For the last few days I've been needlessly obsessed with a study I found at Georgia State University, about peer-reviewed journals. (The image is of Fondren Library at Rice University, where I got some really great naps during the 1970s, and worked for a peer-reviewed journal.)
The article cites a study from England indicating academics prefer peer review to simply posting studies on the Web and letting everyone criticize them.
I grabbed hold of a telling detail, while nearly half believed open access (as using the Web is called) would undermine the current system, 41% said that would be a good thing.
I should have waited, because today the folks at Georgia State gave me (as they say) "the rest of the story."
It's an article in Library Journal which the publisher (Reed-Elsevier) has conveniently declined to make available on their Web site, which offers the smoking gun.
The article, by Theodore Bergstrom and R. Preston McAfee, charged that the publishers of peer-reviewed journals are collecting monopoly profits on labor donated to them by universities.
It's time to recognize a simple fact and react to it: the symbiotic relationship between academics and for-profit publishers has broken down. Large for-profit publishers are gouging the academic community for as much as the market will bear. Moreover, they will not stop pricing journals at the monopoly level, because shareholders demand it.
So far, universities have failed to use one of the most powerful tools they possess: charging for their valuable input. Journal editing employs a great deal of professorial and staff time, as well as supplies, office space, and computers, all provided by universities.
Academic journals cost very little to print or distribute. They are produced, in fact, by researchers who agree to be part of the peer-review process. They are a bottleneck through which knowledge must pass before the rest of us get a crack at it.
Yet these same journals are owned by for-profit publishers, who keep raising their prices, forcing universities to pay for them, often with government money
At ZDNet Open Source recently I called this a battle between academe and open source. But in fact there's more to it than that. There's the abuse of monopoly power, and the acceptance of an abusive relationship by the academic community.
When private companies are allowed to gain monopoly profits, often paid-for by government funds, and act as a bottleneck to knowledge, something is clearly very wrong.
With apologies to Bergstrom and McAfee there are, in fact, several things schools could do:
- They could create competitors to the privately-run journals.
- They could demand payment for their professors' work on those journals, as the authors suggest.
- They could create a new method, acceptable to them, for creating peer-review products that are published online.
That unavailable Library Journal article is a Clue. If you want to restrict access to academic journals, either before or after they've edited and approved a paper, you can do that. The Internet provides a highly flexible system, with a highly flexible set of business models, for doing that.
Just stop making this refusal to consider "open access" and continue the present system as some kind of stand on principle.
It is an economic issue. You're coddling monopolists.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for over 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the "Interactive Age Daily" for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age, and dozens of other publications over the years.
1. Espen on December 14, 2005 06:08 PM writes...
I read somewhere that the speed of academic publishing is little faster today than what it was at Newton's time, with manuscripts crossing the Atlantic by sailing ship.
The academic libraries are all complaining about the exorbitant costs - and pointing out how the open web is getting better and better.
My prediction is that most academic publishing will be on the web in 5 years.
Permalink to Comment2. Brad Hutchings on December 14, 2005 07:16 PM writes...
Academic publishing is a system that metes out prestige in a way that benefits the participants. Prestige is created from being highly exclusive. The professors who work on the papers and review the papers can get more than their time's worth in prestige if they're working on the right papers for the right journals. The universities earn their own prestige kickbacks by having their profs contribute. This is totally a win-win situation for all involved. Some within the universitry may complain about costs to libraries. Some outside may complain about the restricted access to knowledge that such a system puts in place. But the publishers are not the sole beneficiaries of the arrangement.
Having participated in the process in my grad school career, it always struck me as much more deliberative than the open market. I prefer more unregulated, open market systems for access to goods. I don't think those markets owe new players any special access. With knowledge, however, which has such low cost to reproduce and high cost to create, I am partial to systems, however anachronistic they may seem, which reward deliberation and expert specialization. Turning academic publishing into the Wikipedia would be a total disaster for the state of useful, correct knowledge!! For the fields where the journals do really well, everyone (or even most people) DOES NOT have anything useful to contribute. The creation of knowledge in those spaces needs to be left to the specialists. The current system does a pretty good job of that, and the proposals for more open systems rarely take that into account.
Permalink to Comment3. Preston McAfee on December 15, 2005 01:24 AM writes...
Open access doesn't mean "publish everything." Publishing everything will guarantee that no one wants to read the output, online or not. Instead, open access journals need to employ the same high standards that characterize print journals. This has nothing to do with for-profit or non-profit. Either can be open access, and both would need to collect revenue by another means that charging for access, such as author charges, submission charges or (modest) print copy charges.
Moreover, as we show, for-profit journals are not the only source of prominence and prestige, and in fact offer lower citation counts than non-profit journals. For-profit journals, of course, have an incentive to exploit prominence in their pricing. This extracts a large revenue for the for-profit publisher, in spite of the fact that work is mostly done by uncompensated professors.
Permalink to Comment4. Matthew Cockerill on December 15, 2005 06:00 AM writes...
See also this recent open letter from 60 Fellows of the Royal Society in the UK, calling on the Royal Society (itself a major publisher) to be more positive about moves towards open access.
Permalink to Comment5. Brad Hutchings on December 15, 2005 05:06 PM writes...
OK Preston, so answer one question which none of the proponents of "open access" seems to want to answer. Why, if there are open alternatives ranging from self-publishing on the web to non-profit journals, do academics still flock to the for-profit journals, effectively working as slave labor for the greedy monopolists, even in the face of (or in spite of) loud protests from critics like you. You guys are academics, and that means "not as stupid as the rest of us" (according to Wikipedia). So what gives? What value do these for-profit journals have that turns so many of your peers into meer idiots like the rest of us?
I suspect your accounting is just bad. You're overlooking some very valuable good that makes all these individual deals with the devils worth it. You can't possibly be saying that academia is too dumb for its own good, can you?
Permalink to Comment6. Francine Fialkoff on December 22, 2005 04:39 PM writes...
Library Journal reported on the open letter, and, in fact,that news story is available on our web site.http://www.libraryjournal.com/article/CA6282794.html Our corporate parent didn't control it at all.
Permalink to CommentFrancine Fialkoff
Editor
Library Journal