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

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

I'm not sure how this is a reply to my post, which focused on the 
cost of peer review. How does more money going to a publisher 
make any difference at all with respect to the cost of peer 
review, which is generally not paid for by any journal publisher 
but is borne solely by the faculty who do the reviewing? The 
simple fact is that the more journals there are, the more 
articles there are to review, the greater is the burden of peer 
review on those doing the reviewing. Even with "light" reviewing, 
7,000 articles a year in PLoS One takes up a lot of reviewing 
time!

Sandy Thatcher


At 11:22 PM -0400 6/29/11, Armbruster, Chris wrote:
>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