Comments on Dig Girl: Academic publishing

Thank you for your comments, Anthea. (1) It's...

2011-09-07T07:34:44.392-07:00

Thank you for your comments, Anthea.
(1) It's true the for-profit publishing houses charge the library consortia huge access fees. These fees are then sloughed off on library users in the form of memberships and/or registration fees. Either way scholars and the public have to pay big $$ for the privilege of accessing research.
(2) I agree that academics should be paid what they

Interesting post but I think that you’ve missed so...

2011-09-05T19:25:29.868-07:00

Interesting post but I think that you’ve missed some key points. Firstly, you’ve missed out several points (1) the big publishing houses [eg Elsevier, Wiley) are charging the university library consortia huge amounts of money to subscribe to these closed shop journals (check out the costs of individual articles in Monbiot’s referenced article on this blog: http://www.monbiot.com/2011/08/29/

Great post, Dig Girl. You bring up exactly the so...

2011-09-04T10:25:25.868-07:00

Great post, Dig Girl. You bring up exactly the sorts of questions that are often on my mind when it comes to publishing and how it relates to tenure. The issue of "what counts" is an important one, that's for sure. What I am not sure about it how to go about changing what counts. Maybe we all need to keep giving this issue more air time, so to speak. That's a start. And

I'm surprised to hear that since I assumed the...

2011-09-03T06:15:39.065-07:00

I'm surprised to hear that since I assumed the sciences were much more progressive about open access! You're right that it comes down to us to use the new tools, but is that enough? How can we change the tenure system to accept these new forms of publishing as something just as valid?

Science is exactly the same way and the cycle is a...

2011-09-01T12:11:31.491-07:00

Science is exactly the same way and the cycle is as endless as it is exhausting. In the past few years, there have been some positive developments - the NIH required funded research to be open access within a short time period of publication (limiting the time during which the journals can extort their fees) and we've seen the advent of an entirely new journal family (the Public Library of