Academic publishing

Economics of publishing

Cameron Neylon runs a cottage industry producing pragmatic publishing critique from an institutional economics perspective:

e.g. The Marginal Costs of Article Publishing or A Journal is a Club:

we’d been talking about communities, cultures, economics, “public-making” but it was the word ‘club’ and its associated concepts, both pejorative and positive that crystalised everything. We were talking about the clubbishness of making knowledge — the term “Knowledge Clubs” emerged quickly — but also the benefits that such a club might gain in choosing to invest in wider sharing.

Working paper: Potts et al. (2016). Alternatively, see Afonso (2014), “How Academia resembles a drug gang”.

How to Get Something Out of Neoliberal Critique Without (Immediately) Overthrowing the Capitalist System:

In the business setting this often leads incumbent publishers to a kind of spluttering defense of the value they create, while simultaneously complaining that the customer doesn’t appreciate their work. Flip the target slightly and we’d call this “missing the new market opportunity” or “failing to express the value offering clearly”. […]

Lingua, […] has gone from one of the most important journals in analytical linguistics to no longer being in the field, and seems well on its way to becoming irrelevant. How does a company as competent in its business strategy as Elsevier let this happen? I would argue, as I did at the time that the former editorial board of Lingua resigned to form Glossa that it was a failure to understand the assets.

The neoliberal analysis of Lingua showed an asset generating good revenues, with good analytics and a positive ROI. The capitalist analysis focussed on the fixed assets and trademarks. But it turns out these weren’t what was creating value. What was creating value was the community, built around an editorial board and the good will associated with that.

Also, see Pushing costs downstream.`

Here’s a thing I would like to be said a little better, but think is important An Adversarial Review of “Adversarial Generation of Natural Language”: The argument is that even though it’s nice that arxiv avoids some of the problems of traditional publishing, it inherits some of the problems that traditional publishing tries to avoid. No free lunches.

Realpolitik of journals

Journal rank and journal impact factor etc. Who cares? Your funders care, against your advice but whatever, they have the money, so you need to care too in order that they will keep funding you.

Latrobe explains it. Scimago Journal rank is the Google Pagerank-inspired slightly hipper journal ranking. Their search tool is probably what you want. Impact factors come from the 60s and are still around, h-Index is also a thing. journalrank might be a factor too?

According to Latrobe, we have the following indices and (partial list of) weaknesses.

Tools

See also academic reading workflow for reader-oriented tips.

• researchers.one:

  A platform for scholarly publishing and peer review that empowers researchers with the

  • Autonomy to pursue their passions,
  • Authority to develop and disseminate their work, and
  • Access to engage with the international community of scholars.

• unpaywall:

  Millions of research papers are available for free on government and university web servers, legally uploaded by the authors themselves, with the express permission of publishers. Unpaywall automatically harvests these freely shared papers from thousands of legal institutional repositories, preprint servers, and publishers, making them all available to you as you read.

• Zenodo “is an open dependable home for the long-tail of science, enabling researchers to share and preserve any research outputs in any size, any format and from any science.”

  • Research. Shared. — all research outputs from across all fields of science are welcome!
  • Citeable. Discoverable. — uploads gets a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) to make them easily and uniquely citeable…
  • Flexible licensing — because not everything is under Creative Commons.
  • Safe — your research output is stored safely for the future in same cloud infrastructure as research data from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

  A major win is the easy DOI-linking of data and code for reproducible research. (for free)

• Open Conference Systems (OCS)

  is a free Web publishing tool that will create a complete Web presence for your scholarly conference. OCS will allow you to:

  • create a conference Web site
  • compose and send a call for papers
  • electronically accept paper and abstract submissions
  • allow paper submitters to edit their work
  • post conference proceedings and papers in a searchable format
  • post, if you wish, the original data sets
  • register participants
  • integrate post-conference online discussions

• Peeriodicals

  A peeriodical is a lightweight virtual journal with you as the Editor-in-chief, giving you complete freedom in setting editorial policy to select the most interesting and useful manuscripts for your readers.

  I did not find that explanation so useful as the interview the creators gave.

• The Winnower

  is an open access online scholarly publishing platform that employs open post-publication peer review. You guessed it! We think transparency from start to finish is critical in scientific communication. […]

• Retraction Watch for sufficiently-high-profile-research is a watchdog blog that has somehow ended up doing well-regarded gatekeeping/exposure.

Prescriptive

Iterations of how this system of review and dissemination system could work better? See Peer review.

The new universal libraries

Incoming

• Is Frontiers predatory?

  • Is Frontiers a potential predatory publisher? – For Better Science
  • Is Frontiers Media a Predatory Publisher?

• PNAS is Not a Good Journal (and Other Hard Truths about Journal Prestige). At this point, most people in science are aware that journals are behaving yet more parasitically. They are sustained by the reputational capital of their self-fulfilling prophecies of prestige, but are spending down that capital. The most generous interpretation of academia’s response is that we are too busy trying not to buttress public trust in science to reform these undeservedly respected institutions. The least generous is that we are symbiotic parasites together with the journals who want to use them for our own reputations at the cost of public trust in science. In between is the story that we are all too busy trying to meet deadlines to solve the collective action problem of boycotting journals.

• Identify trusted publishers for your research • Think. Check. Submit.

• “Journal Evaluation Tool” by Shilpa Rele, Marie Kennedy et al.

• Funder compliant publishers | OAPEN

• Felix Schönbrodt, My personal reviewing policy: No more billion-dollar donations.

• The Dark Rule Utilitarian Argument For Science Piracy

• Journal of Negative Results

• Étienne Fortier-Dubois, Why Is ‘Nature’ Prestigious?

• Web of Science: A Web of Nonsense

• Google Scholar Metrics

• Z-Library Project

References