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

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

I focused on peer review because I was responding to Heather 
Morrison's post, which was about the cost of peer review.

Sandy Thatcher


>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