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This seems to be missing any discussion of non-profit academic society publishers, which in many fields are the dominant publishers and so much better than the
by humanistbot 6y ago
This seems to be missing any discussion of non-profit academic society publishers, which in many fields are the dominant publishers and so much better than the for-profit companies that seem more dominant in the life sciences especially. I'm most familiar with the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) in computer science. Sure, they have their own bureaucracies and added costs, but they run all kinds of other programs and events based on the profits from journals and conferences, including the kind of student scholarships to conferences they suggest. The overall costs are way lower, they're governed by the leading professors who are elected from the membership, they've been far more willing to negotiate with universities in the big transition to open access, and I've found very little meddling of the sort this piece describes.
In ACM / CS, the publishing pipeline is now fully based in LaTeX, so authors effectively do their own typesetting for their own articles. There is now a standardized template for submissions, so the version of the draft you send to peer review is typeset in the same way it will be published in the final version. In my experience, almost always the version that gets published is identical to the final "camera ready" version I submit after peer review.
Finally, peer reviewing is indeed not paid, but the way my fields treat peer review is that you are supposed to review proportionally to however much reviewing you obligate on others by the papers you / your students / your lab submit to peer review. If your paper goes out to three reviewers, you sign up for three reviews. Then for the reviewer coordinator / meta-reviewer burden, if your group/lab is submitting 6-8 papers a year, then you have an obligation to be on the editorial board / program committee, which comes with the reviewer coordinator burden of what a decent sized group/lab obligates on others. Of course, some people are still free riders, and many people submit publications who are not qualified to peer review, but it does change how you think about the "peer reviewing is free labor" issue.
- Mediterraneo10 6y ago> In my experience, almost always the version that gets published is identical to the final "camera ready" version I submit after peer review. This is actually a bad thing, and a sign of standards slipping. Even if one uses a LaTeX template there are all kinds of quality-typesetting nuances that many authors are not aware of: where non-breaking spaces are necessary, proper hyphenation of foreign-language names, en dashes instead of hyphens in ranges, etc. I have seen so many publications in maths and sciences where the author was expected to provide camera-ready copy and the final result was sloppy. I agree that learned societies can do a great job of publishing journals and Festschriften, and it is the norm in my own field where our learned societies never handed over their journals to a for-profit publisher. But I am happy that in my own field one's submissions still get hands-on work by trained copyeditors and typesetters so that the final result is perfect regardless of the author's own typesetting competence.
- catalogia 6y agoExcept for getting people's names right.. if people don't notice something wrong with the typesetting, is it truly wrong? If the people writing and reading documents don't notice the difference between en dashes and hyphens, then in what sense is the difference important?
- Topolomancer 6y agoAuthor here; that very much sounds like the utopia I am dreaming about :-) What kind of field are you in?
- Topolomancer 6y agoAuthor here; you make a lot of good points! I should have phrased the context of this article more clearly: I am aware of the existence of these 'good' publishers, and in machine learning (my main field), the publishing is mostly done via conferences anyway. My bad experiences stem mostly from established publishers such as Springer or Oxford University Press, who are often very important for certain application areas, such as as bioinformatics. The point about equations is very much true, though: _despite_ the fact of existing LaTeX templates, they take your paper and typeset it once again---often with detrimental results :-/ Concerning the peer reviewing: I fully agree! I myself am seeing reviewing as an honour and a duty to support my field. I am objecting to the reviewers/editors doing all this work and the publisher charging ludicrous prices to access a paper. Wiley still charges 42 USD for a PDF download and online only access of a paper I wrote 6 years ago! This is absolutely bonkers and not useful for people in countries/universities that are less well-off...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- tprice7 6y agoI don't see why your last paragraph should even slightly change how one feels about the "peer reviewing is free labour" issue. As you've described it, they are reviewing because they are indebted to other reviewers, not the publishers who are selling the fruits of their labour and keeping the profits.
- musicale 6y ago> they run all kinds of other programs and events based on the profits from journals and conferences That's the problem really: ACM viewing a digital library, journals, and conference proceedings as a cash cow to be milked for many unrelated purposes. ACM seems to have little interest in real open access as long as they are hooked on milking that cow. What's also terrible/embarrassing is that the ACM digital library doesn't even have an API, and its ToS forbid programmatic access. I would pull the plug on ACM if I could.
- Topolomancer 6y agoAt least their servers are reasonably fast. I failed to mention in the article that this is also ridiculous: having to wait 30s to access your article, while clicking through three paywalls...