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

Wed Jun 28 07:33:14 BST 2017

I can fully support Peter's assessment of Buranyi's article. He and I spent a fair bit of time over the telephone and exchanged quite a few e-mails while he was preparing this article. The story clearly mutated as the title indicates because he was originally seeking other kinds of information, more in line with the title, but his piece on Maxwell is first rate. 

I had begun to dig a little into this in earlier pieces of mine, but he has gone much, much further. I learned quite a bit reading it. One should never forget that Maxwell sued Garfield on copyright infringement grounds in order to pry the Science Citation Index away from him. That failed, but the idea of owning both journals and the means to "assess" them - quotation marks highly needed here to express skepticism over the whole process - was not forgotten and Elsevier has been trying to create this kind of system with Scopus.

Nil novi sub sole!

Jean-Claude Guédon
________________________________________
De : goal-bounces at eprints.org [goal-bounces at eprints.org] de la part de Peter Murray-Rust [pm286 at cam.ac.uk]
Envoyé : mardi 27 juin 2017 18:16
À : Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Objet : Re: [GOAL] Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?

I'd like to publicly commend Stephen Buranyi for this article. He spent a *lot*of time on it, and spent a whole day with me getting a historical and current perspective. Originally I think he hoped to give pointers for the future, but the story (rightly) mutated itself into Maxwell , which is exactly where it should be. Not enough people realise that it was effectively Maxwell who has corrupted the scholarly publishing system and this is an excellent and timely reminder of the initial causes.

P.

On Tue, Jun 27, 2017 at 7:12 PM, Donald Samulack - Editage <donald.samulack at editage.com<mailto:donald.samulack at editage.com>> wrote:
I ask that the industry consider whether or not SciHub activities could possibly be the work of one individual residing in Russia, or whether there is something more malicious taking place instead.

I am not a conspiracy theorist, but it makes sense to me (and I have not heard any serious argument otherwise) in light of recent Russian attempts to alter the course of the US election (and others), that if Russia really wanted to get into the computers of every research lab and academic institution around the world, there would be no better way to do it than to give away free research articles. Please think about this… a cover for a phishing exercise targeting every atomic energy facility, WHO-sponsored lab, CDC facilities, government and state labs around the world, leading academic institutions housing the world’s cutting edge intellectual property, etc.

The computing and article collating power that this single person would need to have at her disposal to be able to have the IP change every 10 minutes (as I understand it), archive and mirror the collections, etc. may not be the resources and activities of a single person. We need to consider this possibility in this new world we live in, and also consider the consequences of not taking steps to shut down such potentially corrupt intent, if in fact such intent is ongoing.

Donald Samulack
(Speaking as a concerned citizen)

From: goal-bounces at eprints.org<mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org> [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org<mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org>] On Behalf Of Heather Morrison
Sent: Tuesday, June 27, 2017 1:08 PM
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: Re: [GOAL] Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?

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<tel:(613)%20562-5800>
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<http://1science.com>
Science-Metrix.com
+1-514-495-6505 x111<tel:(514)%20495-6505>

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--
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader Emeritus in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dept. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069