5 ms·

That's certainly a valid viewpoint, that there simply shouldn't be anything other than electronic only journals. Or to take it further (which I acknowledge isn'

That's certainly a valid viewpoint, that there simply shouldn't be anything other than electronic only journals. Or to take it further (which I acknowledge isn't exactly what you said) that there shouldn't even be journals that attempt to bestow prestige at all (ie that should be a process of post publication of some sort). But it's also about the realistic challenges of running a sustainable business in academia. PLoS figured out a formula that works for a portion of the market with PLoS One. Note that that doesn't really work for the humanities and social sciences because the funding situation is so different. So then you have Open Library of Humanities, which is surviving currently on grant money with the hopes that they can get universities to fund their journals (not all that different than subscriptions to be honest, just that they are a nonprofit). But it's entirely unclear if that's going to be sustainable. So even a brand new state of the art low cost journal needs to find funding somewhere. How that works in STEM might make sense (APCs coming from research funding) but how it works outside of that is entirely undefined.

omginternets 11y ago
Regarding the implications of my viewpoint, I'd say that's an accurate summary. My opinion indeed implies a radical departure from the current state of the business, but it seems to me that my colleagues are by and large in agreement. Regarding the humanities/sciences division, I agree that the market is different. I think, however, that this difference is very accurately modeled by a single factor: technical literacy. On the whole, I find that the humanities are not interested in the inner workings of computers. They do not care, and it annoys them greatly to think of such things. Now consider the fact that open access online journals are started by tech people, which is to say people from the sciences. Every open-access journal is just too damn complicated for people who don't care about social media, or even social logins. They want (query in) -> (paper out). I think a simple experiment would be very convincing. Start a journal whose only job is to manage the peer-review process in the most transparent manner possible. University computing centers can donate storage space to the project. The now-slim editorial costs can be covered by modest submission fees -- say $100 for any non-3rd world university. I posit that if such a system were to be developed, the humanities would latch on immediately. In other words, I suspect the humanities want more open-access and unrestrictive licensing, not less, as it's actually more convenient for them. In short, I argue that the editorial business is resisting an inevitable market change. Edit: to end on a more positive note, I'm sure a business opportunity exists for editors who can make present us with a convenient set of tools to work with this data.
- diqu 11y ago
  > University computing centers can donate storage space to the project If we leave the publishing-as-a-business area, I wonder how much university libraries currently pay annually for their subscriptions. And I do wonder, if it would make sense for universities to let their libraries take care of archiving and publishing the respective uni's publications. Open-access everything, host it at home.
  - omginternets 11y ago
    This is a good point. An implicit assumption of mine is that it's cheaper to donate computing resources than to pay the journal subscription fees. To reiterate, however, I think it'll still be necessary to have some sort of submission fee to cover the costs of peer-review.
    - mandor 11y ago
      ... and we still need to understand what these "costs of peer review" are! We are never paid for reviewing papers and most editors work for free. There is free software to handle the peer review process (e.g. http://myreview.sourceforge.net http://myreview.sourceforge.net) which are used by some serious journals for years (e.g. http://ecj.fhv.at http://ecj.fhv.at / http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/evco http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/evco). A few more points: - people outside of computer sciences (and maybe physics) do not want to deal with LaTeX. As a result, they want to submit ugly word files and get a nicely formatted paper out of it (this has a cost, but not in CS where we submit nicely formatted LaTeX papers) - most journals do not do copy-editing, but the big ones actually work on the figures, the text, fix the references, etc. Again, this is not common in CS.

omginternets 11y ago

Regarding the implications of my viewpoint, I'd say that's an accurate summary. My opinion indeed implies a radical departure from the current state of the business, but it seems to me that my colleagues are by and large in agreement. Regarding the humanities/sciences division, I agree that the market is different. I think, however, that this difference is very accurately modeled by a single factor: technical literacy. On the whole, I find that the humanities are not interested in the inner workings of computers. They do not care, and it annoys them greatly to think of such things. Now consider the fact that open access online journals are started by tech people, which is to say people from the sciences. Every open-access journal is just too damn complicated for people who don't care about social media, or even social logins. They want (query in) -> (paper out). I think a simple experiment would be very convincing. Start a journal whose only job is to manage the peer-review process in the most transparent manner possible. University computing centers can donate storage space to the project. The now-slim editorial costs can be covered by modest submission fees -- say $100 for any non-3rd world university. I posit that if such a system were to be developed, the humanities would latch on immediately. In other words, I suspect the humanities want more open-access and unrestrictive licensing, not less, as it's actually more convenient for them. In short, I argue that the editorial business is resisting an inevitable market change. Edit: to end on a more positive note, I'm sure a business opportunity exists for editors who can make present us with a convenient set of tools to work with this data.

diqu 11y ago
> University computing centers can donate storage space to the project If we leave the publishing-as-a-business area, I wonder how much university libraries currently pay annually for their subscriptions. And I do wonder, if it would make sense for universities to let their libraries take care of archiving and publishing the respective uni's publications. Open-access everything, host it at home.
- omginternets 11y ago
  This is a good point. An implicit assumption of mine is that it's cheaper to donate computing resources than to pay the journal subscription fees. To reiterate, however, I think it'll still be necessary to have some sort of submission fee to cover the costs of peer-review.
  - mandor 11y ago
    ... and we still need to understand what these "costs of peer review" are! We are never paid for reviewing papers and most editors work for free. There is free software to handle the peer review process (e.g. http://myreview.sourceforge.net http://myreview.sourceforge.net) which are used by some serious journals for years (e.g. http://ecj.fhv.at http://ecj.fhv.at / http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/evco http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/evco). A few more points: - people outside of computer sciences (and maybe physics) do not want to deal with LaTeX. As a result, they want to submit ugly word files and get a nicely formatted paper out of it (this has a cost, but not in CS where we submit nicely formatted LaTeX papers) - most journals do not do copy-editing, but the big ones actually work on the figures, the text, fix the references, etc. Again, this is not common in CS.