinked, they're just not writing the books to be bought. Nobody goes into academia hoping to write the next bestseller.
VIRGIE11111 11y ago
Fantastic writing ! I Appreciate the info , Does anyone know if I could get ahold of a sample 1999 ASI Lite - CF form to edit ?
- Sherice 11y ago
  Hey Virgie11111, I found a blank fillable 1999 ASI Lite - CF form here: http://pdf.ac/ahd5Bk http://pdf.ac/ahd5Bk

216 points by samclemens 11y ago

Broadly speaking, cheap e-books from non-stellar academics are an incredible amount of data leaked for free: top peer-reviewed journals are not cheap at all and relevant conferences proceedings are often run on a pay-for-view scheme. The non-stellar academic from Windy Hill University, Nowhere, will sell a good summary of his/her field and an up to date literature review for less than $20. Bargain.

1971genocide 11y ago
I can tell you are not a millennial student or else you wont have that view. We are made to buy extremely expensive books and waste time reading crap books all the time. The best books in my field were written randomly over the last 300 years. I think ALL information should be free in the digital age. its the maximum rate of efficiency. There are 6 billion people in the world without a proper high class uni education like myself. How is it that we are okay supplying free weapons to poor people but go to great deal to restrict the supply of information ?
- wolfgke 11y ago
  Relevant: Aaron Swartz - Guerilla Open Access Manifesto https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamjuly2008_djvu.txt https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...
- dalke 11y ago
  "we are made to buy extremely expensive books" One of the thing about young people is they rarely have a sense of history. The relevant question is, how does that compare to, say, a Gen X student? We have plenty of archival evidence for that. One such is this newspaper article from 1988, titled "Students pay a high price for college textbooks" at https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1298&dat=19881110&id=qvpNAAAAIBAJ&sjid=fIsDAAAAIBAJ&pg=7074,1871947&hl=en https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1298&dat=19881110&id=... . It starts off "The price of textbooks will make you cry." The end of the first column continues "For the last 50 to 60 years students said exactly the same thing about book prices." Yes, Baby Boomers made the same complaint you just did. The larger context is that starting in the 1980s cultural views shifted so that college should be seen as prerequisite job training, and not as a way to expand the mind, understand the world, and better oneself. Thus, colleges could justify price hikes by saying it would lead to a better jobs in the future, which could pay off the increased debt. Where Boomers could work for the summer to pay off a year of school, modern students must pay back loans for the next decade. But that has relatively little to do with the price of textbooks. Even if the textbooks were free, it would only mean the colleges would hike the prices elsewhere to maximize profit extraction.
- kwhitefoot 11y ago
  > How is it that we are okay supplying free weapons to poor people but go to great deal to restrict the supply of information ? I hope that was a rhetorical question.

m-i-l 11y ago

Reminds me of Business Secrets of the Pharaohs [0]. But does anyone actually enter in to this process without understanding what it is? Looks like is is a widely known practice [1]. [0] http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/entertainment/articles/2012-12/05/peep-show-mark-corrigan-business-secrets-of-the-pharaohs http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/entertainment/articles/2012-12/... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_open_access_publishing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predatory_open_access_publishi...

caminante 11y ago
Editor: Nothing's happening and you guys are behind on ad impressions. Anyone have content ideas? "Freelance" Journalist: Oh! I could do a creative writing prompt as an "Anonymous Academic," sexing up the ordinary academic publishing world with an expose. Bitter college kids will eat that up on social media. Editor: Guess that works. Run it!

patio11 11y ago

Academics spend years writing books nobody will buy. That's practically the definition of academic writing. They go into incredible amount of depths for a very, very niche audience: other academics interested in, e.g., the experience of women in Japanese detective novels of the 19th century. (n.b. Actually a book, assuming I am remembering all the details correctly. An advisor spent years on it.) This is exactly the result the market should hope for: a profitable method which gets academics to write down very-incredibly-niche ideas and then put copies of them exactly where someone would expect to find very-incredibly-niche ideas. The alternative to these $150 books is not $7.50 books. It is "no book." They do not meaningfully trade off with equally-in-depth blog posts, because academics are not scored on, and hence do not as a matter of practice actually sit down and write, book-length blog posts.

jakobegger 11y ago
I think you drastically overestimate the quality of the books this article talks about. These publishers will publish any rubbish you give them just to profit from selling to librarians who do not understand enough of the subject matter to know they are being scammed. I've been contacted on Facebook by these scam publishers, inquiring if I'd like to publish some of my university essays. There are plenty of alternatives. Most of the niche knowledge is distributed via scientific journals and conference proceedings. And many scientific publishers will happily publish books on any obscure topic, if you pay for printing. Scientific publishing has plenty of problems, but these kinds of "publishers" are the worst; they leech off already stretched library budgets for short term profits without providing any value to society at all.
- patio11 11y ago
  I don't think we disagree very much about the likely level of subject-specific due diligence these publishers will do. I think we disagree very much about the likely level of subject-specific due diligence done by any publisher on any title picked at random from a university library. Peer review is, like Santa, a story we tell to motivate little children; academics (particularly in the humanities) are their own QC departments. And many scientific publishers will happily publish books on any obscure topic, if you pay for printing. I feel like I have to say "I do not understand the relevance of this fact to the claim that the academic press is a staunch bulwark against incorrect facts receiving its imprimatur."

anta40 11y ago

£80 is definitely not cheap. I'm curious what factors make those textbooks so pricey.

patio11 11y ago
They're like software: really cheap at the margin to make the 100,000th copy, really expensive to make the first one. Textbooks are pricey and Harry Potter is not because textbooks sell hundreds of copies and Harry Potter sells hundreds of millions. (With a wee bit of portfolio theory going on where HP also has to pay for advance checks written to all the talented single mothers on welfare who write books in obscurity but who are not J.K. Rowling and do not become billionaires because their books have more typical outcomes and sell ~X00 copies worldwide.)

hellofunk 11y ago

This article could easily be expanded to include software developers as well as academics. I've seen several excellent developers with strong reputations contributing to the open source community get "hoodwinked" into rushing out shallow books for companies like Apress. I've seen other developers also get sucked into the game, only to see less income from the work in one year as you'd need to buy a modest used car -- after months of at least half-time effort. The market and problem for these books is a bit different than the market described in this article, but the symptoms on the writers is often the same.

maaaats 11y ago
Alot of publishers also do a shotgun approach to find developers to write a book for them. I've been contacted several times to act as reviewer or even write the book myself about a framework named Libgdx. All because I have a Github repo with some example code for a single feature, that's somewhat popular. The repo is many years old, and I no longer write mobile games. So I'm not a good match as an author for such a book. Still, if I'd say yes, they would've published a shitty book. And I can't say I didn't think about it, vanity..
- leaveyou 11y ago
  To me this is a sign that the end of traditional publishing is very near. They milk the last drops from a dying field ?
  - hellofunk 11y ago
    I'm not sure what you mean by "traditional publishing" but in many cases the books that are being written are primarily sold as ebooks, and part of the larger scam is that consumers can actually buy these books months before they are written with the promise of constant updates. I bought an Apress ebook once that was barely started when I purchased it, but that was not clear at the time. The actual finished book was nearly one year later. But if by "traditional publishing" you include electronic publishing, then I'd agree, something is probably going to change soon. It's clear that you can get much more education in today's world in ways other than books.

raverbashing 11y ago

And of course the question is, how much would the academic make with those sales? (I'm guessing not much)

PeterisP 11y ago
Possibly a negative amount - some of these publishers do, in essence, a classic "who's who"/vanity publishing scam where the profit comes from the author paying for a bunch of expensive copies, and they usually won't even be sold to anyone else.

tarekkurdy 11y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M68wcB6L0s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3M68wcB6L0s

madaxe_again 11y ago

And students are being hoodwinked into buying them. The books also often include minutiae which change from edition to edition, so you have to get the nth edition in order to take your class - because in physics, for instance, there are Q&A in the books which differ between editions. The main book we had to get was written by two of the lecturers, and was £300. It was so half-assedly bound that you had to cut the pages open.

harry8 11y ago
name the book, author and publisher. If what you say is true they don't deserve protection.
- Thriptic 11y ago
  It sounds like what they are referring to is a course reader published by their own university.
kwhitefoot 11y ago
Did you complain to the university? Which university? Sounds like a low grade institution to me. When I studied physics at Exeter in the mid 70s there was a lively trade in second hand books and I don't think that any of the books specified that they had to be the absolutely latest edition. Nor did the faculty write a book and demand that we bought it; I think that might have caused a lot of trouble then but students now seem to be more docile than we were. We mostly didn't do exercises from textbooks, we had tutors who set work so it didn't matter which edition you used so long as the contents were correct.
- madaxe_again 11y ago
  Durham. Definitely not low grade - was top in the country for Physics while I was there. Most tutors set work outside of books, but there were definitely a few who were rinsing students for all it was worth. Edit: seems they've gone further down the textbook route - here's their justification on the matter - https://www.dur.ac.uk/physics/students/textbooks/ https://www.dur.ac.uk/physics/students/textbooks/

brohoolio 11y ago

The article states people are getting hoodwinked but then goes on to blame academics. "So why don’t academics simply stay away from the greedy publishers? The only answer I can think of is vanity." Or that the publishers are misrepresenting how the books might sell.

harry8 11y ago
Why didn't the author name the publisher? So librarians, unfamiliar with esoteric fields can put a black mark next to that publisher's name and only buy from that publisher if requested or approved by an academic in that field. Surely the reputation damage that should be inflicted would stop such practises if they exist. But we have a claim with no evidence at this point.
- librvf 11y ago
  I agree, the original article doesn't hold up well under scrutiny. Anonymous source and no verifiable, relevant facts-- even facts that should be easy to obtain.
  - dalke 11y ago
    Perhaps the author of an editorial in a British newspaper is aware of the draconian libel laws in the UK, and doesn't want to name names to avoid a likely lawsuit?
    - librvf 11y ago
      Perhaps. I think it's equally likely the story is low-effort clickbait that's fooled over 200 readers at Hacker News.

georgeek 11y ago

One quality specialized publisher is Now Publishers : http://www.nowpublishers.com/ http://www.nowpublishers.com/ Quality is managed by having leading academics have a say in the editorial decisions. Their conditions are somehow better than more established ones. Authors still hold the copyright over the material, and according to the librarians at my institution, their campus and course packs are much cheaper to other publishers.

n0us 11y ago

One of the best emails I've received in a while was from the UVA alumni association letting me know that I would retain library access, including access to JSTOR, because there is no way I could afford to outright purchase everything I want to read.

librvf 11y ago

These may sound like stories of concern to academics alone. But the problem is this: much of the time that goes into writing these books is made possible through taxpayers’ money. And who buys these books? Well, university libraries – and they, too, are paid for by taxpayers. Meanwhile, the books are not available for taxpayers to read – unless they have a university library card. In the US, taxpayers are said to be spending $139bn a year on research, and in the UK, £4.7bn. Too much of that money is disappearing into big pockets. What is this garbage? Why not let an interesting article about a specific problem (academic publishing scams) stand on its own? Why pour on sensationalized, over-simplified, misleading "context?" According to to study where those numbers came from, the $139bn the federal government spends on "research" is a part of a larger pool of "funding for research" that includes non-government sources, which is like $450bn. Universities (not just the libraries) are getting about $60bn from the big pool. In other words: the study, at least the results referenced by The Guardian article, does not say ANYTHING about the flow of money from taxpayer wallets to university libraries. Based on the evidence presented, the fraction of university library funding from taxpayer dollars could be anywhere from 0% to 100%. This is blatant dishonesty from The Guardian. http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf14307 http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/infbrief/nsf14307 Oh and one more thing: The "good" part of the article is written by an anonymous source with no verifiable facts (no publisher names, no book names). I have no real reason to dispute its authenticity, the idea certainly seems plausible, but I can not verify any of the claims being made without basically starting my own study from scratch.

jordanpg 11y ago
Wow -- apparently The Guardian actually has a recurring section called "Academics Anonymous"??? That seems like an interesting story in its own right. Well done pointing this out. This supposed academic, is doing palpable damage to his/her own industry. This is the kind of article we can expect to be quoted by the right-wing crazies who want to shut down all universities.
- notahacker 11y ago
  As a commenter beneath the article pointed out, it also rather clashes the Guardian's own one day seminars on "How to Write an Academic Paper and Get It Published", a snip at £249 per person...

jordanpg 11y ago

I wonder how much of this is simply a function of the massive overpopulation of graduate programs and the growing need to fill out CVs with publications? I know that this has been happening for years in the form of obscure journals that no one reads or cares about.

Goladus 11y ago

Has The Guardian Been Bought By The Onion? http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/09/05/the-guardian-been-bought-by-the-onion-only-no-one-noticed/ http://the-digital-reader.com/2015/09/05/the-guardian-been-b...

nebulous1 11y ago

Why wouldn't the answer be to have the libraries not buy books from unscrupulous publishers?

Zigurd 11y ago

This is why, if you want to be an author publishing through the more or less conventional publishing industry, you need a first-rate agent, and a knowledge of who is a first-rate publisher. There's a big difference between a global publisher placing your book in their professional publishing imprints versus an obscure publisher leaching a bit of money out of libraries. The first-rate publisher will also get your expensive book into their subscription programs that they market to corporate subscribers, for example. If you have a good agent, they will steer you toward the goals you are pursuing, if you communicate those goals clearly. That's where some knowledge of which publishers have the best and/or most widely read books in your field is important. If you want to get your book into the more-widely sold trade paperback format, you need to tune your proposal to that goal. Most publishers require you to do some competitive analysis in your proposal. That's going to be important guidance for where your book ends up.

deleted 11y ago

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copsarebastards 11y ago

They aren't being hoodwinked, they're just not writing the books to be bought. Nobody goes into academia hoping to write the next bestseller.

VIRGIE11111 11y ago

Fantastic writing ! I Appreciate the info , Does anyone know if I could get ahold of a sample 1999 ASI Lite - CF form to edit ?

Sherice 11y ago
Hey Virgie11111, I found a blank fillable 1999 ASI Lite - CF form here: http://pdf.ac/ahd5Bk http://pdf.ac/ahd5Bk