18.597 paying for publishing

               Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 18, No. 597.
       Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/
                        www.princeton.edu/humanist/
                     Submit to: humanist_at_princeton.edu

   [1] From: Ken Friedman <ken.friedman_at_bi.no> (76)
         Subject: Re: 18.594 paying for PROFITABLE publishing on
                 internet research

   [2] From: Kevin Hawkins <kshawkin_at_umich.edu> (6)
         Subject: Re: 18.594 paying for publishing on internet research

   [3] From: Norman Hinton <hinton_at_springnet1.com> (3)
         Subject: Re: 18.594 paying for publishing on internet research

   [4] From: Pat Galloway <galloway_at_ischool.utexas.edu> (17)
         Subject: Re: 18.594 paying for publishing on internet research

--[1]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 06:14:01 +0000
         From: Ken Friedman <ken.friedman_at_bi.no>
         Subject: Re: 18.594 paying for PROFITABLE publishing on internet
research

Dear Willard,

This is strange to me for many reasons. I can't understand why one would
need 12 (twelve!) reviewers. Top journals in most fields get by with two or
three.

But IF one has 12 reviewers, acceptance by 6 is even more strange. To me,
this suggests a cursory gate-keeping process with thumbs-up, thumbs-down
acceptance rather than serious reviewer comments and editorial engagement.
If this is so, it would substitute quantitative review voting for serious
engagement as a misguided proxy for rigor.

IPSI itself is not an academic organization, however. It is a business.
Check out the IPSI web site:

http://www.ipsi.co.yu/

What doesn't seem appropriate is the paper fees and page fees they seem to
charge. At 400 Euros for a 6-page paper, with 100 Euros surcharge for each
extra page, IPSI may find publishing transactions a profitable enterprise.
I located IPSI Transactions on the IPSI web site at:

http://internetjournals.net/

So far, the only transactions seem to be produced by .pdf. One wonders,
therefore, what expenses require these kinds of paper fees and page fees

The first issue of IPSI Transactions of Advanced Research carries 11
papers. So does the first issue of IPSI Transactions on Internet Research.

A simple calculation shows what the support fees mean. Imagine that one
were to run 11 6-page papers with, say, an average of 2 pages over-length
each. At 400 Euros per paper, authors would pay a total of 4,400 Euros in
support fees. Estimating another 22 pages at 100 Euros surcharge for each
extra page, the surcharge would total 2,200. The publishers would take in
6,600 Euros per issue.

The two issues I found have a monthly publication date (Both are January
2005). If IPSI produces one issue per month, twelve months a year of two
periodicals, using the calculations I suggest, they would realize an income
of 158,400 per year, nearly all of it profit.

And that explains the fees.

They are also in the conference business:

http://www.internetconferences.net/

They are holding 12 (twelve again!) conferences in 2005, all at scenic
travel locations. A suspicious mind might wonder whether an organization
such as this is actually running a travel business to profit from
conference fees and site arrangement on conferences that allow speakers to
claim travel support from their schools and companies. If you download the
conference abstract books, you find an odd mix of themes and topics.
Whatever the reason for these conferences, the spectrum of interests within
each conference makes me wonder what common interest links those who attend
at any one of the twelve locations.

Whatever the reason for running twelve conferences, I know of no scholarly
or scientific organization that runs twelve full conferences a year.
There's plenty of work involved in running one serious conference, and the
work is serious enough that most organizations shift chairs at each
conference. Even so, Veljko Milutinovic seems to be a hard working person
with a huge load of books and articles to his credit -- some widely cited
-- so he might thrive on this kind of workload. Then again, if I could earn
that kind of money IPSI earns publishing transactions and chairing
conferences, I suppose I'd thrive on the workload, too.

Yours,

Ken

>Dear colleagues:
>
>Anyone who can shed light on the practice of charging authors for
>publishing submissions please comment on the following. This would seem
>different from requiring a subvention for a book, since (a) the author is
>expected to pay, and (b) a journal article would, I'd think, be unlikely to
>be supported by a funding body. In the following case, the number of
>reviewers also seems rather high.
>
>Yours,
>WM

--
Ken Friedman
Professor of Leadership and Strategic Design
Department of Leadership and Organization
Norwegian School of Management
Design Research Center
Denmark's Design School
+47 06600           Tlf NSM
+47 67.55.73.23    Tlf Office
+47 33.40.10.95    Tlf Privat
email: ken.friedman_at_bi.no
--[2]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 06:14:32 +0000
         From: Kevin Hawkins <kshawkin_at_umich.edu>
         Subject: Re: 18.594 paying for publishing on internet research
Dear Willard ("Dr. Humanist"):
Some of those involved in studying the financial crisis in scholarly
communication propose the "'author pays' model" to cope with the
exponentially rising cost of scholarly literature.  If you search on this
phrase, you'll find references to this disucssion.
Kevin
--[3]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 06:14:59 +0000
         From: Norman Hinton <hinton_at_springnet1.com>
         Subject: Re: 18.594 paying for publishing on internet research
Willard (aka "Dr. Humanist") Good Lord ! I'd tell them where to shove it.
As Walter Ong used to say "There's always some place else to publish
something".
--[4]------------------------------------------------------------------
         Date: Tue, 22 Feb 2005 06:15:20 +0000
         From: Pat Galloway <galloway_at_ischool.utexas.edu>
         Subject: Re: 18.594 paying for publishing on internet research
This payment for publishing is one of the open-access models, that
championed by the Public Library of Science, whereby the author's grant
funds ($1500 per article with PLoS, which does no other cost-recovery) pay
for keeping the online journals online and available to the public (peer
reviewers get credit toward publishing their own stuff). Scientists can in
fact get funding to place their articles online because of the requirement
that they disseminate their work widely, and the cost under this model is
less than the page charges they already pay for paper journals. Of course
scientists have been posting preprints online for a long time, but if their
institution has a repository that guarantees persistence, then the
institution pays. Open access isn't after all free, and there are several
models for publishing online AND keeping the publication available in
perpetuity, which is the puzzle piece you must have if you are to have a
scholarly literature.
Pat Galloway
School of Information
University of Texas-Austin