Article, UK: "Is it time for our universities to fight back against profiteering publishers?"

[Andy]

Academic publishing is a uniquely troubling industry. Its profits are worth billions annually and its profit margins compare favourably with those of oil giants and tech juggernauts. Unlike these industries, however, its core workforce does not see a return on its earnings despite the marginal costs being few.
How is this possible? Academics work hard to produce research that is funded by taxpayers, charities and universities. This work is effectively donated for free to academic journals who pass it to other academics for peer review as unpaid volunteers. If the work is deemed up to scratch by these volunteers, the journal accepts the work and the university must sign the copyright over to publishers, who are free to place it online behind a paywall.

This prevents the public, who typically funded it, from ever seeing it – unless they want to pay up to several hundred pounds for a single PDF file. Adding insult to injury, the publishers then charge the very same institutions that donated the work millions of pounds for their libraries to access it.

https://thebristolcable.org/2017/12/time-universities-fight-back-profiteering-publishers/

 

[adreno]

It was time for this a long time ago.

 

[Barry]

Great article. The classic paywall scenario also means some possibly dubious researchers can obscure their work from public view. Interesting this article is by the Bristol Cable.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

I think the universities have brought this on themselves by 'measuring' research in terms of publications.

There is a very simple solution. We already all have college websites provided by the college IT department. Anything we want to publish can be uploaded on to the college site. The college can easily organise peer review - there could be a mutual system arranged between universities. All research that has actually been done should be published anyway. So peer review would not be a matter of publish or reject. It would be a much more useful commentary on the value of the material. As it is academics have to peer review for journals who are very often extremely unhelpful with software etc. SO there would be no extra work doing peer review for sister colleges.

So work from University College London would be published by University College London, with peer review. Nothing could be simpler. All those people at Elsevier are just a waste of space.

 

[Barry]

Sounds good @Jonathan Edwards. And all that misspent money could be reinvested into much more worthwhile activities - education, research, etc. I also suspect that universities doing their own publishing, might itself be very educational in its own right.

 

[Sean]

I don't have the words to describe how much I loathe the parasitic for-profit journal industry and their amazingly blatant and successful scam.

Sooner it is killed off, the better.

 

[Samuel]

IAll research that has actually been done should be published anyway.

true.

> So work from University College London would be published by University College London, with peer review.

still concerns regarding incentives, transparency, pre-registration, providing data before publication in open and documented formats and making it accessible, etc.

we watched agape as qmul fought tooth and nail against science.

but plos one didn't solve it either. they are being cowards.

 

[Jonathan Edwards]

still concerns regarding incentives, transparency, pre-registration, providing data before publication in open and documented formats and making it accessible, etc.

I think if individual Universities/Colleges ran their own publishing they would be motivated to police their own people's standards otherwise they would rapidly get a general reputation for being 'dodgy'. Institutions with good staff doing good work could afford to lay everything bare and still come out on top. Any institutions trying to hide their dirty washing would very rapidly come to be known for that.

No system is going to be perfect or impervious to corruption but the current system could not really be worse.