Re: Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?

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

Begin forwarded message:

> 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.
>
> Andrew
>
>
> > Is 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/>



-------------------------------------------
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/18849915-ae8fa580
Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-aa268125
Unsubscribe Now: 
https://www.listbox.com/unsubscribe/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-32545cb4&post_id=20170630220422:9752BEC8-5E01-11E7-88F5-FE94E19263BA
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com