Guardian article on academic publishing. 28 June 2017
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
Elsevier’s Profits Continue to Rise. 8 May 2016
The 2015 annual report of Elsevier's parent company, RELX, was published in March.
http://www.relx.com/investorcentre/reports%202007/Documents/2015/relxgroup_ar_2015.pdf
Happily for RELX the academic publishing part of their business, Elsevier, continues to grow (by 2%) and profits continue to rise (by 3%) - to well over 30% adjusted operating profit (see page 17 of the report). £760 million profit on a turnover of £2070 million is pretty good by the standards of any industry.
Of course this level of revenue is small beer compared to some of the other players in the academic publishing market such as Wiley (see below). The 2015 results of Informa plc show a similar pattern to Elsevier's, with an adjusted operating profit margin at over 36% for its academic publishing business (which includes many familiar names). Even these high levels of profit mask the immense profitability of the journal segment of academic publishing, which does much better than academic book publishing.
Sadly for academic libraries, universities, academics and taxpayers the exploitation of academic labour continues. Neither academics nor their departments are compensated for the labour devoted to journal peer reviewing for free. Journal publishers continue to receive copyright on research work outputs for free. They continue to demolish university library budgets with journal subscription fees. Meanwhile the content of those journals continues to be provided free by academics whose work is funded by others, including taxpayers.
12 years on from the highly critical House of Commons report into academic publishing, nothing of significance has changed except the rise and rise of the global academic publishing corporations.
PearsonWorld and ‘bespoke’ books. Part 1. 3 September 2015
I see that Pearson[i] do ‘personalised learning resources’ for higher education: http://tinyurl.com/pdylp6m. Academics can compile their own materials in combination with relevant materials published by Pearson to create a bespoke book for their students. Pearson tells potential customers that their students will…. “pay only for the content they need which aligns exactly to your teaching.”
That sends a shiver down my spine for a couple of reasons. The first is pedagogical. It reminds me of my experience years ago as a tutor on an Open University Masters course being told in a training session that tutors were forbidden to direct students’ reading beyond the OU materials provided. I was astonished, stated my view that the policy was stupid and ignored it. The OU materials were varied, of a very high standard and well integrated. But they presented a closed world of knowledge. Happily at some point later the OU saw that limiting students’ inquisitiveness, research skills and knowledge of the breadth of literature available in this way made no sense. Pearson’s notion of ‘personalised learning resources’ is potentially going much further down this road of branded, over-structured teaching provision: a modern-day form of programmed instruction with an edu-business twist.
And of course, apart from the lecturer’s own work, their “bespoke” books contain Pearson materials; for copyright reasons, Pearson would say. There are two case studies provided by Pearson to help sell this idea. One says “I was lucky because Pearson had all the cases I wanted”, and the other “It helped that Pearson had the content I needed.” Those two short case studies are worth reading (http://tinyurl.com/oqm5dup and http://tinyurl.com/nvf3qjs). In both of them “my Pearson account manager” is lauded. The imagery is the same in both: the lecturer having their hand held by the kindly account manager with the fabulous resources of benevolent Pearson making things better for lecturers and students.
Which brings me on to my second concern: the Pearsonisation of education: the spread of PearsonWorld. This is already extremely well advanced in the United States, with Pearson involved in school-level testing and provision of textbooks and other learning materials in a big way. The same is true of other parts of the world. Anna Hogan and Bob Lingard write extremely informatively about this in a number of different outputs for a variety of audiences (http://tinyurl.com/okujmxu and see references below). Edu-business of this kind is finding a benign environment in neo-liberal government regimes like those of the USA and the UK. And of course Pearson wants to extend the breadth and depth of its reach globally; to meet its goal of becoming “one globally connected company” as their 2013 annual report has it (p. 11).
Or of course students could make use of their university library, which is free at the point of use. Interestingly, the word “library” only crops up once in the two case studies, the Heriot-Watt one: “it’s nice to see students no longer relying on library copies.” I'm not so sure.
(Part 2 of this post suggests some alternative routes, if bespoke books for specific courses are your thing. There are other possibilities, I'm sure, so please point to them if you wish.)
References
Hogan, A., Lingard, B. and Sellar, S. (2015) Edu-businesses and education policy. Professional Voice, 10 2: 24-30. http://issuu.com/aeu-vic/docs/pv_10_2_complete_web
Hogan, A., Sellar, S. and Lingard, B. (2015). Network restructuring of global edu-business: the case of Pearson’s Efficacy Framework. In W. Au and J. J. Ferrare (Eds.), Mapping corporate education reform: power and policy networks in the neoliberal state (pp. 43-64) London, UK: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138792005
Hogan, A. (2014) NAPLAN and the role of edu-business: new governance, new privatisations and new partnerships in Australian education policy. Australian Educational Researcher, 1-18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13384-014-0162-z
[i] Sales in 2013: £5.2 billion. Adjusted operating profit of only £871 million thanks to “tough trading” that year.
PearsonWorld Part 2: Alternative ways of creating ‘bespoke’ books for students. 3 September 2105
If academics want to go down the ‘bespoke books’ road there are better ways of doing it than involving Pearson, ones that offer: faster delivery; online access and cheaper pricing (including in some cases being free for students). Createspace is the easiest alternative: materials are quickly created using free online tools and the resultant book is available to buy through Amazon in online or hard copy form. The author sets the price and online books can be made free for 5 days in every 90. Smashwords plus Lulu is a bit more complicated – the Smashwords online creation software isn’t as good as Createspace’s, and it requires a secondary process of setting up the book in Lulu for print on demand (POD). However the advantage is that the e-book can be made free forever on Smashwords. Lulu’s POD book price is set by the author at or above Lulu's minimum, which is low, and (from experience) the quality is excellent and it is delivered to the purchaser a couple of days after ordering (Pearson say 15 weeks for theirs). Or you could just use Lulu on its own – they do e-books as well as POD books. Copyright issues for material in the book can be addressed in the way they always have been – by writing to the copyright owner and asking for permission to reproduce a specific item or section in a specific form for a specific purpose for a given length of time. Materials are not limited to Pearson-owned ones, and of course short passages of text, properly referenced, do not need copyright permission, being 'fair use' (80 words of a book is a rule of thumb, but it depends on context).
That’s still relying on business support, of course, but at least it doesn’t involve getting sucked into PearsonWorld. It’s a learning process involving more work and it’s more time-consuming. But you take control of it yourself as an autonomous, intelligent, critical and creative person.
Celebrating the “good” journals and publishers 21.8.2015
One of my readers reminded me that we should celebrate those journals and publishers who are on the side of angels when it comes to open access. It's a good point, and we should not just celebrate them but publish work in them. Here are some initial comments, and I'd welcome more from readers.
Care needs to be taken when choosing to celebrate and use open access journals. Many are not really on the side of the angels. Predatory publishers describe themselves as ‘open access’, and in a sense they are: the author pays and the reader has free access to their work, just as in the open access gold model (see earlier blog posts). However predatory publishers’ journals do not have readership, quality control, status or value. I wouldn't describe 'legitimate' journals that only offer gold open access as on the angels' side either - their high publication fees exclude many authors and institutions.
So which open access journals and publishers should be celebrated and used?
The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association aims to promote good practice in open access publishing and support the best publishers. Their members list is a good place to start looking. In 2003 the Open Society Foundations (funded by George Soros) gave financial backing to Lund University in Sweden to run a Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). DOAJ carefully vets open access journal publishers before listing them. It currently covers over 10,000 journals.
Another alternative is to stay with the big five publishers (often necessary for early-career academics who need to establish their credentials) but simultaneously to take every opportunity to make work accessible to everyone…..Without, of course, paying the big five’s exorbitant fees for ‘gold’ open access (immediate availability with no paywall).
The way to do this is to “archive” work – that is, to make it accessible to the public, but within the policies of the chosen journal. Archiving can be done on the author’s own website, a university repository (Lancaster University’s is here: http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/) or on public servers such as www.academia.edu. Universities and their libraries are understandably very keen that academics use their repositories as much as possible, though my experience is that they make it very frustrating and time-consuming to do so.
There are various levels of archiving:
· Pre-print archiving: uploading the version of an article after it is submitted to the journal but before refereeing.
· Author’s post-print archiving: uploading the final .pdf version of the article, but not the published version in the journal.
· Publisher’s post-print archiving: uploading the published version of the article immediately after the journal publishes it.
· Green open access: publisher’s post-print archiving after a period of embargo. Sometimes one year, sometimes two or more.
Different journals have different policies on these options, and set different conditions in relation to them. Fortunately JISC has funded the RoMEO website, which is a searchable database of publishers' policies regarding the self- archiving of journal articles on the web and in open access repositories. It is a really good place to choose a journal on the basis of its access policies: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ .
For example the journal Higher Education comes out reasonably well[i]. Although published by Springer, one of the oligopolistic big five, that journal allows every level of archiving listed above except publisher’s post-print archiving within the first year of publication. In other words Higher Education has a green open access policy with a one-year embargo and permits pre-print and author's post-print archiving.
Its entry on RoMEO is here: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/issn/0018-1560/.
Readers: please suggest specific publishers or journals that should be celebrated for their open access approach. I'll start off with a couple of suggestions:
[i] It is ‘green’ on RoMEO’s four-colour scale of accessibility: green; blue; yellow; white. This is not be confused with ‘green open access’, which means the ability to archive the publisher’s post-print after an embargo period. RoMEO’S categorisation system is set out here: http://tinyurl.com/d49jb6g
“NOT MY MONKEYS”: Caught in the commercialism trap? 30 July 2015
The eminent American observer of UK higher education, Martin Trow, observed in the late 1980’s that British academics were caught in a ‘Robbins trap’ (Trow, 1989). This is the paradox presented by a simultaneous and incompatible commitment to higher education expansion as advocated in the 1963 Robbins report, on the one hand, and a model of higher education founded on practices more suited to a smaller, more homogenous HE system on the other (Trowler, 1997).
For academics caught in that trap, doing the old things in a very different context didn’t work and resulted in exhaustion, stress and frustration at not being able to achieve their goals. These academics were trying to offer a bespoke higher education experience to individual students in newly massified contexts. And of course they largely failed because of the weight of student numbers, the new heterogeneity of the student body and because of the simultaneous suite of curricular ‘reforms’ somewhat modelled on the US HE setup (semesterisation, modularisation and the rest) which made it difficult to get to know individual students. Different practices and different values were required in this new situation, Trow claimed.
Things have moved on and academics as a group have largely adapted. The sector itself has settled down somewhat and in some places early enthusiasms for those ‘reforms’ have moderated or reversed. But, as another eminent American sociologist noted, most people feel their lives are in “a series of traps” (Mills, 1959), not just the one. For some the Robbins Trap has been replaced by another antagonistic relationship: between their longstanding values, priorities and practices on the one hand and a higher education context that has changed under their feet: the Commercialism Trap.
With the progressive withdrawal of state support from higher education in many countries, universities have been forced to chase funding and behave more like businesses. New managerialist practices have been a deployed in this, particularly in relation to target-setting and associated resource allocation and promotion policies. In many places universities have become much more commercialised, target-driven and financially focused. Frances Kelly’s heartfelt article A Day in the Life (and Death) of a Public University(2015) describes this, and its personal effects on her as Head of Department resigning from her job, in some detail:
"As I listen to the speakers talk about the ‘third mission’ I notice I am growing angry and upset, too upset to speak. I think about the idea of welfare and how it is now absent from university mission statements, although the template phrase student experience regularly appears".
Like Kelly, many academics continue to have a commitment to working for the public good and to being a responsible academic citizen, working pro bono and ‘doing their bit’. In a commercialised, competitive environment they continue to do external examining work, review articles, sit on external committees, offer talks to other universities, do public engagement work and so on, either for free or for ‘honorarium’ rates hovering around the minimum wage or below it.
And of course they are encouraged to continue by the representatives of interests which would be harmed if they stopped: the convenient fiction of collegiality and the public good is mobilized when necessary, and commercialism temporarily occluded. The results are the same as before: exhaustion, stress and frustration as academics attempt to both meet the targets set by the employers and to behave in ways they see as good citizenship.
Pertinent questions to be asked, though, are: ‘whose interests is this in?’ and ‘does doing this really achieve the goals I consider important?’ So, for example, when GlobalAcademyJobs encourages you to become a journal peer reviewer, how robust is the argument that your CV will be enhanced? Is this a target actually recognised by appointment and promotion panels? And whose interests does such an argument really serve[1]?
There is a Polish proverb which translates as: “Not My Circus. Not My Monkeys.” I think it’s useful to reflect regularly on the nature of our personal circus, our own monkeys. And to look closely at the ones that trundle down the road towards us from time to time, asking “whose circus is that?” Understanding what the trap is and how it works is the first step to getting out of it.
References
Kelly, F. (2015) A day in the life (and death) of a public university. Higher Education Research and Development. Taylor and Francis Online http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07294360.2015.1024628
GlobalAcademyJobs (2015) How to Become a Peer Reviewer. http://globalacademyjobs.com/blog/91/How-to-become-a-peer-reviewer.
Mills, C. W. (1959) The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Trow M. (1989) The Robbins Trap: British Attitudes and the Limits of Expansion, Higher Education Quarterly, 43, 1, pp. 55-75. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2273.1989.tb01493.x/abstract
Trowler, P. (1997) Beyond the Robbins Trap: reconceptualising academic responses to change in higher education (or....Quiet Flows the Don?). Studies in Higher Education, 22, 3, 301-318. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03075079712331380916
[1] I noted in an earlier blog ("Elsevier's Double Trouble") that the big academic publishers are facing a dire problem recruiting peer reviewers as they increase the number of journals and articles they publish year on year. Coincidentally, .....or perhaps not, that blog was also sparked by an article promoting doing peer review in the GlobalAcademyJobs bulletin.
“Scholarly Publishing: What If?” The House of Commons report over 10 years on. 16 June 2015.
(All quotes from House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, 2004)
What if the British government actually did give “consideration to balancing the needs of the research community, the taxpayer and the commercial sectors for which it has responsibility?”
What if the scholarly publishing industry was no longer allowed to “receive [for free]…the goods that it sells to its customers from those same customers, [with] a quality control mechanism provided [for free] by its customers…[while receiving ] a tremendous fee from those same customers?”
What if public money were not “used at three stages in the publishing process: to fund the research project; to pay the salaries of academics who carry out peer review for no extra payment; and to fund libraries to purchase scientific publications?”
What if the government no longer “showed so little concern about where [that] public money ended up?”
What if the government did actually feel the “need to account for its investment in the publishing process?”
What if the government really did “take a lead in establishing an efficient and sustainable environment for the publication of research findings?”
What if the Office of Fair Trading really did “commit to biennial public reporting on the state of the [scholarly publishing] market, including how STM [Scientific, technical and medical] publication prices are developing; how prices change following mergers and acquisitions in the sector and the impact of bundling deals upon competition?”
What if publishers really did “provide modest financial rewards to the departments in which the [peer] reviewers are based…[to help] fund seminars or further research?”
What if the provision for outcompeting bloated global publishing corporations through a centrally managed system of fully open access journals and repositories were not underfunded, partial, disconnected and largely an alien idea to most academics?
And what if the millions saved every year in university funds and taxes that currently support those corporations’ profits and their shareholders’ dividends were used instead to fund student scholarships, to enhance research capacity and improve provision in higher education generally?
Reference
House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (HoCSTC) (2004) Scientific publications: free for all? London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399.pdf
A Few Relevant Organizations' Websites (Readers – please add more in comments)
Authors’ Alliance: http://www.authorsalliance.org/
British Library: www.bl.uk
Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions: http://www.sparc.arl.org/COAPI
EDiNA: http://edina.ac.uk/
Global Open Access Portal: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/portals-and-platforms/goap/
JISC: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/content
Open Access Network: http://openaccessnetwork.org/
OpenDepot.org: http://opendepot.org/information.html
Right to Research Coalition: http://www.righttoresearch.org/
SHERPA: Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access (SHERPA) Project. Jointly funded by JISC and the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL). http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/
SPARC: Open Access Working Group. http://www.sparc.arl.org/initiatives/advocacy/oawg
SPARC Europe: http://sparceurope.org/
Going for Gold. Open access and the ‘big four’ academic publishers. 27 May 2015.
Currently there are two versions of open access offered by journal publishers: green and gold[i]. Gold involves a payment to make your article open to anyone. Green, where available, means waiting a year or two, and the loss of currency and immediacy. Even the green option is not a threat to the profits of the journal publishing companies, as one would imagine. In fact open access has added another income stream to their total revenues.
Open access fee income from “author-pays” and “author’s-funder-pays” is currently a small part of the revenue of these companies. But it is growing, and it is a strategic priority for publishers, while traditional journal subscription income continues to grow too.
Here’s what the big four (Reed Elsevier, John Wiley (now Wiley-Blackwell), Springer S&BM and Informa) say about open access in their annual reports.
Reed Elsevier (2013). Total revenue for year, combined business: £6bn. Science, Technical and Medical division: £2bn. Article publication fees for gold open access range from $500 to $5,000 plus tax (Elsevier, 2015).
“Over the past 15 years alternative payment models for the dissemination of research such as “author-pays open access” or “author’s-funder-pays” have emerged.” (p. 16)....“In the primary research market, Elsevier aims to grow volume through new journal launches, expansion of author-pays journals and growth from emerging markets…” (p. 15)....Over 1,600 of Elsevier’s journals now offer the option of funding research publishing and distribution via a sponsored article fee. In addition, Elsevier now publishes more than 50 open access journals.” (p. 16)....“Revenue growth was driven by solid subscription renewals and new sales. “Author-pays” or “author’s-funder-pays” article volumes continued to grow strongly from a small base.” (p. 17).
John Wiley (2014). Total revenue for year: $1.775bn. Article publication fees for gold open access range from $800 to $4,500 plus tax (John Wiley, 2015).
“Wiley Open Access is the Company’s publishing program for open-access research articles…. All research articles published in Wiley Open Access journals are freely available to the general public on Wiley Online Library to read, download and share. A publication service fee is charged upon acceptance of a research article by the Company, which may be paid by the individual author….[To support authors] an academic or research institution, society or corporation may fund the fee directly…. In addition to Wiley Open Access, the Company provides authors with the opportunity to make their individual research articles that were published within the Company’s paid subscription journals freely available to the general public through OnlineOpen.” (p. 16).
Research revenue by product type, fiscal year 2014: (data from p. 15)
Journal subscriptions: 64%
Other publishing income: 18%
Print books: 11%
Digital books: 5%
Open access: 2%
“Key growth strategies for the Research business include developing….. new open access revenue streams.” (p. 15). “Journal Subscription revenue and other related publishing income, such as open access, advertising, backfile sales, the licensing of publishing rights, journal reprints and individual article sales accounted for approximately 50% of the Company’s consolidated fiscal year 2014 revenue.” (p. 21) [Journal subscription revenue alone represented over $641 million (p. 44)]
“Research revenue for fiscal year 2014 increased 3% to $1,044.3 million. The growth was mainly driven by Journal Subscriptions, Digital Books and Open Access fees….” (p. 30). “Open Access revenue, which represents article publication fees from authors that provide immediate free access to the author’s article on the Company’s website, grew $11.5 million in fiscal year 2014.” (p. 30).
Springer Science and Business Media (2012). Total revenue for year almost 1bn euros. Article publication fees for gold open access $3,000 plus tax (Springer, 2015).
“[Financial year] 2012 saw very solid growth of more than 20% in the number of open access articles published.” (p. 3)
“[Financial year] 2012 operating performance was driven by further accelerated organic growth of Springer’s core STM [Science, Technical and Medical] divisions...[involving income from] peer reviewed academic subscription and open access journals, academic books, series and database products as well as the related publishing services….” (p. 3)
“Revenues from Springer’s various open access publishing offers grew above 25% in [financial year] 2012 driven by strong growth in articles submissions and the expansion of Springer’s open access journal portfolio.” (p. 4)
Informa (2013). Total revenue for year: £1.1bn. Academic publishing: £367m. Article publication fees for gold open access: £1,788 plus tax (Taylor and Francis, 2015).
“Operational highlights [of 2013 included the]…………. launch of open access publishing brand, Cogent OA (p. 01)…. which will launch a range of open access journal titles in 2014…… ensuring we are well positioned as this market grows.” (p. 03).
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Does any of this matter, even given the extremely high rates of profitability for the oligopolistic big 4 (a gross profit margin of 73% on scholarly publications in Wiley's case, with open access contributing $17.6 million in revenue - John Wiley 2014, p. 30)?
Here’s what the SV-POW website says on the issue of the profits of the current system of academic publishing, focussing on Elsevier in particular:
“Yes, publishers have a right to make a living. Not only that, but they have a right to make as big a profit as the market can bear (though of course when they form a cartel that distorts the market monopolistically, that changes things).
But here’s what it means to scientists.....:
· When you pay $37.95 to download a PDF from an Elsevier journal, $13.56 of that goes straight into the pockets of Elsevier shareholders.
· When you pay $3000 to have your submission to an Elsevier journal appear as open access, $1072.20 of that goes straight into the pockets of Elsevier shareholders.
· When your library pays $1.7m for a bundle of Elsevier-journal subscriptions, $607,580 of that goes straight into the pockets of Elsevier shareholders…….
You just have to ask yourself whether that’s where you want your money going.”[ii]
I think a more productive question the academic world might want to ask itself is……..
Isn’t it time we took much more robust action to (re-)create a model of academic publishing that doesn’t drain the resources of taxpayers, universities and authors into the coffers of the global academic publishing oligopoly?
This is hardly a revolutionary question. A report by Deutsche Bank (2005) is frequently cited as stating the bank believes that “the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process”. A British House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report lamented the public money being drained into academic publishing to generate its profits (HoCSTC, 2004). That report noted that the investment bank Credit Suisse First Boston's conclusion that “we would expect governments (and taxpayers) to examine the fact that they are essentially funding the same purchase three times” (HoCSTC, 2004, p. 37).
That detailed, well-considered and independent report from the House of Commons Committee makes a series of specific recommendations that so far have only been implemented in a partial and patchy way. Many of them have not seen the light of day at all.
I recommend readers of this blog to have a look at the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report. It’s easily available on the web here. It contrasts rather favourably with the better-known Finch report (2012), which many argue was captured by the industry.
Footnotes
[i] “Open access can be achieved in two ways: Green, which enables authors to publish articles in subscription based journals and self–archive the author accepted version of the article for free public use after an embargo period, and Gold, which enables authors to publish their articles in journals that provide immediate free access to the article on the publisher’s website following payment of an article publication fee.” John Wiley, 2014, p 7. Emphasis mine.
[ii] As I was finalising this blog I learned from an ESRC-funded student that their university’s library had, today, offered to pay Wiley’s ‘gold’ open access fee for an article from their PhD research, because funds were still available on a first-come-first-served basis. Like the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the ESRC have an open access requirement on outputs for which they provided funding. So in that student's case, the taxpayer has not only funded three years of research, but also funded the publisher, Wiley, to make it available, at a cost to the student's university of $3,000. One might say that the institution has ‘bought it back’.
As the House of Commons report (HoCSTC, 2004, p. 37) says: "It has been argued that public money is used at three stages in the publishing process: to fund the research project; to pay the salaries of academics who carry out peer review for no extra payment; and to fund libraries to purchase scientific publications. As one of our submissions asked, “what other business receives the goods that it sells to its customers from those same customers, a quality control mechanism provided by its customers, and a tremendous fee from those same customers?”
References
(Websites last accessed 27.5.2015)
Deutsche Bank AG, 2005, Jan 11. Reed Elsevier: moving the supertanker. Company Focus: Global Equity Research Report.
Elsevier, 2015. Open access articles. http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/sponsored-articles
Finch Report, 2012. Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: How to expand access to research publications. http://www.researchinfonet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Finch-Group-report-FINAL-VERSION.pdf
House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (HoCSTC) (2004) Scientific publications: free for all? London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399.pdf
Informa PLC, 2013. Annual report 2013. http://www.informa.com/documents/investor%20relations/annual%20report%202013/informa%20plc%20annual%20report%20accounts%202013.pdf
John Wiley, 2015. Wiley open access.http://www.wileyopenaccess.com/details/content/12f25e0654f/Publication-Charges.html
John Wiley, 2014. Annual report for fiscal year ending April 2014. http://www.wiley.com/legacy/about/corpnews/fy14_10kFINAL.pdf
Reed Elsevier (Part of the RELX group), 2013. Annual reports and financial statements. http://www.elsevier.com/about/annual-reports
Springer, 2015. Open choice: your research. Your choice. http://www.springer.com/gp/open-access/springer-open-choice
Springer Science & Business Media, 2012. General overview and financial performance.http://static.springer.com/sgw/documents/1412702/application/pdf/Annual_Report_2012_01.pdf
SV-POW!, 2012. The obscene profits of commercial scholarly publishers. http://svpow.com/2012/01/13/the-obscene-profits-of-commercial-scholarly-publishers/
Taylor and Francis, 2015. Publishing open access with Taylor and Francis.http://journalauthors.tandf.co.uk/preparation/OpenAccess.asp
Dear Messrs Taylor and Francis. 19 May 2015.
Dear Messrs. Taylor and Francis
Thank you so much for your kind welcome to your manuscriptcentral website. I don’t recall applying for membership and it’s a special privilege given that I have had no previous contact with your journal. I would be delighted to give you all my contact details and to sum up my research interests in 4 to 5 keywords there, as you suggest. And yes of course I would be delighted to change that temporary password immediately.
Thank you again for your kindness: I am flattered.
Best wishes
_____________________________________________________
Dear Messrs. Taylor and Francis
Thank you for your second communication, just received, asking me to review an article submitted to your fine journal. I have completed all the details you asked for on your website. However I didn’t find the place there where I need to complete my bank details for this work. Perhaps the payment goes to my department or to my university? If that is the case I will ask them to contact you so that you can transfer the payment to the appropriate account.
Best wishes
_____________________________________________________
Dear Messrs. Taylor and Francis
Oh I see. This work is to be undertaken gratis. Perhaps then in recompense I (or my university) will be offered at least a reduction in the £1,788 fee (plus tax) charged for “gold” open access article publication? I have read that the fee needs to be so high partly because of the peer review process which ensures the quality of your esteemed journals.
I would imagine that the work will take me around 2 hours, so a reduction of, let’s say, £100 per review, would seem an extremely reasonable estimate.
Is that agreeable?
Best wishes
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Dear Messrs. Taylor and Francis
Thank you. I see, so there is no recompense for the work at all and no waivers for reviewers of gold open access fees. As I understand it you do not pay authors or their institutions for the research work encapsulated in articles that you publish in your journals, nor do you recompense them for signing to you their copyright in the articles. I assume then you gentlemen are engaged in this work for charitable purposes; perhaps to promote knowledge distribution?
Best wishes
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Dear Informa PLC
I understand from Messrs Taylor and Francis that their publishing work is part of your group. They have directed my query about charitable status to you.
Before I agree to begin the two hours pro bono work they have asked me to undertake, I would be grateful if you would enlighten me as to the work of your group.
Yours sincerely
_____________________________________________________
Dear Informa PLC
I am astonished that all these familiar names have been acquired by you: Carfax; Routledge; Lawrence Erlbaum; Parthenon; David Fulton and so many others. You certainly seem to be very significant in the publishing industry. Messrs. Taylor and Francis alone publish approximately 1,000 journals and 2,000 book titles each year and your group has around 1,700 journals and a total of 93,000 titles all told. That is astonishingly prolific.
You are a force indeed in the academic publishing world. But you still haven’t answered my question about your charitable status.
Yours sincerely
_____________________________________________________
Informa PLC..........
I have just discovered the following about the work of your group and about scholarly journal publishing:
· Though your head office is in London you are incorporated in Jersey and domiciled in Switzerland, in the most tax-efficient canton. Some authors talk about tax avoidance (Harvie et al 2012). I couldn’t possibly comment.
· Academic publishing is an oligopoly with only 5 other big players, 3 of whom are even bigger than you. They have each been acquiring smaller companies for years. That process towards monopolisation continues.
· You and those other companies derive many millions of pounds annually from university journal subscriptions, despite not having paid those same universities for their academics’ time in producing the content. This is largely tax-payers’ money, though tax payers are prevented by your paywalls from accessing those journals.
· Non-disclosure clauses in subscription contracts mean that the exact amounts paid for these subscriptions are secret. They differ from journal to journal and university to university. Freedom of information requests, university financial reports and publishers' own annual reports give some indication of the huge size of the overall figures involved however.
· Subscription prices are increasing by around 13% each year, and libraries usually have to subscribe to ‘bundles’ of journals, many of which they do not require.
· Operating profit margins in the academic publishing oligopoly run at between 30-40%, which is far above most industries. If scholarly journal publishing is considered separately from other activities the figures for profitability increase – to as much as 70%. The gross profit margin on John Wiley’s scholarly publications for year ending April 2014 was 73% (John Wiley, 2014, p. 30). This level of profit is not surprising given the zero cost of the raw material and much of the labour force. Informa declared a 2013 adjusted operating profit from academic publishing at £130.9m on adjusted revenue of £367.1m (about 36% profit margin, after adjustments) with dividends to shareholders increased to nearly 19 pence per share. These revenue and profit figures increased by 7% and 4% respectively 2012 - 2013. This excludes revenues and profits from your global events and business intelligence operations. The adjusted operating profit of the whole group was £335.3m, and on this you paid just £71.6m in taxes of different sorts to different authorities globally in 2013. This is a tax rate of just over 21%.
I agree with Beverungen et al, (2012, p. 936) that the political economy of academic publishing involves a “double, or even triple, appropriation of public resources”. I began my correspondence “with the impression that academic journal publishing is a benign, almost idyllic, sector of society, in which commercial publishers coexist peaceably with learned societies, working harmoniously to increase the sum of human knowledge” (Harvie et al, 2013, p. 235), just as the Finch report describes (Finch Report, 2012, p. 90). I end it with a very different view.
Therefore I am unwilling to complete the article review you requested until you offer your reviewers or their employers adequate compensation for this work. Clearly you, and the other large academic publishers (Reed Elsevier, John Wiley, Springer S&BM) can easily afford to do so.
References
(Websites last accessed 18.5.2015)
Altbach, P. G. and Rapple, B., 2012. Anarchy, commercialism, and “publish or perish”. International Higher Education 67, 5-7. https://www.revistaensinosuperior.gr.unicamp.br/edicoes/ihe/IHE67original.pdf
Beverungen, A., Bohm, S., Land, C., 2012. The poverty of journal publishing. Organization 19, 929–938. doi:10.1177/1350508412448858
Brook, M., 2014 The cost of academic publishing. Open Access Working Group. http://access.okfn.org/2014/04/24/the-cost-of-academic-publishing/
Finch Report, 2012. Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: How to expand access to research publications. http://www.researchinfonet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Finch-Group-report-FINAL-VERSION.pdf
Harvie, D., Lightfoot, G., Lilley, S., Weir, K., 2012. What are we to do with feral publishers? Organization 19, 905–914. doi:10.1177/1350508412448859
Harvie, D., Lightfoot, G., Lilley, S., Weir, K., 2013. Publisher, be damned! From price gouging to the open road. Prometheus 31, 229–239. doi:10.1080/08109028.2014.891710
Informa PLC, 2013. Annual report 2013. http://www.informa.com/documents/investor%20relations/annual%20report%202013/informa%20plc%20annual%20report%20accounts%202013.pdf
John Wiley, 2014. Annual report for fiscal year ending April 2014. http://www.wiley.com/legacy/about/corpnews/fy14_10kFINAL.pdf
Reed Elsevier (Part of the RELX group) Annual reports. http://www.elsevier.com/about/annual-reports
Springer Science & Business Media, 2012. General overview and financial performance.http://static.springer.com/sgw/documents/1412702/application/pdf/Annual_Report_2012_01.pdf
SV-POW!, 2012. The obscene profits of commercial scholarly publishers. http://svpow.com/2012/01/13/the-obscene-profits-of-commercial-scholarly-publishers/
Elsevier’s Double Trouble. 22 May 2015.
Reed Elsevier (part of the RELX Group) is pretty big, as its annual report for 2013 reveals (Reed Elsevier, 2013). Its revenues in that year were £2.1billion. About a third of that (but nearly half its profits) came from the part of its five areas of operation that includes scholarly journals. Elsevier’s academic journal operation is huge. In the year covered by the 2013 report over 1 million research papers were submitted to the company’s journals, over 10,000 editors managed the peer review and selection process and over 350,000 articles were published in over 2,000 journals (Reed Elsevier, 2013).
Peer review is crucial in this: it gives authority and legitimacy to Elsevier’s journals and it puts clear blue water between it and the host of predatory publishers discussed in my earlier blog.
Elsevier’s publishing arm is not just big; it’s growing fast. The number of articles submitted to Elsevier journals grew by 9% in the year covered by its report. In addition the company wants to launch new journals and expand what it calls (with refreshing directness) “author-pays” and “author’s-funder-pays” journals. In academia we have learned to refer to these as “gold open access” – though we sometimes lose sight of who gets the gold. Elsevier seems a bit less bothered about fully open access journals, though it does have “over 50” of those, partly as a response to academic pressure, discussed below (of course the report doesn’t mention that last part).
So scholarly publishing is not a cottage industry; it’s a global production process, and it’s expanding quickly. Because only the delivery side can be easily automated, the intellectual production side needs more and more workers in order to cope with this expansion. Happily for Elsevier, the largest segment of its academic army of labour – the peer reviewers – works for free. But here lie the roots of Elsevier’s first problem: how to expand that army of unpaid academic labourers.
And Elsevier has a second problem. It is to do with its reputation in the academic world. There have been a string of problems in recent years. These have involved:
The ‘double trouble’ for Elsevier, then, is the imperative to increase the number of unpaid peer reviewers globally in a climate where its controversial history could make this difficult.
Part of the company’s solution to this conundrum is to contribute funds to a charitable body, Sense About Science (SaS, 2015a). Amongst other things SaS runs workshops on peer reviewing for newer researchers (SaS, 2014; 2015b). These are subsidised by further funding from Elsevier and other members of the scholarly publishing oligopoly. SaS has also conducted research (“administered with a grant from Elsevier, who also provided support writing this report” - SaS, 2009, p. 2) on peer review as an academic activity.
No doubt Sense About Science’s motives are good and its research is completely impartial, but the conclusions of that research have been reported as a praise song for peer reviewing. The benefits and virtues of peer reviewing are extolled and the practice of doing reviews is positioned as an essential skill that researchers need, offering them career benefits of all sorts (Global Academy Jobs, 2015). Newer academics are told that engaging in peer review will enhance their critical skills, help them publish good articles and get to know journals in their field.
This arm’s length approach to recruiting its unpaid workforce by Reed Elsevier seems to be working: the benefits of peer reviewing get illuminated through the good works of a charitable body whose workshops also increase the quality of the review process. The bonus is that nobody mentions exploitation of academic labour, high profits, journal subscription prices, the string of controversies or the appropriation of public resources by the scholarly publishing industry generally.
It is undeniable that there are some benefits in doing peer reviews for the reviewers themselves, especially for new academic recruits. But this doesn’t mean that these new academics – who are usually struggling with high workloads and a steep learning curve on a low salary - need to be exploited in this way.
References
(All websites last accessed 22.5.2015)
Altbach, P. G. and Rapple, B., (2012) Anarchy, commercialism, and “publish or perish”. International Higher Education 67, 5-7. https://www.revistaensinosuperior.gr.unicamp.br/edicoes/ihe/IHE67original.pdf
Global Academy Jobs (2015) Global Academy Jobs weekly bulletin. May. http://globalacademyjobs.cmail1.com/t/ViewEmail/t/DB9C005F90D396E3/1BAEBCAE5682B32D44D0DD5392A9C75A
Reed Elsevier (2013) Annual report and financial statements 2013. http://www.relxgroup.com/investorcentre/reports%202007/Documents/2013/reed_elsevier_ar_2013.pdf
SaS - Sense About Science (2009) Peer review survey 2009: full report. http://www.senseaboutscience.org/data/files/Peer_Review/Peer_Review_Survey_Final_3.pdf
SaS – Sense About Science (2014) Past peer review workshops.http://www.senseaboutscience.org/pages/past-peer-review-workshops.html
SaS - Sense About Science Funding (2015a) http://www.senseaboutscience.org/pages/funding.html
SaS - Sense About Science Funding (2015b) http://www.senseaboutscience.org/pages/april-2014-workshop.html
The Cost of Knowledge Campaign (2015) http://thecostofknowledge.com/
Wikipedia (2015a) Elsevier: criticism and controversies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Criticism_and_controversies
Wikipedia (2015b): The cost of knowledge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge
“Cultural Lag” and Crowd Sourced Peer Review. 6 January 2015.
In quick succession I recently came across two examples of ‘cultural lag’ theory being used (albeit unnamed) to explain part of our current malaise with academic publishing. Here they are:
"Scientific innovation frequently exceeds the pace of social development, and established cultural institutions often experience a period of upheaval during the integration of new technologies. Until recently, the cost of printing and distributing hardcopy texts might have warranted the traditional academic peer-review process, whereby a small group makes editorial decisions for journals that have thousands of readers. The procedures that systematise these publications suffer from technological lag, as advances in electronic communications have precluded the necessity of this conventional evaluation method. Today, traditional peer-review procedures have become obsolete, a circumstance that calls for a re-conceptualisation of the academic publication process." (Herlihy-Mera, 2012)
"We are fully immersed in the digital age, but cultural change takes some time to catch up with technological advances. The way we view academic publishing is also changing at a varied pace." (Global Academy Jobs, 2015)
Put succinctly cultural lag 'theory' (if it can be called such) says that changes in cultural practices always happen more slowly than technological developments and this delay causes problems of different sorts.
The trouble is, as the eminent sociologist Robert Merton says, "Once a theory includes such concepts as 'lags'... it becomes so labile and so indistinct that it can be reconciled with virtually any configuration of data" (Merton, 1951, p. 238). The same is true of the concept of 'culture' of course. So the theory of 'cultural lag' must be one of the most unstable sociological ideas around. Some of its inherent problems are usefully elaborated by Brinkman and Brinkman (1997).
In terms of its application to academic publishing, cultural lag theory really explains nothing, partly because it misses some important evidence:
1. Academic publishing deploys some very sophisticated technologies applied to: search-and-retrieve; permanent archiving; setting up and defending paywalls; marketing; managing editorial, review and publishing processes, and much else besides. And academic practices have kept pace with them: readers, authors, reviewers, editors and others have adapted their practices quickly, partly because of the benefits brought by those technologies.
2. However there are some evident gaps in the deployment of technologies in some aspects of academic publishing, which seems odd given the significant changes that have happened very rapidly in other parts.
3. Where there are gaps in the use by academic publishing of technology-enhanced solutions – for example in the peer review process – other commercial sectors show that such solutions can be effectively deployed and used. Amazon, ebay and tripadvisor each show in slightly different ways how crowd-sourced reviews work. And again there has been no noticeable 'cultural lag' in terms of shifting practices to their use. There are many benefits for users and large numbers of them have shifted their practices in the area of consumption and leisure.
The explanation of these gaps in academic publishing does not lie in some vague notion of 'cultural lag', therefore, but in an exploration of the drivers behind technological deployment and, particularly, the non-use by journal publishers of extant technologies. The questions that need asking are:
Herlihy-Mera addresses some of these issues around peer review in his chapter (2012). He describes an alternative to the current system, what he calls “open-source peer review” in this way:
"[A]ll texts are listed in a database or online forum; a journal’s readership browses the texts and has authority to decide which merit top placement. Texts that receive positive comments advance on the list."
(Herlihy-Mera, 2012).
He offers a few disparate examples of this happening. However there is some confusion in Herlihy-Mera’s chapter between 'open peer review', with 'open' referring to the absence of anonymity in the process, and 'open-source peer review', as described above. I am grateful to Vicki Trowler for pointing out that a more accurate term for the latter is 'crowd-sourced peer review', where the crowd comprises the journal’s readers. That crowd is likely to be a well-informed if somewhat heterogeneous one. This term also helps draw a clear line between discussions of open peer review and the more radical alternative described above.
I am grateful too for Vicki’s work on chaotic conceptions (V. Trowler, in press, 2015). She says:
"[C]haotic conceptions are abstractions [Vorstellung] that require further disaggregation into simpler and simpler concepts [Begriff], unmasking the ‘rich totality of many determinations and relations’ (Marx, 1973, p. 100). ‘Chaotic conceptions’ are neither simply sloppy nor accidental; they function actively to carry out real ideological work, disguising interests and inequities."
It strikes me that using the conception of 'cultural lag' as an explanation for the lack of better peer review processes might itself be an example of a chaotic conception, masking the interests and inequities which are maintained by the failure to deploy extant technologies to develop an improved system. And the "rich totality of many determinations and relations" which Marx discusses are certainly evident in the academic publishing industry, as my earlier blogs have indicated.
References
Websites last accessed 1 June 2015
Brinkman, R. L. and Brinkman, J. E. (1997) Cultural lag: conception and theory. International Journal of Social Economics, 24, 6, 609-627.
Global Academy Jobs (2015) Why publish in an academic journal?http://globalacademyjobs.com/blog/81/Why-publish-in-an-academic-journal
Herlihy-Mera, J. (2012) Open-source peer reviews: a paradigm shift in academic publishing. https://www.academia.edu/8507075/Open-Source_Peer_Reviews_A_Paradigm_Shift_in_Academic_Publishing. This is published as a chapter in N. Collé-Bak, M. Latham and D. Ten Eyck (Eds.) (2014) Book practices & textual itineraries: textual practices in the digital age. PUN-Editions Universitaires de Lorraine.
Marx, K. (1973) Grundrisse. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Merton, R. K. (1951) Social theory and social structure. Glencoe: The Free Press.
Trowler, V (in press, 2015) "Negotiating Contestations and 'Chaotic Conceptions': Engaging 'Non-Traditional' Students in Higher Education" Higher Education Quarterly.
Academic Publishing via Amazon and Smashwords (other brands are available). Is it a good idea? 23 January 2015.
It has finally become much easier to publish a book for e-readers and print-on-demand (POD). In the old days formatting a book yourself was a tricky business, but it has become much easier thanks to createspace, Amazon’s book production arm, which offers templates and automated checking. Good, free, independent online formatting tools are now also available such as the e-pub validator at http://validator.idpf.org/ and Calibre, the formatting and e-book software. Publishing through createspace or Smashwords puts your book into multiple shop windows and enables you to offer it in both e-book and physical form (though on Smashwords you need to use a separate POD service like Lulu).
These are great services now. But is it a good idea? There are many advantages, especially as you can make your book free (on Smashwords) or very cheap. POD means that physical books of very high standard are delivered to the buyer in two or three days at less than £5, minimum price. Contrast this with academic publishers who charge £100 in hardback, only printing a paperback edition over a year later when they’ve extracted as many sales as possible at the hardback price. This limits accessibility and contributes to the huge profitability of some academic publishers: Harvie et al, 2012, show the staggering profits of academic publishing – higher than brewers, cigarettes and even search providers like Google. You can update your e-book easily, and those who have already bought it via Amazon get the update free on their Kindle. You design its look and feel, including the cover, and you get feedback from buyers which helps you think about improving the impact your work has. And if you want to charge above the very low base price (and Amazon insists you do make a charge – though with short periods free if you want), then royalty rates are high – typically 70% as against less than 10% from traditional publishers.
Risks are small or non-existent. There is no warehousing to do – POD books don’t need to be stored, and if there are no sales your only investment has been your time. True, you have to do everything – proofreading, indexing and the rest, but the same is increasingly true in traditional publishing – the author does more and more, with freelance copy editors helping to a greater or lesser extent. If you want an index done in traditional publishing, you have to pay for it anyway, and the quality is usually worse than if you did it yourself.
Something not much talked about is the tyranny of size in traditional publishing. One would think that academic knowledge comes in only two sizes – small or large: 8,000 words (academic journal article) or 80,000 words (book). This is very like another sector which has undergone parallel changes – the music industry. But in academia we are still in the world of the single or the LP as pretty much the only options. There are no such restrictions on e-books and POD: you can write to the size appropriate to what you want to say. My books for doctoral students seem naturally to fall out at between 10-12,000 words, though I have no idea why.
But the downside is primarily to do with ‘marketing’: getting your book out there. If your name is well-known in the academic world, and/or you have a specialism that people want to know about, this is less of a problem. But if not then raising awareness about and interest in your book enough to download or order it means considerable effort, primarily through social media of different sorts as well as networking both online and in person. You may not feel cut out for that and be happier to see your book in the publisher’s catalogue, their website and marketed through their extensive lists.
Then of course there are issues around evaluation of quality. In the UK the next Research Excellence Framework rules will be an important issue: will such publishing really ‘count’? (Though open access work will be required – and in some formats you can make your book free). Your book may be brilliant, but there are plenty of e-books that are rubbish. Distinguishing yours from that pack can be a challenge, though you could rely on readers’ feedback.
In the past ‘vanity publishing’ had a very bad name, rightly, and traditional publishers, faced with Amazon’s threat, try hard to raise that spectre. But in reality that is a discourse from the distant past, from different times. Not that manipulation of discourse is one-sided: createspace talks about ‘independent publishing’ by authors on its home page: but it is not really independent, especially as e-publishing becomes increasingly monopolistic, making even established traditional publishers very afraid.
For some Amazon’s reputation about its tax affairs and its increasing dominance in the market (around 70%) may make them want to avoid that company. Of course ‘other brands are available’ so there are options. But if Hardie et al (2012) are right, that kind of fiscal activity also happens in traditional publishing...and worse beside, as Altbach and Rapple’s account (2012) of the dealings between Elsevier and Merck shows. It seems unlikely though that Amazon will lose its dominant position in the near future at least.
So is it a good idea? For me, a mixed economy works: publishing e-books and POD books for some purposes and traditional publication outlets for others. For other academics that will not be so attractive – for a variety of reasons. Increasingly, though, I resent signing away copyright to highly profitable business who take for granted academics’ work writing, reviewing, editing for them, for free. I hate to see traditional publishers charging thousands for open access to a single article and for journal subscriptions. This is charged to the very academics and institutions that have produced the material and done the quality-control. And I get irritated by constant requests to review articles. This is an unpaid extra marking load done for businesses that can well afford to pay for that academic work. But there is a moral pressure to do it – after all, my own work is reviewed by others who are similarly exploited.
But if the music business is any indicator (and the excellent book by Talking Heads’ David Byrne suggests that it may well be), we are unlikely to see the demise of traditional publishing any time soon. Instead there will be increasingly diverse provision, with some major players dominating the different sectors.
I post about predators and then what happens……..30 December 2014.
So today I get a Google Scholar alert telling me about an article by 2 people who should know better publishing something related to my work (and citing me) in a journal called International Journal of Advanced Research in Business. Volume 1, Number 1, 2015. Turns out that three of the 'articles' in there are not articles but abstracts only. And clearly there has been no sub-editing going on at all in any of them.
Is that the strong aroma of Journoraptor I can smell? A bit more digging shows this to be one of a stable of journals run by International Advances for Research. Does that name even make sense??http://www.intlafr.com/.
Turns out they also run conferences around the world with some pretty stinging fees (http://www.intlafr.com/registration.html) and pretty ropey websites - note the stock photos of a London bus and Big Ben (http://www.intlafr.com/londonconf.html). Note too the venue "University of London", wherever that is (yes, obviously, in London...but which of the 27 institutions that constitute it?) Smells like a Conferensasaurus to me.
What's also interesting is the amazing 'review committee' consisting of a huge number of distinguished professors and associate professors (real people in real institutions, in the small sample I took) from around the world. I wonder if they know they are on this list:
http://www.intlafr.com/reviewcommittee.html
I'm happy to be corrected about this.....but I for one would run very very fast in the opposite direction from this outfit and all its works.
Predatory Beasts in the REF Jungle. 19 December 2014.
As the REF results are announced it’s a good time to be reminded of one of the unintended consequences of the exercise. It concerns climate change: the REF has inadvertently created a suitable habitat for beasts that predate on the academic world. Below I give them dinosaur-like names, but it will take more than a meteor to wipe this lot out.
We hear a lot about spurious journals run by predatory publishers that charge high fees for so-called open access publication. Peer review processes are minimal or non-existent so there is no quality control. Recent well-publicised exposés include a nonsense article apparently authored by characters from the Simpsons (http://tinyurl.com/n29k8lj), and another which consisted of the repeated phrase ‘get me off your fxxxing mailing list’ (http://tinyurl.com/qx7bu88). Fortunately we now have better weapons for avoiding such predation, most notably Beall’s list: http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/.
Be warned, however, that these are not the only such beasts now roaming the academic jungle. Here’s my I-Spy list of the ones to watch out for:
Journoraptor: Referred to above, this comes camouflaged as a bona-fide journal with a near-identical title. It stalks unwary academics and lures them with promises of publication for a fee. Sadly it’s a case of publish and perish with these nasties: falling prey not only empties bank accounts but badly discredits CVs and provides no REF value. Avoidance tactics: if you are approached and feel tempted, search Beall’s list and check with your librarian.
Monographodon: This is closely related to Journoraptor. It travels in the disguise of a legitimate publisher, again using the camouflage of a legitimate-sounding name. It lures its prey with promises of publishing that book (perhaps a PhD thesis, or some rejected manuscript in the bottom drawer). It differs from Journoraptor in that it will actually physically publish, but it lacks any ability or desire to market the book, taking the money and producing a handful of copies. REF reviewers will not be fooled. Avoidance tactics: if you are approached with the lure of publishing ‘your book’ (with no details specified) run for the hills.
Conferensasaurus: This one is clever. Its lure is an academic conference in the sun with conference topics that are so broad as to cover nearly every academic domain. But don’t be fooled. There may be a ‘conference’ of sorts, but with no academic merit whatsoever, no follow-up and at a high cost. There will be no REF value. Avoidance tactics: watch out for very broad themes and very attractive venues. If you see both together, run very fast (unless your institution is kind enough to fund you for such things, you want a free holiday and are unethical enough to use funds in this way – NOT recommended).
Copyrightonator: Another pernicious beast who predates junior researchers in particular. It roams the jungle collecting thesis topics and then lures its prey with offers of publication when complete. Its diet is copyright ownership and it’s playing the long game, hoping that its prey’s work will become marketable in the future and copyright ownership will be valuable. Researchers’ hopes of future employment on the back of this, and of REF value, will certainly be dashed. Avoidance tactics: if you are approached out of the blue with this kind of offer, delete it. Only sign copyright agreements for specific, completed outputs, and read them carefully.
LegitoSaurus: This nasty little guy is sneaky. It preys on established academics whose names are known in the discipline. It builds a trap of a legitimate-sounding academic activity, perhaps a conference or project, and invites academics to join the academic board, executive committee or some such. Doing so offers no esteem value whatsoever. Avoidance tactics: if you are approached watch for phrases like “There is no obligation when you serve in the committee” and then run very fast indeed.
Impactobactor: A clever one this, feeding both on the academic looking for a high impact factor and on other predatory beasts. Its skin mimics that of ‘legitimate’ impact-measuring organizations such as Thompson Reuters’ Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) which provided metrics about publications. Impactobactor lures both Journoraptors and academics to pay for completely spurious impact measurements. Avoidance tactics: They are particularly hard to spot (watch out, for example, for the “Institute for Science Information” – not “Scientific”: http://isi-thomsonreuters.com/main). Read their names and website addresses carefully and look out for poor English on websites. If you spot them the advice is, as always….run for it.
These beasts seriously threaten your reputation by association, may cost you money and will never help you perform better in the REF.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science
Elsevier’s Profits Continue to Rise. 8 May 2016
The 2015 annual report of Elsevier's parent company, RELX, was published in March.
http://www.relx.com/investorcentre/reports%202007/Documents/2015/relxgroup_ar_2015.pdf
Happily for RELX the academic publishing part of their business, Elsevier, continues to grow (by 2%) and profits continue to rise (by 3%) - to well over 30% adjusted operating profit (see page 17 of the report). £760 million profit on a turnover of £2070 million is pretty good by the standards of any industry.
Of course this level of revenue is small beer compared to some of the other players in the academic publishing market such as Wiley (see below). The 2015 results of Informa plc show a similar pattern to Elsevier's, with an adjusted operating profit margin at over 36% for its academic publishing business (which includes many familiar names). Even these high levels of profit mask the immense profitability of the journal segment of academic publishing, which does much better than academic book publishing.
Sadly for academic libraries, universities, academics and taxpayers the exploitation of academic labour continues. Neither academics nor their departments are compensated for the labour devoted to journal peer reviewing for free. Journal publishers continue to receive copyright on research work outputs for free. They continue to demolish university library budgets with journal subscription fees. Meanwhile the content of those journals continues to be provided free by academics whose work is funded by others, including taxpayers.
12 years on from the highly critical House of Commons report into academic publishing, nothing of significance has changed except the rise and rise of the global academic publishing corporations.
PearsonWorld and ‘bespoke’ books. Part 1. 3 September 2015
I see that Pearson[i] do ‘personalised learning resources’ for higher education: http://tinyurl.com/pdylp6m. Academics can compile their own materials in combination with relevant materials published by Pearson to create a bespoke book for their students. Pearson tells potential customers that their students will…. “pay only for the content they need which aligns exactly to your teaching.”
That sends a shiver down my spine for a couple of reasons. The first is pedagogical. It reminds me of my experience years ago as a tutor on an Open University Masters course being told in a training session that tutors were forbidden to direct students’ reading beyond the OU materials provided. I was astonished, stated my view that the policy was stupid and ignored it. The OU materials were varied, of a very high standard and well integrated. But they presented a closed world of knowledge. Happily at some point later the OU saw that limiting students’ inquisitiveness, research skills and knowledge of the breadth of literature available in this way made no sense. Pearson’s notion of ‘personalised learning resources’ is potentially going much further down this road of branded, over-structured teaching provision: a modern-day form of programmed instruction with an edu-business twist.
And of course, apart from the lecturer’s own work, their “bespoke” books contain Pearson materials; for copyright reasons, Pearson would say. There are two case studies provided by Pearson to help sell this idea. One says “I was lucky because Pearson had all the cases I wanted”, and the other “It helped that Pearson had the content I needed.” Those two short case studies are worth reading (http://tinyurl.com/oqm5dup and http://tinyurl.com/nvf3qjs). In both of them “my Pearson account manager” is lauded. The imagery is the same in both: the lecturer having their hand held by the kindly account manager with the fabulous resources of benevolent Pearson making things better for lecturers and students.
Which brings me on to my second concern: the Pearsonisation of education: the spread of PearsonWorld. This is already extremely well advanced in the United States, with Pearson involved in school-level testing and provision of textbooks and other learning materials in a big way. The same is true of other parts of the world. Anna Hogan and Bob Lingard write extremely informatively about this in a number of different outputs for a variety of audiences (http://tinyurl.com/okujmxu and see references below). Edu-business of this kind is finding a benign environment in neo-liberal government regimes like those of the USA and the UK. And of course Pearson wants to extend the breadth and depth of its reach globally; to meet its goal of becoming “one globally connected company” as their 2013 annual report has it (p. 11).
Or of course students could make use of their university library, which is free at the point of use. Interestingly, the word “library” only crops up once in the two case studies, the Heriot-Watt one: “it’s nice to see students no longer relying on library copies.” I'm not so sure.
(Part 2 of this post suggests some alternative routes, if bespoke books for specific courses are your thing. There are other possibilities, I'm sure, so please point to them if you wish.)
References
Hogan, A., Lingard, B. and Sellar, S. (2015) Edu-businesses and education policy. Professional Voice, 10 2: 24-30. http://issuu.com/aeu-vic/docs/pv_10_2_complete_web
Hogan, A., Sellar, S. and Lingard, B. (2015). Network restructuring of global edu-business: the case of Pearson’s Efficacy Framework. In W. Au and J. J. Ferrare (Eds.), Mapping corporate education reform: power and policy networks in the neoliberal state (pp. 43-64) London, UK: Routledge. https://www.routledge.com/products/9781138792005
Hogan, A. (2014) NAPLAN and the role of edu-business: new governance, new privatisations and new partnerships in Australian education policy. Australian Educational Researcher, 1-18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13384-014-0162-z
[i] Sales in 2013: £5.2 billion. Adjusted operating profit of only £871 million thanks to “tough trading” that year.
PearsonWorld Part 2: Alternative ways of creating ‘bespoke’ books for students. 3 September 2105
If academics want to go down the ‘bespoke books’ road there are better ways of doing it than involving Pearson, ones that offer: faster delivery; online access and cheaper pricing (including in some cases being free for students). Createspace is the easiest alternative: materials are quickly created using free online tools and the resultant book is available to buy through Amazon in online or hard copy form. The author sets the price and online books can be made free for 5 days in every 90. Smashwords plus Lulu is a bit more complicated – the Smashwords online creation software isn’t as good as Createspace’s, and it requires a secondary process of setting up the book in Lulu for print on demand (POD). However the advantage is that the e-book can be made free forever on Smashwords. Lulu’s POD book price is set by the author at or above Lulu's minimum, which is low, and (from experience) the quality is excellent and it is delivered to the purchaser a couple of days after ordering (Pearson say 15 weeks for theirs). Or you could just use Lulu on its own – they do e-books as well as POD books. Copyright issues for material in the book can be addressed in the way they always have been – by writing to the copyright owner and asking for permission to reproduce a specific item or section in a specific form for a specific purpose for a given length of time. Materials are not limited to Pearson-owned ones, and of course short passages of text, properly referenced, do not need copyright permission, being 'fair use' (80 words of a book is a rule of thumb, but it depends on context).
That’s still relying on business support, of course, but at least it doesn’t involve getting sucked into PearsonWorld. It’s a learning process involving more work and it’s more time-consuming. But you take control of it yourself as an autonomous, intelligent, critical and creative person.
Celebrating the “good” journals and publishers 21.8.2015
One of my readers reminded me that we should celebrate those journals and publishers who are on the side of angels when it comes to open access. It's a good point, and we should not just celebrate them but publish work in them. Here are some initial comments, and I'd welcome more from readers.
Care needs to be taken when choosing to celebrate and use open access journals. Many are not really on the side of the angels. Predatory publishers describe themselves as ‘open access’, and in a sense they are: the author pays and the reader has free access to their work, just as in the open access gold model (see earlier blog posts). However predatory publishers’ journals do not have readership, quality control, status or value. I wouldn't describe 'legitimate' journals that only offer gold open access as on the angels' side either - their high publication fees exclude many authors and institutions.
So which open access journals and publishers should be celebrated and used?
The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association aims to promote good practice in open access publishing and support the best publishers. Their members list is a good place to start looking. In 2003 the Open Society Foundations (funded by George Soros) gave financial backing to Lund University in Sweden to run a Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). DOAJ carefully vets open access journal publishers before listing them. It currently covers over 10,000 journals.
Another alternative is to stay with the big five publishers (often necessary for early-career academics who need to establish their credentials) but simultaneously to take every opportunity to make work accessible to everyone…..Without, of course, paying the big five’s exorbitant fees for ‘gold’ open access (immediate availability with no paywall).
The way to do this is to “archive” work – that is, to make it accessible to the public, but within the policies of the chosen journal. Archiving can be done on the author’s own website, a university repository (Lancaster University’s is here: http://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/) or on public servers such as www.academia.edu. Universities and their libraries are understandably very keen that academics use their repositories as much as possible, though my experience is that they make it very frustrating and time-consuming to do so.
There are various levels of archiving:
· Pre-print archiving: uploading the version of an article after it is submitted to the journal but before refereeing.
· Author’s post-print archiving: uploading the final .pdf version of the article, but not the published version in the journal.
· Publisher’s post-print archiving: uploading the published version of the article immediately after the journal publishes it.
· Green open access: publisher’s post-print archiving after a period of embargo. Sometimes one year, sometimes two or more.
Different journals have different policies on these options, and set different conditions in relation to them. Fortunately JISC has funded the RoMEO website, which is a searchable database of publishers' policies regarding the self- archiving of journal articles on the web and in open access repositories. It is a really good place to choose a journal on the basis of its access policies: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/ .
For example the journal Higher Education comes out reasonably well[i]. Although published by Springer, one of the oligopolistic big five, that journal allows every level of archiving listed above except publisher’s post-print archiving within the first year of publication. In other words Higher Education has a green open access policy with a one-year embargo and permits pre-print and author's post-print archiving.
Its entry on RoMEO is here: http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo/issn/0018-1560/.
Readers: please suggest specific publishers or journals that should be celebrated for their open access approach. I'll start off with a couple of suggestions:
- International Journal of Education and Development Using Information and Communication Technology
- Cogent Open Access. Though an arm of Taylor and Francis, Cogent publishes on an open access basis with a 'pay what you want' model for authors. It also nods at the work reviewers do by offering a discount to them. Its subject list is here. It's not ideal, but T&F deserve some credit for this small concession.
[i] It is ‘green’ on RoMEO’s four-colour scale of accessibility: green; blue; yellow; white. This is not be confused with ‘green open access’, which means the ability to archive the publisher’s post-print after an embargo period. RoMEO’S categorisation system is set out here: http://tinyurl.com/d49jb6g
“NOT MY MONKEYS”: Caught in the commercialism trap? 30 July 2015
The eminent American observer of UK higher education, Martin Trow, observed in the late 1980’s that British academics were caught in a ‘Robbins trap’ (Trow, 1989). This is the paradox presented by a simultaneous and incompatible commitment to higher education expansion as advocated in the 1963 Robbins report, on the one hand, and a model of higher education founded on practices more suited to a smaller, more homogenous HE system on the other (Trowler, 1997).
For academics caught in that trap, doing the old things in a very different context didn’t work and resulted in exhaustion, stress and frustration at not being able to achieve their goals. These academics were trying to offer a bespoke higher education experience to individual students in newly massified contexts. And of course they largely failed because of the weight of student numbers, the new heterogeneity of the student body and because of the simultaneous suite of curricular ‘reforms’ somewhat modelled on the US HE setup (semesterisation, modularisation and the rest) which made it difficult to get to know individual students. Different practices and different values were required in this new situation, Trow claimed.
Things have moved on and academics as a group have largely adapted. The sector itself has settled down somewhat and in some places early enthusiasms for those ‘reforms’ have moderated or reversed. But, as another eminent American sociologist noted, most people feel their lives are in “a series of traps” (Mills, 1959), not just the one. For some the Robbins Trap has been replaced by another antagonistic relationship: between their longstanding values, priorities and practices on the one hand and a higher education context that has changed under their feet: the Commercialism Trap.
With the progressive withdrawal of state support from higher education in many countries, universities have been forced to chase funding and behave more like businesses. New managerialist practices have been a deployed in this, particularly in relation to target-setting and associated resource allocation and promotion policies. In many places universities have become much more commercialised, target-driven and financially focused. Frances Kelly’s heartfelt article A Day in the Life (and Death) of a Public University(2015) describes this, and its personal effects on her as Head of Department resigning from her job, in some detail:
"As I listen to the speakers talk about the ‘third mission’ I notice I am growing angry and upset, too upset to speak. I think about the idea of welfare and how it is now absent from university mission statements, although the template phrase student experience regularly appears".
Like Kelly, many academics continue to have a commitment to working for the public good and to being a responsible academic citizen, working pro bono and ‘doing their bit’. In a commercialised, competitive environment they continue to do external examining work, review articles, sit on external committees, offer talks to other universities, do public engagement work and so on, either for free or for ‘honorarium’ rates hovering around the minimum wage or below it.
And of course they are encouraged to continue by the representatives of interests which would be harmed if they stopped: the convenient fiction of collegiality and the public good is mobilized when necessary, and commercialism temporarily occluded. The results are the same as before: exhaustion, stress and frustration as academics attempt to both meet the targets set by the employers and to behave in ways they see as good citizenship.
Pertinent questions to be asked, though, are: ‘whose interests is this in?’ and ‘does doing this really achieve the goals I consider important?’ So, for example, when GlobalAcademyJobs encourages you to become a journal peer reviewer, how robust is the argument that your CV will be enhanced? Is this a target actually recognised by appointment and promotion panels? And whose interests does such an argument really serve[1]?
There is a Polish proverb which translates as: “Not My Circus. Not My Monkeys.” I think it’s useful to reflect regularly on the nature of our personal circus, our own monkeys. And to look closely at the ones that trundle down the road towards us from time to time, asking “whose circus is that?” Understanding what the trap is and how it works is the first step to getting out of it.
References
Kelly, F. (2015) A day in the life (and death) of a public university. Higher Education Research and Development. Taylor and Francis Online http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07294360.2015.1024628
GlobalAcademyJobs (2015) How to Become a Peer Reviewer. http://globalacademyjobs.com/blog/91/How-to-become-a-peer-reviewer.
Mills, C. W. (1959) The Sociological Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Trow M. (1989) The Robbins Trap: British Attitudes and the Limits of Expansion, Higher Education Quarterly, 43, 1, pp. 55-75. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2273.1989.tb01493.x/abstract
Trowler, P. (1997) Beyond the Robbins Trap: reconceptualising academic responses to change in higher education (or....Quiet Flows the Don?). Studies in Higher Education, 22, 3, 301-318. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/03075079712331380916
[1] I noted in an earlier blog ("Elsevier's Double Trouble") that the big academic publishers are facing a dire problem recruiting peer reviewers as they increase the number of journals and articles they publish year on year. Coincidentally, .....or perhaps not, that blog was also sparked by an article promoting doing peer review in the GlobalAcademyJobs bulletin.
“Scholarly Publishing: What If?” The House of Commons report over 10 years on. 16 June 2015.
(All quotes from House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, 2004)
What if the British government actually did give “consideration to balancing the needs of the research community, the taxpayer and the commercial sectors for which it has responsibility?”
What if the scholarly publishing industry was no longer allowed to “receive [for free]…the goods that it sells to its customers from those same customers, [with] a quality control mechanism provided [for free] by its customers…[while receiving ] a tremendous fee from those same customers?”
What if public money were not “used at three stages in the publishing process: to fund the research project; to pay the salaries of academics who carry out peer review for no extra payment; and to fund libraries to purchase scientific publications?”
What if the government no longer “showed so little concern about where [that] public money ended up?”
What if the government did actually feel the “need to account for its investment in the publishing process?”
What if the government really did “take a lead in establishing an efficient and sustainable environment for the publication of research findings?”
What if the Office of Fair Trading really did “commit to biennial public reporting on the state of the [scholarly publishing] market, including how STM [Scientific, technical and medical] publication prices are developing; how prices change following mergers and acquisitions in the sector and the impact of bundling deals upon competition?”
What if publishers really did “provide modest financial rewards to the departments in which the [peer] reviewers are based…[to help] fund seminars or further research?”
What if the provision for outcompeting bloated global publishing corporations through a centrally managed system of fully open access journals and repositories were not underfunded, partial, disconnected and largely an alien idea to most academics?
And what if the millions saved every year in university funds and taxes that currently support those corporations’ profits and their shareholders’ dividends were used instead to fund student scholarships, to enhance research capacity and improve provision in higher education generally?
Reference
House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (HoCSTC) (2004) Scientific publications: free for all? London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399.pdf
A Few Relevant Organizations' Websites (Readers – please add more in comments)
Authors’ Alliance: http://www.authorsalliance.org/
British Library: www.bl.uk
Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutions: http://www.sparc.arl.org/COAPI
EDiNA: http://edina.ac.uk/
Global Open Access Portal: http://www.unesco.org/new/en/communication-and-information/portals-and-platforms/goap/
JISC: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/content
Open Access Network: http://openaccessnetwork.org/
OpenDepot.org: http://opendepot.org/information.html
Right to Research Coalition: http://www.righttoresearch.org/
SHERPA: Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access (SHERPA) Project. Jointly funded by JISC and the Consortium of University Research Libraries (CURL). http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/
SPARC: Open Access Working Group. http://www.sparc.arl.org/initiatives/advocacy/oawg
SPARC Europe: http://sparceurope.org/
Going for Gold. Open access and the ‘big four’ academic publishers. 27 May 2015.
Currently there are two versions of open access offered by journal publishers: green and gold[i]. Gold involves a payment to make your article open to anyone. Green, where available, means waiting a year or two, and the loss of currency and immediacy. Even the green option is not a threat to the profits of the journal publishing companies, as one would imagine. In fact open access has added another income stream to their total revenues.
Open access fee income from “author-pays” and “author’s-funder-pays” is currently a small part of the revenue of these companies. But it is growing, and it is a strategic priority for publishers, while traditional journal subscription income continues to grow too.
Here’s what the big four (Reed Elsevier, John Wiley (now Wiley-Blackwell), Springer S&BM and Informa) say about open access in their annual reports.
Reed Elsevier (2013). Total revenue for year, combined business: £6bn. Science, Technical and Medical division: £2bn. Article publication fees for gold open access range from $500 to $5,000 plus tax (Elsevier, 2015).
“Over the past 15 years alternative payment models for the dissemination of research such as “author-pays open access” or “author’s-funder-pays” have emerged.” (p. 16)....“In the primary research market, Elsevier aims to grow volume through new journal launches, expansion of author-pays journals and growth from emerging markets…” (p. 15)....Over 1,600 of Elsevier’s journals now offer the option of funding research publishing and distribution via a sponsored article fee. In addition, Elsevier now publishes more than 50 open access journals.” (p. 16)....“Revenue growth was driven by solid subscription renewals and new sales. “Author-pays” or “author’s-funder-pays” article volumes continued to grow strongly from a small base.” (p. 17).
John Wiley (2014). Total revenue for year: $1.775bn. Article publication fees for gold open access range from $800 to $4,500 plus tax (John Wiley, 2015).
“Wiley Open Access is the Company’s publishing program for open-access research articles…. All research articles published in Wiley Open Access journals are freely available to the general public on Wiley Online Library to read, download and share. A publication service fee is charged upon acceptance of a research article by the Company, which may be paid by the individual author….[To support authors] an academic or research institution, society or corporation may fund the fee directly…. In addition to Wiley Open Access, the Company provides authors with the opportunity to make their individual research articles that were published within the Company’s paid subscription journals freely available to the general public through OnlineOpen.” (p. 16).
Research revenue by product type, fiscal year 2014: (data from p. 15)
Journal subscriptions: 64%
Other publishing income: 18%
Print books: 11%
Digital books: 5%
Open access: 2%
“Key growth strategies for the Research business include developing….. new open access revenue streams.” (p. 15). “Journal Subscription revenue and other related publishing income, such as open access, advertising, backfile sales, the licensing of publishing rights, journal reprints and individual article sales accounted for approximately 50% of the Company’s consolidated fiscal year 2014 revenue.” (p. 21) [Journal subscription revenue alone represented over $641 million (p. 44)]
“Research revenue for fiscal year 2014 increased 3% to $1,044.3 million. The growth was mainly driven by Journal Subscriptions, Digital Books and Open Access fees….” (p. 30). “Open Access revenue, which represents article publication fees from authors that provide immediate free access to the author’s article on the Company’s website, grew $11.5 million in fiscal year 2014.” (p. 30).
Springer Science and Business Media (2012). Total revenue for year almost 1bn euros. Article publication fees for gold open access $3,000 plus tax (Springer, 2015).
“[Financial year] 2012 saw very solid growth of more than 20% in the number of open access articles published.” (p. 3)
“[Financial year] 2012 operating performance was driven by further accelerated organic growth of Springer’s core STM [Science, Technical and Medical] divisions...[involving income from] peer reviewed academic subscription and open access journals, academic books, series and database products as well as the related publishing services….” (p. 3)
“Revenues from Springer’s various open access publishing offers grew above 25% in [financial year] 2012 driven by strong growth in articles submissions and the expansion of Springer’s open access journal portfolio.” (p. 4)
Informa (2013). Total revenue for year: £1.1bn. Academic publishing: £367m. Article publication fees for gold open access: £1,788 plus tax (Taylor and Francis, 2015).
“Operational highlights [of 2013 included the]…………. launch of open access publishing brand, Cogent OA (p. 01)…. which will launch a range of open access journal titles in 2014…… ensuring we are well positioned as this market grows.” (p. 03).
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Does any of this matter, even given the extremely high rates of profitability for the oligopolistic big 4 (a gross profit margin of 73% on scholarly publications in Wiley's case, with open access contributing $17.6 million in revenue - John Wiley 2014, p. 30)?
Here’s what the SV-POW website says on the issue of the profits of the current system of academic publishing, focussing on Elsevier in particular:
“Yes, publishers have a right to make a living. Not only that, but they have a right to make as big a profit as the market can bear (though of course when they form a cartel that distorts the market monopolistically, that changes things).
But here’s what it means to scientists.....:
· When you pay $37.95 to download a PDF from an Elsevier journal, $13.56 of that goes straight into the pockets of Elsevier shareholders.
· When you pay $3000 to have your submission to an Elsevier journal appear as open access, $1072.20 of that goes straight into the pockets of Elsevier shareholders.
· When your library pays $1.7m for a bundle of Elsevier-journal subscriptions, $607,580 of that goes straight into the pockets of Elsevier shareholders…….
You just have to ask yourself whether that’s where you want your money going.”[ii]
I think a more productive question the academic world might want to ask itself is……..
Isn’t it time we took much more robust action to (re-)create a model of academic publishing that doesn’t drain the resources of taxpayers, universities and authors into the coffers of the global academic publishing oligopoly?
This is hardly a revolutionary question. A report by Deutsche Bank (2005) is frequently cited as stating the bank believes that “the publisher adds relatively little value to the publishing process”. A British House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report lamented the public money being drained into academic publishing to generate its profits (HoCSTC, 2004). That report noted that the investment bank Credit Suisse First Boston's conclusion that “we would expect governments (and taxpayers) to examine the fact that they are essentially funding the same purchase three times” (HoCSTC, 2004, p. 37).
That detailed, well-considered and independent report from the House of Commons Committee makes a series of specific recommendations that so far have only been implemented in a partial and patchy way. Many of them have not seen the light of day at all.
I recommend readers of this blog to have a look at the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee report. It’s easily available on the web here. It contrasts rather favourably with the better-known Finch report (2012), which many argue was captured by the industry.
Footnotes
[i] “Open access can be achieved in two ways: Green, which enables authors to publish articles in subscription based journals and self–archive the author accepted version of the article for free public use after an embargo period, and Gold, which enables authors to publish their articles in journals that provide immediate free access to the article on the publisher’s website following payment of an article publication fee.” John Wiley, 2014, p 7. Emphasis mine.
[ii] As I was finalising this blog I learned from an ESRC-funded student that their university’s library had, today, offered to pay Wiley’s ‘gold’ open access fee for an article from their PhD research, because funds were still available on a first-come-first-served basis. Like the Research Excellence Framework (REF), the ESRC have an open access requirement on outputs for which they provided funding. So in that student's case, the taxpayer has not only funded three years of research, but also funded the publisher, Wiley, to make it available, at a cost to the student's university of $3,000. One might say that the institution has ‘bought it back’.
As the House of Commons report (HoCSTC, 2004, p. 37) says: "It has been argued that public money is used at three stages in the publishing process: to fund the research project; to pay the salaries of academics who carry out peer review for no extra payment; and to fund libraries to purchase scientific publications. As one of our submissions asked, “what other business receives the goods that it sells to its customers from those same customers, a quality control mechanism provided by its customers, and a tremendous fee from those same customers?”
References
(Websites last accessed 27.5.2015)
Deutsche Bank AG, 2005, Jan 11. Reed Elsevier: moving the supertanker. Company Focus: Global Equity Research Report.
Elsevier, 2015. Open access articles. http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/sponsored-articles
Finch Report, 2012. Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: How to expand access to research publications. http://www.researchinfonet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Finch-Group-report-FINAL-VERSION.pdf
House of Commons Science and Technology Committee (HoCSTC) (2004) Scientific publications: free for all? London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399.pdf
Informa PLC, 2013. Annual report 2013. http://www.informa.com/documents/investor%20relations/annual%20report%202013/informa%20plc%20annual%20report%20accounts%202013.pdf
John Wiley, 2015. Wiley open access.http://www.wileyopenaccess.com/details/content/12f25e0654f/Publication-Charges.html
John Wiley, 2014. Annual report for fiscal year ending April 2014. http://www.wiley.com/legacy/about/corpnews/fy14_10kFINAL.pdf
Reed Elsevier (Part of the RELX group), 2013. Annual reports and financial statements. http://www.elsevier.com/about/annual-reports
Springer, 2015. Open choice: your research. Your choice. http://www.springer.com/gp/open-access/springer-open-choice
Springer Science & Business Media, 2012. General overview and financial performance.http://static.springer.com/sgw/documents/1412702/application/pdf/Annual_Report_2012_01.pdf
SV-POW!, 2012. The obscene profits of commercial scholarly publishers. http://svpow.com/2012/01/13/the-obscene-profits-of-commercial-scholarly-publishers/
Taylor and Francis, 2015. Publishing open access with Taylor and Francis.http://journalauthors.tandf.co.uk/preparation/OpenAccess.asp
Dear Messrs Taylor and Francis. 19 May 2015.
Dear Messrs. Taylor and Francis
Thank you so much for your kind welcome to your manuscriptcentral website. I don’t recall applying for membership and it’s a special privilege given that I have had no previous contact with your journal. I would be delighted to give you all my contact details and to sum up my research interests in 4 to 5 keywords there, as you suggest. And yes of course I would be delighted to change that temporary password immediately.
Thank you again for your kindness: I am flattered.
Best wishes
_____________________________________________________
Dear Messrs. Taylor and Francis
Thank you for your second communication, just received, asking me to review an article submitted to your fine journal. I have completed all the details you asked for on your website. However I didn’t find the place there where I need to complete my bank details for this work. Perhaps the payment goes to my department or to my university? If that is the case I will ask them to contact you so that you can transfer the payment to the appropriate account.
Best wishes
_____________________________________________________
Dear Messrs. Taylor and Francis
Oh I see. This work is to be undertaken gratis. Perhaps then in recompense I (or my university) will be offered at least a reduction in the £1,788 fee (plus tax) charged for “gold” open access article publication? I have read that the fee needs to be so high partly because of the peer review process which ensures the quality of your esteemed journals.
I would imagine that the work will take me around 2 hours, so a reduction of, let’s say, £100 per review, would seem an extremely reasonable estimate.
Is that agreeable?
Best wishes
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Dear Messrs. Taylor and Francis
Thank you. I see, so there is no recompense for the work at all and no waivers for reviewers of gold open access fees. As I understand it you do not pay authors or their institutions for the research work encapsulated in articles that you publish in your journals, nor do you recompense them for signing to you their copyright in the articles. I assume then you gentlemen are engaged in this work for charitable purposes; perhaps to promote knowledge distribution?
Best wishes
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Dear Informa PLC
I understand from Messrs Taylor and Francis that their publishing work is part of your group. They have directed my query about charitable status to you.
Before I agree to begin the two hours pro bono work they have asked me to undertake, I would be grateful if you would enlighten me as to the work of your group.
Yours sincerely
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Dear Informa PLC
I am astonished that all these familiar names have been acquired by you: Carfax; Routledge; Lawrence Erlbaum; Parthenon; David Fulton and so many others. You certainly seem to be very significant in the publishing industry. Messrs. Taylor and Francis alone publish approximately 1,000 journals and 2,000 book titles each year and your group has around 1,700 journals and a total of 93,000 titles all told. That is astonishingly prolific.
You are a force indeed in the academic publishing world. But you still haven’t answered my question about your charitable status.
Yours sincerely
_____________________________________________________
Informa PLC..........
I have just discovered the following about the work of your group and about scholarly journal publishing:
· Though your head office is in London you are incorporated in Jersey and domiciled in Switzerland, in the most tax-efficient canton. Some authors talk about tax avoidance (Harvie et al 2012). I couldn’t possibly comment.
· Academic publishing is an oligopoly with only 5 other big players, 3 of whom are even bigger than you. They have each been acquiring smaller companies for years. That process towards monopolisation continues.
· You and those other companies derive many millions of pounds annually from university journal subscriptions, despite not having paid those same universities for their academics’ time in producing the content. This is largely tax-payers’ money, though tax payers are prevented by your paywalls from accessing those journals.
· Non-disclosure clauses in subscription contracts mean that the exact amounts paid for these subscriptions are secret. They differ from journal to journal and university to university. Freedom of information requests, university financial reports and publishers' own annual reports give some indication of the huge size of the overall figures involved however.
· Subscription prices are increasing by around 13% each year, and libraries usually have to subscribe to ‘bundles’ of journals, many of which they do not require.
· Operating profit margins in the academic publishing oligopoly run at between 30-40%, which is far above most industries. If scholarly journal publishing is considered separately from other activities the figures for profitability increase – to as much as 70%. The gross profit margin on John Wiley’s scholarly publications for year ending April 2014 was 73% (John Wiley, 2014, p. 30). This level of profit is not surprising given the zero cost of the raw material and much of the labour force. Informa declared a 2013 adjusted operating profit from academic publishing at £130.9m on adjusted revenue of £367.1m (about 36% profit margin, after adjustments) with dividends to shareholders increased to nearly 19 pence per share. These revenue and profit figures increased by 7% and 4% respectively 2012 - 2013. This excludes revenues and profits from your global events and business intelligence operations. The adjusted operating profit of the whole group was £335.3m, and on this you paid just £71.6m in taxes of different sorts to different authorities globally in 2013. This is a tax rate of just over 21%.
I agree with Beverungen et al, (2012, p. 936) that the political economy of academic publishing involves a “double, or even triple, appropriation of public resources”. I began my correspondence “with the impression that academic journal publishing is a benign, almost idyllic, sector of society, in which commercial publishers coexist peaceably with learned societies, working harmoniously to increase the sum of human knowledge” (Harvie et al, 2013, p. 235), just as the Finch report describes (Finch Report, 2012, p. 90). I end it with a very different view.
Therefore I am unwilling to complete the article review you requested until you offer your reviewers or their employers adequate compensation for this work. Clearly you, and the other large academic publishers (Reed Elsevier, John Wiley, Springer S&BM) can easily afford to do so.
References
(Websites last accessed 18.5.2015)
Altbach, P. G. and Rapple, B., 2012. Anarchy, commercialism, and “publish or perish”. International Higher Education 67, 5-7. https://www.revistaensinosuperior.gr.unicamp.br/edicoes/ihe/IHE67original.pdf
Beverungen, A., Bohm, S., Land, C., 2012. The poverty of journal publishing. Organization 19, 929–938. doi:10.1177/1350508412448858
Brook, M., 2014 The cost of academic publishing. Open Access Working Group. http://access.okfn.org/2014/04/24/the-cost-of-academic-publishing/
Finch Report, 2012. Accessibility, sustainability, excellence: How to expand access to research publications. http://www.researchinfonet.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Finch-Group-report-FINAL-VERSION.pdf
Harvie, D., Lightfoot, G., Lilley, S., Weir, K., 2012. What are we to do with feral publishers? Organization 19, 905–914. doi:10.1177/1350508412448859
Harvie, D., Lightfoot, G., Lilley, S., Weir, K., 2013. Publisher, be damned! From price gouging to the open road. Prometheus 31, 229–239. doi:10.1080/08109028.2014.891710
Informa PLC, 2013. Annual report 2013. http://www.informa.com/documents/investor%20relations/annual%20report%202013/informa%20plc%20annual%20report%20accounts%202013.pdf
John Wiley, 2014. Annual report for fiscal year ending April 2014. http://www.wiley.com/legacy/about/corpnews/fy14_10kFINAL.pdf
Reed Elsevier (Part of the RELX group) Annual reports. http://www.elsevier.com/about/annual-reports
Springer Science & Business Media, 2012. General overview and financial performance.http://static.springer.com/sgw/documents/1412702/application/pdf/Annual_Report_2012_01.pdf
SV-POW!, 2012. The obscene profits of commercial scholarly publishers. http://svpow.com/2012/01/13/the-obscene-profits-of-commercial-scholarly-publishers/
Elsevier’s Double Trouble. 22 May 2015.
Reed Elsevier (part of the RELX Group) is pretty big, as its annual report for 2013 reveals (Reed Elsevier, 2013). Its revenues in that year were £2.1billion. About a third of that (but nearly half its profits) came from the part of its five areas of operation that includes scholarly journals. Elsevier’s academic journal operation is huge. In the year covered by the 2013 report over 1 million research papers were submitted to the company’s journals, over 10,000 editors managed the peer review and selection process and over 350,000 articles were published in over 2,000 journals (Reed Elsevier, 2013).
Peer review is crucial in this: it gives authority and legitimacy to Elsevier’s journals and it puts clear blue water between it and the host of predatory publishers discussed in my earlier blog.
Elsevier’s publishing arm is not just big; it’s growing fast. The number of articles submitted to Elsevier journals grew by 9% in the year covered by its report. In addition the company wants to launch new journals and expand what it calls (with refreshing directness) “author-pays” and “author’s-funder-pays” journals. In academia we have learned to refer to these as “gold open access” – though we sometimes lose sight of who gets the gold. Elsevier seems a bit less bothered about fully open access journals, though it does have “over 50” of those, partly as a response to academic pressure, discussed below (of course the report doesn’t mention that last part).
So scholarly publishing is not a cottage industry; it’s a global production process, and it’s expanding quickly. Because only the delivery side can be easily automated, the intellectual production side needs more and more workers in order to cope with this expansion. Happily for Elsevier, the largest segment of its academic army of labour – the peer reviewers – works for free. But here lie the roots of Elsevier’s first problem: how to expand that army of unpaid academic labourers.
And Elsevier has a second problem. It is to do with its reputation in the academic world. There have been a string of problems in recent years. These have involved:
- mass resignations of editors of different Elsevier journals over subscription prices and other matters (Wikipedia, 2015a);
- boycotts of Elsevier journals and books because of its self-interested political lobbying and funding;
- controversies about payments to Elsevier for bypassing the peer review route to publication;
- a scandal about fees for publishing non-independently-reviewed articles that favour drugs produced by ‘big pharma’ (Altbach and Rapple, 2012).
The ‘double trouble’ for Elsevier, then, is the imperative to increase the number of unpaid peer reviewers globally in a climate where its controversial history could make this difficult.
Part of the company’s solution to this conundrum is to contribute funds to a charitable body, Sense About Science (SaS, 2015a). Amongst other things SaS runs workshops on peer reviewing for newer researchers (SaS, 2014; 2015b). These are subsidised by further funding from Elsevier and other members of the scholarly publishing oligopoly. SaS has also conducted research (“administered with a grant from Elsevier, who also provided support writing this report” - SaS, 2009, p. 2) on peer review as an academic activity.
No doubt Sense About Science’s motives are good and its research is completely impartial, but the conclusions of that research have been reported as a praise song for peer reviewing. The benefits and virtues of peer reviewing are extolled and the practice of doing reviews is positioned as an essential skill that researchers need, offering them career benefits of all sorts (Global Academy Jobs, 2015). Newer academics are told that engaging in peer review will enhance their critical skills, help them publish good articles and get to know journals in their field.
This arm’s length approach to recruiting its unpaid workforce by Reed Elsevier seems to be working: the benefits of peer reviewing get illuminated through the good works of a charitable body whose workshops also increase the quality of the review process. The bonus is that nobody mentions exploitation of academic labour, high profits, journal subscription prices, the string of controversies or the appropriation of public resources by the scholarly publishing industry generally.
It is undeniable that there are some benefits in doing peer reviews for the reviewers themselves, especially for new academic recruits. But this doesn’t mean that these new academics – who are usually struggling with high workloads and a steep learning curve on a low salary - need to be exploited in this way.
References
(All websites last accessed 22.5.2015)
Altbach, P. G. and Rapple, B., (2012) Anarchy, commercialism, and “publish or perish”. International Higher Education 67, 5-7. https://www.revistaensinosuperior.gr.unicamp.br/edicoes/ihe/IHE67original.pdf
Global Academy Jobs (2015) Global Academy Jobs weekly bulletin. May. http://globalacademyjobs.cmail1.com/t/ViewEmail/t/DB9C005F90D396E3/1BAEBCAE5682B32D44D0DD5392A9C75A
Reed Elsevier (2013) Annual report and financial statements 2013. http://www.relxgroup.com/investorcentre/reports%202007/Documents/2013/reed_elsevier_ar_2013.pdf
SaS - Sense About Science (2009) Peer review survey 2009: full report. http://www.senseaboutscience.org/data/files/Peer_Review/Peer_Review_Survey_Final_3.pdf
SaS – Sense About Science (2014) Past peer review workshops.http://www.senseaboutscience.org/pages/past-peer-review-workshops.html
SaS - Sense About Science Funding (2015a) http://www.senseaboutscience.org/pages/funding.html
SaS - Sense About Science Funding (2015b) http://www.senseaboutscience.org/pages/april-2014-workshop.html
The Cost of Knowledge Campaign (2015) http://thecostofknowledge.com/
Wikipedia (2015a) Elsevier: criticism and controversies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier#Criticism_and_controversies
Wikipedia (2015b): The cost of knowledge. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cost_of_Knowledge
“Cultural Lag” and Crowd Sourced Peer Review. 6 January 2015.
In quick succession I recently came across two examples of ‘cultural lag’ theory being used (albeit unnamed) to explain part of our current malaise with academic publishing. Here they are:
"Scientific innovation frequently exceeds the pace of social development, and established cultural institutions often experience a period of upheaval during the integration of new technologies. Until recently, the cost of printing and distributing hardcopy texts might have warranted the traditional academic peer-review process, whereby a small group makes editorial decisions for journals that have thousands of readers. The procedures that systematise these publications suffer from technological lag, as advances in electronic communications have precluded the necessity of this conventional evaluation method. Today, traditional peer-review procedures have become obsolete, a circumstance that calls for a re-conceptualisation of the academic publication process." (Herlihy-Mera, 2012)
"We are fully immersed in the digital age, but cultural change takes some time to catch up with technological advances. The way we view academic publishing is also changing at a varied pace." (Global Academy Jobs, 2015)
Put succinctly cultural lag 'theory' (if it can be called such) says that changes in cultural practices always happen more slowly than technological developments and this delay causes problems of different sorts.
The trouble is, as the eminent sociologist Robert Merton says, "Once a theory includes such concepts as 'lags'... it becomes so labile and so indistinct that it can be reconciled with virtually any configuration of data" (Merton, 1951, p. 238). The same is true of the concept of 'culture' of course. So the theory of 'cultural lag' must be one of the most unstable sociological ideas around. Some of its inherent problems are usefully elaborated by Brinkman and Brinkman (1997).
In terms of its application to academic publishing, cultural lag theory really explains nothing, partly because it misses some important evidence:
1. Academic publishing deploys some very sophisticated technologies applied to: search-and-retrieve; permanent archiving; setting up and defending paywalls; marketing; managing editorial, review and publishing processes, and much else besides. And academic practices have kept pace with them: readers, authors, reviewers, editors and others have adapted their practices quickly, partly because of the benefits brought by those technologies.
2. However there are some evident gaps in the deployment of technologies in some aspects of academic publishing, which seems odd given the significant changes that have happened very rapidly in other parts.
3. Where there are gaps in the use by academic publishing of technology-enhanced solutions – for example in the peer review process – other commercial sectors show that such solutions can be effectively deployed and used. Amazon, ebay and tripadvisor each show in slightly different ways how crowd-sourced reviews work. And again there has been no noticeable 'cultural lag' in terms of shifting practices to their use. There are many benefits for users and large numbers of them have shifted their practices in the area of consumption and leisure.
The explanation of these gaps in academic publishing does not lie in some vague notion of 'cultural lag', therefore, but in an exploration of the drivers behind technological deployment and, particularly, the non-use by journal publishers of extant technologies. The questions that need asking are:
- Who has the power to decide what gets deployed, and how?
- Who benefits, and in what ways, from deployment and non-deployment?
- What structures of power, profit, authority and status are supported and challenged by the different options for change?
- Which ways of seeing and valuing are supported, which occluded, in the process of choosing between these options?
Herlihy-Mera addresses some of these issues around peer review in his chapter (2012). He describes an alternative to the current system, what he calls “open-source peer review” in this way:
"[A]ll texts are listed in a database or online forum; a journal’s readership browses the texts and has authority to decide which merit top placement. Texts that receive positive comments advance on the list."
(Herlihy-Mera, 2012).
He offers a few disparate examples of this happening. However there is some confusion in Herlihy-Mera’s chapter between 'open peer review', with 'open' referring to the absence of anonymity in the process, and 'open-source peer review', as described above. I am grateful to Vicki Trowler for pointing out that a more accurate term for the latter is 'crowd-sourced peer review', where the crowd comprises the journal’s readers. That crowd is likely to be a well-informed if somewhat heterogeneous one. This term also helps draw a clear line between discussions of open peer review and the more radical alternative described above.
I am grateful too for Vicki’s work on chaotic conceptions (V. Trowler, in press, 2015). She says:
"[C]haotic conceptions are abstractions [Vorstellung] that require further disaggregation into simpler and simpler concepts [Begriff], unmasking the ‘rich totality of many determinations and relations’ (Marx, 1973, p. 100). ‘Chaotic conceptions’ are neither simply sloppy nor accidental; they function actively to carry out real ideological work, disguising interests and inequities."
It strikes me that using the conception of 'cultural lag' as an explanation for the lack of better peer review processes might itself be an example of a chaotic conception, masking the interests and inequities which are maintained by the failure to deploy extant technologies to develop an improved system. And the "rich totality of many determinations and relations" which Marx discusses are certainly evident in the academic publishing industry, as my earlier blogs have indicated.
References
Websites last accessed 1 June 2015
Brinkman, R. L. and Brinkman, J. E. (1997) Cultural lag: conception and theory. International Journal of Social Economics, 24, 6, 609-627.
Global Academy Jobs (2015) Why publish in an academic journal?http://globalacademyjobs.com/blog/81/Why-publish-in-an-academic-journal
Herlihy-Mera, J. (2012) Open-source peer reviews: a paradigm shift in academic publishing. https://www.academia.edu/8507075/Open-Source_Peer_Reviews_A_Paradigm_Shift_in_Academic_Publishing. This is published as a chapter in N. Collé-Bak, M. Latham and D. Ten Eyck (Eds.) (2014) Book practices & textual itineraries: textual practices in the digital age. PUN-Editions Universitaires de Lorraine.
Marx, K. (1973) Grundrisse. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Merton, R. K. (1951) Social theory and social structure. Glencoe: The Free Press.
Trowler, V (in press, 2015) "Negotiating Contestations and 'Chaotic Conceptions': Engaging 'Non-Traditional' Students in Higher Education" Higher Education Quarterly.
Academic Publishing via Amazon and Smashwords (other brands are available). Is it a good idea? 23 January 2015.
It has finally become much easier to publish a book for e-readers and print-on-demand (POD). In the old days formatting a book yourself was a tricky business, but it has become much easier thanks to createspace, Amazon’s book production arm, which offers templates and automated checking. Good, free, independent online formatting tools are now also available such as the e-pub validator at http://validator.idpf.org/ and Calibre, the formatting and e-book software. Publishing through createspace or Smashwords puts your book into multiple shop windows and enables you to offer it in both e-book and physical form (though on Smashwords you need to use a separate POD service like Lulu).
These are great services now. But is it a good idea? There are many advantages, especially as you can make your book free (on Smashwords) or very cheap. POD means that physical books of very high standard are delivered to the buyer in two or three days at less than £5, minimum price. Contrast this with academic publishers who charge £100 in hardback, only printing a paperback edition over a year later when they’ve extracted as many sales as possible at the hardback price. This limits accessibility and contributes to the huge profitability of some academic publishers: Harvie et al, 2012, show the staggering profits of academic publishing – higher than brewers, cigarettes and even search providers like Google. You can update your e-book easily, and those who have already bought it via Amazon get the update free on their Kindle. You design its look and feel, including the cover, and you get feedback from buyers which helps you think about improving the impact your work has. And if you want to charge above the very low base price (and Amazon insists you do make a charge – though with short periods free if you want), then royalty rates are high – typically 70% as against less than 10% from traditional publishers.
Risks are small or non-existent. There is no warehousing to do – POD books don’t need to be stored, and if there are no sales your only investment has been your time. True, you have to do everything – proofreading, indexing and the rest, but the same is increasingly true in traditional publishing – the author does more and more, with freelance copy editors helping to a greater or lesser extent. If you want an index done in traditional publishing, you have to pay for it anyway, and the quality is usually worse than if you did it yourself.
Something not much talked about is the tyranny of size in traditional publishing. One would think that academic knowledge comes in only two sizes – small or large: 8,000 words (academic journal article) or 80,000 words (book). This is very like another sector which has undergone parallel changes – the music industry. But in academia we are still in the world of the single or the LP as pretty much the only options. There are no such restrictions on e-books and POD: you can write to the size appropriate to what you want to say. My books for doctoral students seem naturally to fall out at between 10-12,000 words, though I have no idea why.
But the downside is primarily to do with ‘marketing’: getting your book out there. If your name is well-known in the academic world, and/or you have a specialism that people want to know about, this is less of a problem. But if not then raising awareness about and interest in your book enough to download or order it means considerable effort, primarily through social media of different sorts as well as networking both online and in person. You may not feel cut out for that and be happier to see your book in the publisher’s catalogue, their website and marketed through their extensive lists.
Then of course there are issues around evaluation of quality. In the UK the next Research Excellence Framework rules will be an important issue: will such publishing really ‘count’? (Though open access work will be required – and in some formats you can make your book free). Your book may be brilliant, but there are plenty of e-books that are rubbish. Distinguishing yours from that pack can be a challenge, though you could rely on readers’ feedback.
In the past ‘vanity publishing’ had a very bad name, rightly, and traditional publishers, faced with Amazon’s threat, try hard to raise that spectre. But in reality that is a discourse from the distant past, from different times. Not that manipulation of discourse is one-sided: createspace talks about ‘independent publishing’ by authors on its home page: but it is not really independent, especially as e-publishing becomes increasingly monopolistic, making even established traditional publishers very afraid.
For some Amazon’s reputation about its tax affairs and its increasing dominance in the market (around 70%) may make them want to avoid that company. Of course ‘other brands are available’ so there are options. But if Hardie et al (2012) are right, that kind of fiscal activity also happens in traditional publishing...and worse beside, as Altbach and Rapple’s account (2012) of the dealings between Elsevier and Merck shows. It seems unlikely though that Amazon will lose its dominant position in the near future at least.
So is it a good idea? For me, a mixed economy works: publishing e-books and POD books for some purposes and traditional publication outlets for others. For other academics that will not be so attractive – for a variety of reasons. Increasingly, though, I resent signing away copyright to highly profitable business who take for granted academics’ work writing, reviewing, editing for them, for free. I hate to see traditional publishers charging thousands for open access to a single article and for journal subscriptions. This is charged to the very academics and institutions that have produced the material and done the quality-control. And I get irritated by constant requests to review articles. This is an unpaid extra marking load done for businesses that can well afford to pay for that academic work. But there is a moral pressure to do it – after all, my own work is reviewed by others who are similarly exploited.
But if the music business is any indicator (and the excellent book by Talking Heads’ David Byrne suggests that it may well be), we are unlikely to see the demise of traditional publishing any time soon. Instead there will be increasingly diverse provision, with some major players dominating the different sectors.
I post about predators and then what happens……..30 December 2014.
So today I get a Google Scholar alert telling me about an article by 2 people who should know better publishing something related to my work (and citing me) in a journal called International Journal of Advanced Research in Business. Volume 1, Number 1, 2015. Turns out that three of the 'articles' in there are not articles but abstracts only. And clearly there has been no sub-editing going on at all in any of them.
Is that the strong aroma of Journoraptor I can smell? A bit more digging shows this to be one of a stable of journals run by International Advances for Research. Does that name even make sense??http://www.intlafr.com/.
Turns out they also run conferences around the world with some pretty stinging fees (http://www.intlafr.com/registration.html) and pretty ropey websites - note the stock photos of a London bus and Big Ben (http://www.intlafr.com/londonconf.html). Note too the venue "University of London", wherever that is (yes, obviously, in London...but which of the 27 institutions that constitute it?) Smells like a Conferensasaurus to me.
What's also interesting is the amazing 'review committee' consisting of a huge number of distinguished professors and associate professors (real people in real institutions, in the small sample I took) from around the world. I wonder if they know they are on this list:
http://www.intlafr.com/reviewcommittee.html
I'm happy to be corrected about this.....but I for one would run very very fast in the opposite direction from this outfit and all its works.
Predatory Beasts in the REF Jungle. 19 December 2014.
As the REF results are announced it’s a good time to be reminded of one of the unintended consequences of the exercise. It concerns climate change: the REF has inadvertently created a suitable habitat for beasts that predate on the academic world. Below I give them dinosaur-like names, but it will take more than a meteor to wipe this lot out.
We hear a lot about spurious journals run by predatory publishers that charge high fees for so-called open access publication. Peer review processes are minimal or non-existent so there is no quality control. Recent well-publicised exposés include a nonsense article apparently authored by characters from the Simpsons (http://tinyurl.com/n29k8lj), and another which consisted of the repeated phrase ‘get me off your fxxxing mailing list’ (http://tinyurl.com/qx7bu88). Fortunately we now have better weapons for avoiding such predation, most notably Beall’s list: http://scholarlyoa.com/publishers/.
Be warned, however, that these are not the only such beasts now roaming the academic jungle. Here’s my I-Spy list of the ones to watch out for:
Journoraptor: Referred to above, this comes camouflaged as a bona-fide journal with a near-identical title. It stalks unwary academics and lures them with promises of publication for a fee. Sadly it’s a case of publish and perish with these nasties: falling prey not only empties bank accounts but badly discredits CVs and provides no REF value. Avoidance tactics: if you are approached and feel tempted, search Beall’s list and check with your librarian.
Monographodon: This is closely related to Journoraptor. It travels in the disguise of a legitimate publisher, again using the camouflage of a legitimate-sounding name. It lures its prey with promises of publishing that book (perhaps a PhD thesis, or some rejected manuscript in the bottom drawer). It differs from Journoraptor in that it will actually physically publish, but it lacks any ability or desire to market the book, taking the money and producing a handful of copies. REF reviewers will not be fooled. Avoidance tactics: if you are approached with the lure of publishing ‘your book’ (with no details specified) run for the hills.
Conferensasaurus: This one is clever. Its lure is an academic conference in the sun with conference topics that are so broad as to cover nearly every academic domain. But don’t be fooled. There may be a ‘conference’ of sorts, but with no academic merit whatsoever, no follow-up and at a high cost. There will be no REF value. Avoidance tactics: watch out for very broad themes and very attractive venues. If you see both together, run very fast (unless your institution is kind enough to fund you for such things, you want a free holiday and are unethical enough to use funds in this way – NOT recommended).
Copyrightonator: Another pernicious beast who predates junior researchers in particular. It roams the jungle collecting thesis topics and then lures its prey with offers of publication when complete. Its diet is copyright ownership and it’s playing the long game, hoping that its prey’s work will become marketable in the future and copyright ownership will be valuable. Researchers’ hopes of future employment on the back of this, and of REF value, will certainly be dashed. Avoidance tactics: if you are approached out of the blue with this kind of offer, delete it. Only sign copyright agreements for specific, completed outputs, and read them carefully.
LegitoSaurus: This nasty little guy is sneaky. It preys on established academics whose names are known in the discipline. It builds a trap of a legitimate-sounding academic activity, perhaps a conference or project, and invites academics to join the academic board, executive committee or some such. Doing so offers no esteem value whatsoever. Avoidance tactics: if you are approached watch for phrases like “There is no obligation when you serve in the committee” and then run very fast indeed.
Impactobactor: A clever one this, feeding both on the academic looking for a high impact factor and on other predatory beasts. Its skin mimics that of ‘legitimate’ impact-measuring organizations such as Thompson Reuters’ Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) which provided metrics about publications. Impactobactor lures both Journoraptors and academics to pay for completely spurious impact measurements. Avoidance tactics: They are particularly hard to spot (watch out, for example, for the “Institute for Science Information” – not “Scientific”: http://isi-thomsonreuters.com/main). Read their names and website addresses carefully and look out for poor English on websites. If you spot them the advice is, as always….run for it.
These beasts seriously threaten your reputation by association, may cost you money and will never help you perform better in the REF.