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

[David Prosser <david.prosser@rluk.ac.uk>]

Peer review is not the only cost of scholarly publishing and so 
I'm not sure why Sandy is focussing on it.

Here's a couple of thoughts.  Elsevier (and I'm using them as 
shorthand for most large publishers) receives approximately $5000 
per article they publish.  PLoS receives less than $2000 per 
article they publish*.

The question is: is Elsevier and its ilk providing 2.5 times the 
service, impact, and quality that PLoS provides?

David

(PLoS one has an article processing charge of $1350.  Other PLoS 
journals have higher charges, but as they publish far fewer 
articles I'm assuming that the average comes in at less than $2k. 
Please let me know if I'm wrong.)

On 29 Jun 2011, at 04:03, Sandy Thatcher wrote:

> 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