The n-Category Café

If you don’t want to commit yourself to a boycott (and even if you do), there’s a different petition to sign.

Another tangential point is that an institutional subscription based on per-page charges (at some appropriate price) made sense in the pre-WWW days when you’d trek to the library to look at the journals. I now have the technical capacity to get information following up a reference to a journal (that it wouldn’t make sense to make a long-term subscription to) and receive the information on my PC at a “cost” to the publisher which is probably below 5 US cents. However, the “profit margin” seems to be set very high: I’ve just seen a charge of 14.95 English pounds to purchase one article from a math journal publisher. Given that this is for a technical detail related to an applied problem and I can’t tell from the abstract whether this paper definitely has information relevant to what I’m doing, this price is a huge disincentive to trying to build on the work of others in different fields.

Whilst those with focussed research programs probably have all the relevant journals under full subscription, the high prices to view individual papers acts as a barrier to the creation of interdisciplinary work in science and engineering.

There are a number of morally correct choices and boycotts that hover out there for any conscious mathematician to pay attention to. There is the Banff protocol. There is the CRC Press/Mathworld debacle. Examples go on - but these are the ones I personally would love to jump headfirst into.

However, I am very early in my introduction to mathematical society. I don’t have a name. I need to build a publication record. And I am not really convinced that actively cutting down on the journals I’d even consider publications in is a good idea. I will, and I gladly say so, try journals first according to Banff - but excluding the rest seems almost reckless at this point in my career.

There is also the issue of bundling, which I’m not entirely convinced that Banff will handle that.

Not being a mathematician myself, is there somewhere I can find a list of the ‘25 top mathematics journals ranked by impact factor’ ?

There’s an underlying economic question whose answer is not known. There is a cost to publishing a paper in Science or Mathematics, one component of which is the publishing/distribution cost. The publishers charge the author (who passes on the costs to university, corporation, granting agency) and charges the university or corporation again for subscription.

Why do scientists and mathematicians put up with this? (1) The social benefit of writing for colleagues, in venues edited by colleagues; (2) there must be SOME economic benefit to the authors. The author is presumably closer to be hired/promoted/tenured with each paper. On the average, I’ve heard estimates of $3,000 to $5,000 lifetime benefit from a paper publication, according to Prof. Geoffrey A. Landis (NASA, MIT professorship, Hugo and Nebula-award winning science fiction author) when we discussed this.

Didn’t this get discussed from another angle in January 2007, after
http://physicsweb.org/articles/world/20/1

“… There is no
universal figure for the cost of publishing research
papers because it depends strongly on the proportion
of papers that are rejected. Publishing research
papers is unusual in the business sense because a lot
of time, energy and money goes into dealing with
papers that do not meet the quality threshold of the
journal in question and so do not appear as a
“product”. Most commentators now agree that the costs
in the quality end of the market are about £1500–£2000
per published paper.

Some advocates of open access have talked about
charging researchers a certain amount when they submit
a paper and then making them pay an additional fee if
their paper is published. However, this approach is
bureaucratic and open to abuse. Imagine sending a
paper and cash to a publisher and then having the
paper rejected. Could you then ask your funding agency
for more money so you can submit the paper again and,
if so, for how long could this continue?…”

A friend pointed out the following rather creepy statement made by Stephen Cowden of Elsevier, attempting to justify Elsevier’s role in running a weapons trade show:

The defence industry is necessary for upholding national security, for the preservation of democratic values and supporting the ever widening role played by the armed forces.

(1) “Excessively high” seems rather vague. How many of the top 25 journals are excessively high-priced w.r.t. the average of the top 25 journals?

(2) Isn’t it a little weird to use a high-priced commercial publication like JCR as a tool in your crusade against high-priced commercial publications?

(3) It don’t believe that support for the protocol is enhanced by mixing the professional with the political.

Apparently Elsevier are going to stop running arms fairs. Here’s the email I just got from Tom Stafford:

From: tom stafford
To: tom stafford
Subject: BREAKING NEWS: Elsevier to quit hosting arms fairs
Date: Fri, 01 Jun 2007 11:20:05 +0100

“Reed Elsevier announced today that it is to exit the defence
exhibitions sector. This portfolio of five shows is part of Reed
Elsevier’s global Business division and represents around 0.5% of group
annual turnover.

http://www.reed-elsevier.com/

An email from the CEO of RE, Crispin Davis says

“Over the last year or so it has become increasingly clear that growing numbers of important customers and authors, particularly in the science and medical markets, have very real concerns with our involvement in this sector. They believe strongly that our presence here is incompatible with the aims of the science and medical communities. I am also very aware this is a view shared by a number of our employees. We have listened closely to these concerns and we have concluded that the long term interests of Reed Elsevier as a leading publisher of science, medical, legal and business content would be best served by withdrawing from defence exhibitions. We intend to complete the withdrawal during the second half of 2007.”

Thanks to everyone who has worked towards this, who signed the petition or the open letter or wrote directly to RE.

More news when this is confirmed, and I get more details

Yours
tom

–

Tom Stafford
Department of Psychology
University of Sheffield
Western Bank,
Sheffield, S10 2TP, UK

What is the average price of the top 25 math journals in 2007? I have used the JCR 2007 and the 2007/08 price list linked from the Banff Protocol page to do my own computations, which give an average of $0.65 for the categories MATHEMATICS and MATHEMATICS, APPLIED combined, and an average of $0.78 for MATHEMATICS only (average of journals in the price list only, 15 in the first case and 22 in the second.) It would be good if someone updated that page with current figures, by the way.

Also, are there other protocols to which people are adhering too?