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Re: Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?
From: "Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>
Date: Fri, 30 Jun 2017 22:04:14 -0400
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From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com> Date: June 30, 2017 at 12:06:41 PM EDT To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Re: Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science? Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com [Note: This comment comes from friend Andrew Odlyzko. DLH] From: odlyzko () umn edu (Andrew Odlyzko) Subject: Re: [Dewayne-Net] Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science? Date: June 28, 2017 at 11:03:31 AM EDT To: dewayne () warpspeed com Dewayne, It is a very nice article. But it conflates several issues, and has some serious distortions. High profits at Elsevier (as well as at other publishers, including quite a few non-profit professional societies) are one issue. They provide an interesting perspective on the general evolution of the economy, in which high profits are often attained with small investments by seizing strategic choke points. I wrote about this in ""Open Access, library and publisher competition, and the evolution of general commerce," Evaluation Review, vol. 39, no. 1, Feb. 2015, pp. 130-163, preprint at http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/libpubcomp.pdf Another issue is simply the unnecessarily high costs of scholarly publishing. Elsevier (as well as many non-profit society publishers) collect about $5,000 in total on average for each article. There is plenty of evidence (see the article cited above) that 10% of that would suffice to provide a peer reviewed journal system of quality comparable to the present one. (Just the distribution of articles by themselves is almost trivial, the arXiv prepring archive operates at a cost of about $10 per preprint.) The main obstacle is the intertia of academia. Scholars could easily change the system, but coordinating them (or even getting them to pay any attention to the issues) is hard. Yet another issue is the influence of the journal system on the whole research enterprise. But there it seems that journals (and in this respect it is not clear Elsevier and other commercial publishers are much different from professional society ones) simply reflect the general sociology of science. Even if Elsevier gave away its journals, those problems would not change. There is a slew of publications on the problems with with current system, and just one example is the paper of Vinkers et al. in Br. Med. J. in 2015, "Use of positive and negative words in scientific PubMed abstracts between 1974 and 2014: retrospective analysis," www.bmj.com/content/351/bmj.h6467 with a popular writeup by Philip Ball in Nature, http://www.nature.com/news/novel-amazing-innovative-positive-words-on-the-rise-in-science-papers-1.19024 A fourth issue in the Buranyi article is the role of Robert Maxwell. There was much negative about his contributions. But if one reads the Buranyi piece carefully, one gets some glimpses of the positive effects that Maxwell had on scholarly publishing. He did recognize the rapid expansion of the research establishment, and in particular the rise of new fields, fields that traditional professional societies were neglecting. I have not heard of any cases where he tried to influence the scientific content of his journals (say, by suppressing articles about dangers of tobacco, or of pollution). So yes, the high prices and high profits that he extracted were regrettable. But he just exploited the opportunities that traditional scholarly publishers had left open. AndrewIs the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science? It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google – and it was created by one of Britain’s most notorious tycoons: Robert Maxwell. By Stephen Buranyi Jun 27 2017 <https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science>Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>
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- Re: Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science? Dave Farber (Jul 01)