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

["Armbruster, Chris" <Chris.Armbruster@EUI.eu>]

May I suggest that open access is indeed a solution - a solution 
that increases the budget available for scholarly publishing, 
possibly quite dramatically, should research funders start paying 
APCs on a large scale. In 'public' economies finding a new/second 
source from which to fund expenses often works (e.g. if the money 
going into a national health insurance scheme is not enough, why 
not raise tax on consumption and pump that money into the system 
too...).

Publishers are right in rushing into new ventures to tap new 
funding streams (though we may argue how well they go about 
this...), and all the scholars condemned to 'publish or perish' 
will be grateful to publishers for increasing publishing 
opportunities.

Some publishers might then lament that certain formats or 
disciplines are not doing so well, but I am not persuaded that 
this is not simply due to a lack of business strategy, marketing 
prowess and the ability to find the customer that will pay... for 
the imperative to publish and purchase seems unbroken.

Chris Armbruster


On 29 Jun 2011, at 05:03, 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
>
>
>
> 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