Editorial Board of Topology -- a Leading Mathematics Journal -- Resigns
over publisher's decision to raise the institutional subscription price to $1,665 for one year (six issues). The New York Sun reports on this.
Thanks to Paul Caron (TaxProf) for the pointer.
I don't see why this should be any different - the amount of labor and expense that goes into producing a scholarly journal is extremely high, and the audience for such journals are extremely low. Thus, without some form of institutional subsidy to bring the cost below market, you're going to see journals with high cover prices.
Fork over.
A huge proportion of journals are, quite frankly, not worth the paper they're printed on, and are often not even read by the people who wrote for the things...
Why would you need journals for that? Many of us have dissertations that do the job quite well.
over publisher's decision to raise the institutional subscription price to $1,665 for one year (six issues)."
Up $25 from its current institutional subscription price of $1,640....
Note that their costs are nearly nil. When I submit a paper, many places make me pay a fee to publish it (proportional to length, roughly). I have to make camera-ready typeset proofs. All they do is send it (electronically) to a referee to decide whether or not to take it and do the actual printing, which my payments subsidize.
Up against the wall, publishers.
That's 'cause topologically, knots don't matter. No matter how many knots you tie yourself into, you're still topologically equivalent to your original form.
But I'd like to qualify the earlier comments on certain journals only serving as dust collectors. I found it fascinating to see that some journals looked crisp and almost new in their bindings years after publications, while others showed a dramatic amount of wear after only a year or so. The library had no empirical way of knowing how often one journal was used compared to another, since they're not allowed to be checked out and statistics upon reshelving were kept only at the highest level (how many QAs--math, how many QBs--astronomy, etc.). So, if the library budget were squeezed, they'd either have to ask the appropriate departments which journals could be cut--knowing that was an imperfect measure--or just guess based on which ones seemed the least used based on lack of wear.
Am I missing something? Why wouldn't an individual professor at each school subscribe and donate it to the library? Once you buy a publication you're free to give it away, aren't you? The libraries could be given entertainment budgets to buy occasional lunches for generous donors.
I think it depends whether or not the models have their ears pierced.
You have to be a homeomorphic to really appreciate it. If you know what I mean.
I don't expect hardcopies of journals to be around much longer, but blogs will never replace the refereeing process.
I suppose it is possible that the printing, binding, distribution, and advertising costs are so considerable for a limited-circulation journal, but indeed in that case moving them online can't come soon enough.
The number of online math journals is not so large as Tek Jensen suggests. Yet. And of course, some that are, are password protected and usage statistics per account would be trivial to collect.
Academic publishing uses massive amounts of donated labor. The articles are submitted for free, often with a per-page charge. The reviewers contribute their work for free, as do some editors. All of these people are PhDs, and all of their time has value that never gets reimbursed. Then in the final step, the publishers step in, own the copyright to the article, charge ridiculous rates, and end up with crazy profit margins.
But the amount of uncompensated labor and expense that goes into a journal is an already existing subsidy. What these people want in return for their labor is a high-quality journal that is widely accessible and doesn't strain the library budgets for their institutions. They aren't happy with what they're getting.
The economics of volunteer labor might not be as easy to measure as the economics of paid labor, but it exists nonetheless.
Are some math journals really print-only? I was basing my assumption on other subjects, just assuming that this internet thing had caught on elsewhere? Does anyone actually read them, especially given that I'd assume most people would put their articles on the lanl preprint service?
As for Topology, the remarkable price is the $100 per year from private subscribers at a time when mass media magezines are changing ~$5 per issue. What would be interesting is commentary by people who actually know something about the market eonomics of publishing.
Are you actually comparing an academic journal to Time or Penthouse?
While some journals do offer fees for refereeing my understanding is that it isn't really fair compensation. In other words basically the hard part of doing the reviewing is subsidised by the universities already.
However, the most important issue is that unlike traditional magazine or book sales the desire of the mathematician writing the article is not to be paid based on the readership but rather to gain reputation because of his publication. Thus the interests of the mathematical community at large are to have the journal accessible to as many people as possible. In particular what should never happen (and as a grad student in math I can say it does) is for articles to be unavailable to certain researchers or difficult to access because they/their university does not receive that journal.
In essence unlike a traditional journal mathematical journals are really university subsidized endeavors to allow peer reviewed mathematical work to be as widely disseminated as possible. Thus given that they are going to subsidize the journal the university wants it to be freely available to everyone, and most definitely do not want their contributors to labor under the restriction of not being allowed to post their own articles to their own websites to protect the journal's profit margins.
This is one situation where it is pretty clear that universities would be better off with open online access to the information with peer review and organizational work subsidized directly by the universities without the sham of ordering copies of the journal whose information the universities already paid to produce.
The current competing model is a pay to publish model where universities pay to have their paper's reviewed. I think this should be slightly tweaked to have institutional memberships where universities pay a certain flat fee and get to have their professor's papers reviewed and private individuals can have the fee waved in exception circumstances but either way it is better than the current model.
For those who think this smacks too much of anti-free market think of it this way. It is far more efficient to pay for the actual service being provided (having your paper peer reviewed/nicely re typeset) than pretending to pay for information people would happily give away for free if they were allowed.
In short I'm glad this movement is coming to math as well as biology. I hope within my lifetime to see all journals freely and openly accessible on the web.
But these rights are only a problem BECAUSE of the pay-per-journal system in the first place. If you pay for the peer review/donate you don't have complex subsidiary rights to manage. The problem is that journals need to restrict republishing rights so people don't print cheap copies and take their money but they have to have some mechanism for republishing so paper's don't disappear after the author dies.
In a more open system the author could just give complete rights to republish the work in it's eternity without modification to anyone.
But most of the peer review labor is donated or occurs at very reduced rates. Yes managing this process does require staff but that doesn't mean it could be paid for directly by those submitting articles or by the universities.
What really peeves me is this claim about preserving work as part of the permanent scientific record. This may have been true back before the internet but now obscure journals are far more likely to prevent a work from being widely available by preventing it's posting on the internet than to enable it.
Yes!
Not very many of them but some of the more obscure ones. Though in the last couple years more and more have been coming online but I suspect there are still a few hold outs.
I suspect the reason is that these journals aren't popular enough for the universities to pay an electronic access fee on top of a print subscription and the journal would lose money if it lost print subscriptions.
Tek Jansen: yes, many journals are still print-only, and those that are online require a paid subscription either personally or through one's institution. The fact that online access is available makes it even more annoying for me to have to pay for them to print a paper, as well as do all the work for them in typesetting it. As for people having access through the library, if your institution's library doesn't set up a proxy so your computer can pretend to be online from there, you're SOL when you're on the road.
logicnazi: I'm pretty sure Sylvain is being taken out of context, but I admit I haven't talked to him recently to ask. I'd be willing to bet, though, that his actual statement included your thoughts which were then left on the editing room floor.
Not that these scholarly publications don't have value, of course- many of them have spent substantial effort trying to validate his work. I'm sure it's an incredible challenge running these low-readership, high-cost publications. It ain't like you can book radio ads or hire Hooters girls to promote them . . .
I'm a historian. We are *expected* to publish in peer-reviewed journals. But the articles don't "count" much. Our primary means of getting our research out and evaluated is books.
The journals in my field--'Diplomatic History,' 'Diplomacy and Statecraft,' 'International History Review,' et al.--could never get away with institutional pricing like that in the original post: They simply don't carry the weight that, say, "nature" does within its field.
Not the first time that this has happen to an Elsevier journal, either. Elsevier's prices are really insane.
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AMEN! Our library cut a number of Elsevier research journals that have "high impact" ratings simply because the prices were laughable. What's more many of their titles are NOT available for individual subscription. Some professional societies avoid Elsevier like the plague and I've been at meetings where when the talk of which journal to use for a "special" issue, the "anyone but Elsevier" often comes up.
2) When you get electronic access, you rent the journals. You get to keep a hard copy subscription.
3) Tenure driven, it's one reason law reviews are so cheap.
4) It's stupid to raise the price for library subscriptions for law reviews, since you'd then spiral up your own library costs as they have to buy all the other law reviews.
5) How much should Eugene be paying to get his lengthy articles published?
I can only think of three or four topologically different swimsuits. There's the tube with an extra opening (one piece suit, also men's swimsuit and bikini bottom). There's the two piece, tube with an extra opening plus a plain tube (bikini top). And there's the kind with a strap around the neck as well as around the back.
The Communist Youth newspaper Juventud Rebelde dedicated its front page to the Cuban president, printing a blown-up picture of a pensive Castro with the title "Always fighting for something, and fighting with optimism!"
Today I wanted to go back before my class and review an old paper about Green's Theorem and the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra in the 12/2003 American Mathematical Monthly (the journal of the Mathematical Association of America, and thus a great source of stuff undergrads can follow if you hold their hands).
AMM is available online through JSTOR, with a "moving wall" of 3 years. That is: if you want an article from an issue within the last three years you've gotta go for the print version.
Except the audience for mathematical papers are pretty much all mathematicians themselves and can usually handle dvi files. Besides, the standard TeX fonts look pretty good in pdf . The publishing companies use TeX as well the real difference is just that they have very extensive style files that make sure everything looks good. The JSL at least releases these files for download and if you use their documentclass it looks just as good as the printed one.
At worst you just have to print out the pdf and you can always zoom to the right size. I've actually never had a problem with resolution independence, a good pdf viewer should always be able to do a good job scaling, they could always oversample and shrink by a integer multiple if necessery. Have you seen this mostly in pdfs produced by XeTeX or otherwise using none standard TeX fonts?
Mathematicians have no trouble working from electronic versions (often printed out). Most math people my age work fairly extensively from pre-prints and unoffical copies they get via email or on the web.
John Armstrong,
Good I didn't want to think that a mathematician would be that simpleminded. Although I guess I just made myself into a good example by not realizing he probably had a more complex point that got cut.
Are you a mathematician?
You are missing the following types.
Tube top.
Suits with a hole to show off clevage.
Suits with holes to show the back, front.
Suits with several of these holes combined.
Also there are a bunch of suits with various kinds of connections between the top and bottom bikinni.
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/joalet.pdf
Rob Kirby wrote about this topic in the Notices a couple years ago as well:
http://www.ams.org/notices/200402/commentary.pdf