Re: Publishers - your thoughts on jobs for your authors and reviewers?

[Sandy Thatcher <sandy.thatcher@alumni.princeton.edu>]

Besides pointing out the obvious, viz., that university press 
employees are just as subject to being cut as any other 
university staff are and thus it makes no sense to interpret this 
to be the position of the journal publishers in our ranks, I 
would point out that the article does not address the "perverse 
incentives" noted by one of the commenters that drive the whole 
system and result in ever increasing article output by faculty 
(which, in turn, partly accounts for price increases exceeding 
the rate of inflation and adds to the burden on faculty of peer 
reviewing more articles). Nor does it offer any solution so far 
as peer review is concerned. The fact is that open access is no 
answer at all to the cost of peer review.

Indeed, to the extent that librarians encourage the launching of 
more OA journals resulting in ever more articles being produced, 
the cost of peer review will rise even further. I don't know that 
it is fair to accuse any publishers of being responsible for 
encouraging the increase in article output. The reasons for this 
increase lie much more in the "perverse incentives" of the whole 
promotion-and-tenure process as well as the system of research 
grants that seems to reward scientists who are most "productive" 
in terms of number of articles published. Until these "perverse 
incentives" change, there will be no decrease in peer-review 
costs.

Sandy Thatcher



At 10:43 PM -0400 6/27/11, Heather Morrison wrote:

>This quote from Graham Taylor, director of academic publishing 
>at the Publishers Association, just came to my attention:  "The 
>only way for universities to save money is to make people 
>redundant," From:  Jump, P. (2010)  Pay out then priced out: bid 
>to rein in high journal costs Times Higher Education: 
>http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storycode=414106
>
>Considering that the focus of this article is reining in high 
>journal costs, I am not sure how this quote could be interested 
>as saying another other than that publishers are quite happy to 
>see jobs at universities cut to retain profit levels. This could 
>mean loss of academic positions - the very authors and reviewers 
>who provide the work for scholarly journals, for free. Or it 
>could mean loss of support staff positions, which would impact 
>the workload of academics. Or perhaps this means librarians - 
>the publishers' customers and partners?
>
>Question for publishers: is this a common view? Go ahead and 
>push the people who do the work for us for free out on the 
>street, just don't lay a finger on our profit margins? Given the 
>austerity measures that have taken place in recent years, it 
>seems highly likely that at the very least some of the academic 
>authors and reviewers are now literally doing the work for free, 
>on furlough without the benefit of the academic salaries enjoyed 
>in the past.
>
>Thanks to David Prosser for the pointer to this quote: 
>Prosser, D. C. (2011). Reassessing the value proposition: First 
>steps towards a fair(er) price for scholarly journals. Serials, 
>24(1), 60-63.
>
>Thoughts?
>
>best,
>
>Heather G. Morrison
>Doctoral Candidate, Simon Fraser University School of
>Communication
>http://www.cmns.sfu.ca/
>The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
>http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com