Re Study finds that for-pay scholarly journals contribute virtually nothing to the papers they publish

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

Begin forwarded message:

> From: Sharon Noonan Kramer <snk1955 () aol com>
> Date: March 16, 2018 at 1:59:25 PM EDT
> To: dave () farber net
> Subject: Re: [IP] Re Study finds that for-pay scholarly journals contribute virtually nothing to the papers they 
> publish
>
> Maybe it should say "pay to pad CV's for grant applications or for paid-for-hire services as an expert witness"
>  
> Sharon Kramer
>  
>  
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave Farber <farber () gmail com>
> To: ip <ip () listbox com>
> Sent: Fri, Mar 16, 2018 7:53 am
> Subject: [IP] Re Study finds that for-pay scholarly journals contribute virtually nothing to the papers they publish
>
> Maybe it should say “pay for tenure”
>
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Steve Crocker <steve () stevecrocker com>
> Date: March 15, 2018 at 3:59:08 PM EDT
> To: dave () farber net
> Subject: Re: [IP] Study finds that for-pay scholarly journals contribute virtually nothing to the papers they publish
>
> I looked into this briefly several years ago.  The factor that sticks out like a sore thumb is the role these 
> journals play in the tenure process.
>
> Steve
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 14, 2018 at 8:37 PM, Dave Farber <farber () gmail com> wrote:
>
>
>
> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Date: March 14, 2018 at 4:23:06 PM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Study finds that for-pay scholarly journals contribute virtually nothing to the papers they 
> publish
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from reader Randall Head.  DLH]
>
> Study finds that for-pay scholarly journals contribute virtually nothing to the papers they publish
> from the all-that-glitters-is-not-gold dept
> By Glyn Moody
> Mar 13 2018
> <https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20180308/03225939387/research-shows-that-published-versions-papers-costly-academic-titles-add-almost-nothing-to-freely-available-preprints-they-are.shtml>
>
> The open access movement believes that academic publications should be freely available to all, not least because 
> most of the research is paid for by the public purse. Open access supporters see the high cost of many academic 
> journals, whose subscriptions often run into thousands of dollars per year, as unsustainable for cash-strapped 
> libraries, and unaffordable for researchers in emerging economies. The high profit margins of leading academic 
> publishers -- typically 30-40% -- seem even more outrageous when you take into account the fact that publishers get 
> almost everything done for free. They don't pay the authors of the papers they publish, and rely on the unpaid 
> efforts of public-spirited academics to carry out crucial editorial functions like choosing and reviewing submissions.
>
> Academic publishers justify their high prices and fat profit margins by claiming that they "add value" as papers 
> progress through the publication process. Although many have wondered whether that is really true -- does a bit of 
> sub-editing and design really justify the ever-rising subscription costs? -- hard evidence has been lacking that 
> could be used to challenge the publishers' narrative. A paper from researchers at the University of California and 
> Los Alamos Laboratory is particularly relevant here. It appeared first on arXiv.org in 2016 (pdf), but has only just 
> been "officially" published (paywall). It does something really obvious but also extremely valuable: it takes around 
> 12,000 academic papers as they were originally released in their preprint form, and compares them in detail with the 
> final version that appears in the professional journals, sometimes years later, as the paper's own history 
> demonstrates. The results are unequivocal:
>
> We apply five different similarity measures to individual extracted sections from the articles' full text contents 
> and analyze their results. We have shown that, within the boundaries of our corpus, there are no significant 
> differences in aggregate between pre-prints and their corresponding final published versions. In addition, the vast 
> majority of pre-prints (90%-95%) are published by the open access pre-print service first and later by a commercial 
> publisher.
>
> That is, for the papers considered, which were taken from the arXiv.org preprint repository, and compared with the 
> final versions that appeared, mostly in journals published by Elsevier, there were rarely any important additions. 
> That applies to titles, abstracts and the main body of the articles. The five metrics applied looked at 
> letter-by-letter changes between the two versions, as well as more subtle semantic differences. All five agreed that 
> the publishers made almost no changes to the initial preprint, which nearly always appeared before the published 
> version, minimizing the possibility that the preprint merely reflected the edited version.
>
> The authors of the paper point out a number of ways in which their research could be improved and extended. For 
> example, the reference section of papers before and after editing was not compared, so it is possible that academic 
> publishers add more value in this section; the researchers plan to investigate this aspect. Similarly, since the 
> arXiv.org papers are heavily slanted towards physics, mathematics, statistics, and computer science, further work 
> will look at articles from other fields, such as economics and biology.
>
> Such caveats aside, this is an important result that has not received the attention it deserves. It provides hard 
> evidence of something that many have long felt: that academic publishers add almost nothing during the process of 
> disseminating research in their high-profile products. The implications are that libraries should not be paying for 
> expensive subscriptions to academic journals, but simply providing access to the equivalent preprints, which offer 
> almost identical texts free of charge, and that researchers should concentrate on preprints, and forget about 
> journals. Of course, that means that academic institutions must do the same when it comes to evaluating the 
> publications of scholars applying for posts.
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/
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>
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