[GOAL] Scientist: Academic publishing is broken

Thu Apr 19 10:59:54 BST 2012

Dear all,

I've read this opinion in the Scientist Academic publishing is broken by 
Michael P. Taylor and I think should be of interest of the list

The current system by which academics publish their scientific discoveries 
is a massive waste of money.
i would like to point out the three reasons why, according to Michael P 
Taylor, researchers continue publishing their papers in Elsevier, even 
knowing that the average cost per article in any Elsevier journal in 2010 
was $10,500 US.   
First: monopoly effort of some journals (there are no competitors in some 
areas. Cell
Second: Academics tend to be conservative
(...) Third, and most important, while it may cost a fraction as much 
money to publish in an open-access journal, those savings are not rewarded 
to the researchers. With open-access publishing, the researchers must pay 
those fees out of their own grant money, or with department funds, while 
subscription bills are footed by the university libraries, which have 
completely separate budgets. So, even though, under an open-access 
publishing regime, for every thousand dollars that a researcher or 
department spends on author fees, the library could save eight times as 
much in paid journal subscriptions, the division of budgets within 
universities (and the fact that until all publishing is open access 
libraries will still have to continue subscribing to paid journals) is 
inhibiting this transition. 

I'm sure the list will add some more.

http://the-scientist.com/2012/03/19/opinion-academic-publishing-is-broken/
Cheers
Consol Garcia Gómez
Responsable Unitat de Recerca
Biblioteca del Campus del Baix Llobregat
UPC - BarcelonaTech
CBL Edifici D-7
Esteve Terradas, 10
08860 Castelldefels
Tel. 93 552 35 63
consol.garcia at upc.edu
http://bibliotecnica.upc.edu/BCBL/
http://twitter.com/BibliotecaCBL
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20120419/54a62e19/attachment.html 