[GOAL] Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?

[Heather Morrison]

Indeed, great article. Building on this, a reflection: whatever one thinks of the ethics and legality of Elsevier's lawsuit against SciHub founder Alexandra Elbakyan, it appears to me that she has demonstrated that a Kazhakstani graduate student can provide the bulk of the important services contributed by Elsevier (hosting and serving up articles) at no cost to users, and apparently off the side of her desk. If this is correct, this says something about the real necessary marginal cost for providing this service, i.e. almost nothing.

Considering that academics do the real work of academic publishing - writing and peer review - if the traditional value add of publishers in storing and disseminating articles, necessary in the print and early electronic ages, can now be done for next to nothing, surely we can devise a new system that retains or strengthens quality at a fraction of the cost?

best,

--
Dr. Heather Morrison
Associate Professor
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa
Desmarais 111-02
613-562-5800 ext. 7634
Sustaining the Knowledge Commons: Open Access Scholarship
http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca<mailto:Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca>

On 2017-06-27, at 11:38 AM, "Reckling, Falk" <Falk.Reckling at fwf.ac.at<mailto:Falk.Reckling at fwf.ac.at>>
 wrote:

Indeed Eric, astonishingbackground story, almost all what you have to know about the publishing industry and very well written,



Best Falk



Von: Éric Archambault<mailto:eric.archambault at science-metrix.com>
Gesendet: Dienstag, 27. Juni 2017 09:26
An: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)<mailto:goal at eprints.org>
Betreff: [GOAL] Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?



Interesting article in the Guardian that spells out the role played by Robert Maxwell in the development of the scholarly journal industry.

Éric


Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other


Eric Archambault
1science.com
Science-Metrix.com
+1-514-495-6505 x111

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