Mathematicians Take a Stand

[Steerpike]

An article about publishing - this time academic publishing. I don't know how many of you have been following the boycott of Elsevier that started late last year, but this relate to that. Another example of how the new landscape in the digital age is shaking up the practices of established publishers.

The link opens a PDF file of the article:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1204.1351v1.pdf

 

[Ivan]

Interesting. As a student I can't say how many times I have seen a useful article that costs as much as a hard-back book merely to have a peek at an electronic copy. I wonder how much of this actually goes to the people who researched and wrote the article, and how much goes to now-unnecessary overhead; while it is understandable that those who worked to produce this information should be rewarded, it is somewhat draconian to do so by severely limiting access to that information.

 

[Fnord]

It's just representative of another death gasp of a dying and obsolete industry. With institutions like Harvard working on putting their entire library online, the exchange of ideas is going to become more and prevalent. And like the music and movie industry, those goods are no longer rivalrous and excludable in the internet age. The old business model just doesn't look sustainable.

 

[Steerpike]

I'm not sure journal authors receive royalties for those publications. And looking at the generic publishing agreement on Elsevier's web site, they assign copyright to Elsevier and get a license back to use the article for limited purposes.

 

[Fnord]

Academics don't usually receive income from scholarly journals, just as they don't get income from peer-review or editing. The whole industry is built upon the idea that academics must "publish or perish", so the private journal company gets its work free from the academics who work on publicly-subsidized funds and need to publish papers on a regular basis. Then the publisher sells access to these papers back to the academics. In that sense the publisher is an intermediary who is making income on one side while having nearly cost-free factor inputs on the other.

And that arrangement works out until the supplier of their inputs (the academics in this case) stop supplying those inputs. It goes to show that monopoly power has limitations. But, as I mentioned earlier, this isn't unique to this particular industry; there's a huge shift in many others. Fact of the matter is, libraries don't necessarily need paper copies of all these journals. I still receive a few from scholarly organizations I belong to, but most of anything I want access to, I can get right here from my laptop. It certainly takes up a whole lot less space in my office.

But this industry hasn't adapted yet and I think--in true Schumpeterian fashion--they won't. Instead they'll be phased out and driven out of the market by their own adherence to outmoded business models. Publishers will be the new buggy-whip makers and something else--better and more efficient--will fill the void.

 

[studentofrhythm]

Fnord is right. Oh, academia. I am ending a spell as a faculty member and I have had to publish. But I did it through an open-access journal. No cost of subscription, but still peer-reviewed. The quality control being done on a volunteer basis anyway, why should someone get paid for guarding access to the content as if it were a toll road?

It's really amazing to see the absurdity perpetuated to try to stop digital media from doing what it does best: make information available for very little cost. Copying is the natural order of things in this world, and to keep trying to make it behave like paper and press is doomed to failure, because the alternative is an intolerable police state.