[liberationtech] For everyone and their grad students: Fake, pay-to-publish journals & conferences

Todd Davies davies at stanford.edu
Mon Apr 8 11:37:13 PDT 2013 

The model that most appeals to me at the moment is one that has been 
talked about for years by Doug Engelbart and others: Researchers publish 
in open access repositories whose costs are modest and can be funded 
through grants and institutional cost-sharing. Light moderation classifies 
articles for appropriateness in categories proposed by the authors. 
Secondary sites with their own reputations publish reviews, 
recommendations, and ratings, with trackbacks on the host repository, and 
these influence reading and citing by other researchers. The 
infrastructure for this largely exists already (arXiv, SSRN, etc.). 
Journals, in this environment, would become part of the post-publication 
review process, giving up the right of exclusivity, and would sink or swim 
based on whatever funding model they have.

Todd

Todd Davies                   ***  email: davies at stanford.edu
Symbolic Systems Program      ***  phone: 1-650-723-4091
Stanford University           ***  fax: 1-650-723-5666
Stanford, CA, 94305-2150      ***  web: www.stanford.edu/~davies
USA                           ***  office: 460-040C

On Mon, 8 Apr 2013, LISTS wrote:

> Indeed, this would be a problem. However, it's already a problem, which is to say that poorer universities cannot afford
> subscriptions to EBSCO and whatnot to begin with, and thus their faculty have trouble keeping up with research in comparison to
> those at richer schools. What I'm suggesting here could at least alleviate this problem, because richer schools would subsidize
> access to research.
> 
> Moreover, I'm imagining that the cost of pay-to-publish would be far lower than for-profit schemes like T&F and Elsevier, thus
> enabling poorer school's libraries to save money and actually increase their faculty's ability to do research (assuming that's
> their mission). However, I don't have numbers on this, so I could be wrong.
> 
> - Rob Gehl
> 
> On 04/08/2013 11:52 AM, Glassman, Michael wrote:
> 
> The problem with this is that faculty from wealthier universities will have much more capability to publish than faculty from les
> s wealthy universities.  And those who can get their work supported by those with money have an upper hand of getting more inform
> ation out than those who do not have their work supported.  There is already enough of this in grants perhaps.   Maybe we could e
> nvision something like low cost subscriptions so that individuals or universities could pay a small fee to journals they use a lo
> t.  This works well on a number of political blogs.
> 
> Michael
> ________________________________________
> From: liberationtech-bounces at lists.stanford.edu [liberationtech-bounces at lists.stanford.edu] on behalf of LISTS [lists at robertwgehl
> .org]
> Sent: Monday, April 08, 2013 1:45 PM
> To: liberationtech at lists.stanford.edu
> Subject: Re: [liberationtech] For everyone and their grad students: Fake, pay-to-publish journals & conferences
> 
> Or, potentially, university libraries could shift from buying
> subscriptions to paying for their university faculty's publication fees.
> If the ultimate product is an open access publication, then the issue
> isn't paying for access, but rather paying to produce the public good.
> 
> - Rob Gehl
> 
> On 04/08/2013 11:42 AM, michael gurstein wrote:
> 
> Publishing may be dirt cheap but any systematic/formal e.g. academic
> publishing isn't free... So the problem is that while there is a necessary
> and valuable shift from commercial publishing (and outrageous profiteering)
> to open access online publishing there really aren't any good business
> models yet to cover the (much less but not totally trivial) costs of the new
> forms of academic publishing.
> 
> If for whatever reason (and there are lots including the issues pointed to
> here) one doesn't want to go to a pay for play model that leaves
> advertising(???) or donations (???) or...
> 
> M
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: liberationtech-bounces at lists.stanford.edu
> [mailto:liberationtech-bounces at lists.stanford.edu] On Behalf Of Richard
> Brooks
> Sent: Monday, April 08, 2013 9:34 AM
> To: liberationtech at lists.stanford.edu
> Subject: Re: [liberationtech] For everyone and their grad students: Fake,
> pay-to-publish journals & conferences
> 
> It's not curious. It is accurate. As the funding model moved from
> subscribers paying for access to authors paying for publication, the
> financial incentives changed as well. The loosening of standards is an
> obvious consequence of this decision.
> 
> The question of how best to publish quality academic information is
> non-trivial. Like the question of where to get quality current affairs
> information. It will take a while for things to adjust to the ability of the
> Internet to make publishing dirt-cheap.
> 
> 
> 
> On 04/08/2013 12:19 PM, James Losey wrote:
> 
> I think it's curious how this article frames the journals as "open
> access" rather than a more appropriate "pay to play"
> 
> On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 6:05 PM, Yosem Companys <companys at stanford.edu
> <mailto:companys at stanford.edu>> wrote:
>
>      From: Nathaniel Poor <natpoor at gmail.com
> <mailto:natpoor at gmail.com>>
> 
> 
> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/08/health/for-scientists-an-exploding-w
> orld-of-pseudo-academia.html
>
>      "The scientists who were recruited to appear at a conference called
>      Entomology-2013 thought they had been selected to make a presentation
>      to the leading professional association of scientists who study
>      insects. But they found out the hard way that they were wrong...."
>
>      This has been a problem for a while, but now it's big enough to be a
>      newspaper story.
>
>      -------------------------------
>      Nathaniel Poor, Ph.D.
>      http://natpoor.blogspot.com/
>      https://sites.google.com/site/natpoor/
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> 
> 
> 
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> --
> ===================
> R. R. Brooks
> 
> Associate Professor
> Holcombe Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Clemson
> University
> 
> 313-C Riggs Hall
> PO Box 340915
> Clemson, SC 29634-0915
> USA
> 
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