The Publishing Debacle (1)
I'm going to start here a new category of posts to talk about things in the 'academic' realm. And I'll start with a series of posts with my concerns about the prices of scientific journals. A major problem facing academic researchers is the ballooning subscription rates for journals. And there are substantially more journals than ever before. Even well-funded libraries have cut back, with some famous boycotts of Elsevier by Cornell, Harvard, MIT and others; Elsevier is thought by many to be the worst offender in journal pricing but they are not the only ones. I have a few points to make and I'll spread them out over a few posts:
1. Free content and free peer review should equal fair pricing. The journals neither write the papers nor perform the peer reviews. A number of journals require authors to perform the majority or sometimes all of the layout. These services are all provided free by authors and by professors who view the review process in particular as one of the most serious and important of their scholarly duties. There is an unwritten trust between academians and the presses that providing all content, both authoring and review, for free should translate into fair pricing. Sadly, it is past time to stop submitting to or performing peer review for publishers that are gouging. This is a messy topic for professors who must publish to further their careers and advance their research.