[INDOLOGY] question about a soliciation from publisher MDPI

[Dan Lusthaus]

While on that subject, our entire profession is fiscally backward. It is not just in regard to publications. Would a carpenter or plumber pay you to come to your house to build or fix something? But we pay hefty fees to go to conferences to present our research. Soon we will all be paying to publish our work through “reputable” media.

As for publishers, profit is necessary to stay in business, so as hardcopies become increasingly vestigial, and free online material increasingly available, who is the profit going to come from? And the “free” part of online access is soon to disappear as well. The profit, of course, goes to the publishers. Royalties are a tiny percentage of what the book makes. The cost of producing a volume, which, once typeset (and some of us end up doing camera-ready) is just the cost of paper, ink, and delivery. E-versions, which don’t even cost that — just server space — are now the same price as hardcopy. At the recent AAS (Association of Asian Studies) the decrease in the number of publishers displaying wares, and the smaller booths rented by them, and the fewer actual items on display by many, was clearly noticeable.

Shifting costs to our institutions, which are already experiencing financial stresses which they pretend to solve by eliminating departments of Sanskrit, Religious Studies, etc., is not a healthy solution.

The model is changing, and we are mostly complacent so far.

Dan

> On Mar 27, 2019, at 12:11 PM, Camillo Formigatti via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info> wrote:
> 
> It’s really interesting that in this discussion none of us has actually pointed out that not only scientific publishers shouldn’t ask authors to pay a fee for publication, they should actually pay us for the work we’ve done. If scientific publishers ask scholars to pay a fee for publication it means that their business model is wrong in the best-case scenario or they’re criminals, plain and simple. Maybe the reason for all this is that scientific publishers shouldn’t be run as businesses? I’m just throwing this idea into the arena, since it seems that the business-like model is now all-pervading in every single aspect of human life, even where it shouldn’t.
>  
>  
>  
> Dr Camillo A. Formigatti



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