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Your argument makes no sense. Journal publishers don’t weigh in on tenure or grant decisions. While they provide a conduit for materials that impact such thing
by spamizbad 3y ago
Your argument makes no sense.
Journal publishers don’t weigh in on tenure or grant decisions. While they provide a conduit for materials that impact such things (the researchers papers), they have no say in anything (including, incidentally, sometimes what gets published)
A publisher provided distribution. That’s it. They aren’t even the chef in this analogy: they’re FOH staff.
Journal editors are faculty at academic institutions. They may or may not be paid a small fee by the publisher for their efforts but it’s typically not significant. Reviewers are unpaid volunteers.
Journal publishers historically charged money because they managed the printing and distribution of print journals. Some also facilitated distribution of drafts. That’s it. The bulk of the intellectual labor was done for free by academics.
As you can imagine, in the age of the internet, this entire process can be replaced by a CMS solution hosted in the cloud.
- Someone 3y ago> A publisher provided distribution. That’s it. throwawaaarrgh argues that they provide prestige, too. I agree. Certainly, I can’t see that publishers only provide distribution, as that should be almost trivial to replicate, and lead to a race to the bottom, price-wise, and the entire process would long have been “replaced by a CMS solution hosted in the cloud”.
- spamizbad 3y agoThat prestige exists because of its editors and its history in a specific field of study. There’s no “value” being created by the publisher itself in this respect.
- lores 3y agoThere is, in hiring a highly qualified set of reviewers.
- hgsgm 3y agoReviewers are volunteers. Journals main business is selling the stone for stone soup.
- lores 3y agoI worked in the kitchen and know how the soup is made. If you insist on calling it stone soup, then it's granite - unglamourous, lots of skilled but drudge work to process, but valuable then.
- lores 3y agoYou are absolutely correct. I have made a tool that suggests the most suitable journal for a particular paper to publish. Fewer than 50% researchers care; they all want to be in Nature, price be damned. Academia is not wrong to say publishers make too much profit, but is entirely unwilling to change the way it works too. And how much is Nature supposed to charge when they need 600 highly qualified people to pick the best handful of papers amongst thousands?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]