Worse than Elsevier
by Orr Shalit
Recently, I received the following email:
Dear Dr. Shalit,
I am writing to inquire whether you have received our previous email inviting you to submit an article to the Special Issue on “Uncertain Dynamical Systems: Analysis and Applications,” which will be published in Abstract and Applied Analysis, and the deadline for submission is October 19th, 2012.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Best regards,
************
To this, I replied:
Dear ************,
I am sorry, I did not realized that you were waiting for an answer from me.
The special issue sounds interesting, but I do not submit papers to journals that require processing charges from the authors.
Best regards,
Orr Shalit
This has been my opinion for a long time, and it didn’t change when Gowers and Tao joined the bad guys. Here’s what I think is bad about the publishing model where authors pay to have their papers published.
- There is an obvious conflict of interests here, which might corrupt science.
- These journals always seemed to me to be a nasty way to wring money out of mathematicians that either don’t know better, don’t believe in their own worth, or couldn’t (for some reason) publish their work in a normal journal.
- It will decrease mobility: it creates another obstacle for mathematicians with no grant money or from weaker institutions, making it harder for them to eventually get grants and move to perhaps stronger institutions.
- And even if I do have grant money, that’s not how I want to spend it.
And don’t tell me that in the eighteenth century or ancient Greece scientists payed to have their work published: because here people are not paying to have their work published – everybody’s work is published on the web if they wish it – here people are paying to have their work published inside a journal, meaning that they are buying their work’s credibility.
Only two good things about this model. First, it is open-access, which is great, but as I’ve said that doesn’t matter any more, since all papers are open access anyway (even if the official journal version isn’t). Second good thing, and this is really a good thing: in this model people have to think about what they are sending for publication, because publishing also has a price. So hopefully this can create eventually a situation where people publish a little less papers, but these papers are more complete and contain less repetition.
That last point is really is something to think about. I can think of at least one different means of attaining this goal: tenure.
Here is another argument in support of your position: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=5226
Thanks Matt.
(To be honest, hearing about such things also makes me smile. It gives me an “I told you so…” feeling. But I do hope that not all my bad visions regarding this come true).
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I really doubt that “all papers are already open access”. Yes, the arXiv does a wonderful job at making a large part of papers available, but not all of them. And this is sufficient to get math libraries spend hundred of thousands of dollars to subscribe to journals. So either we need to cut the libraries’ money immediately, or there still is an access problem.
My feeling is that the green-OA access can only be a transition model: if all papers in a field are green-OAed, then I bet no subscription journal can survive in this field (even the Annals did not try this without harm).
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FoM is elistist, avoid it.