[INDOLOGY] question about a soliciation from publisher MDPI

Thu Mar 28 16:36:01 UTC 2019

Dear colleagues,

It’s all fine and well with me, academic publishers should by all means continue to earn profit and become fatter and fatter. However, once again I have to ask the question: where is my money? Sure I know there are costs also for e-publications, but I don’t understand why, in all this, authors are the only one who don’t get paid for their work. I want my money, mates! That’s all I’m saying to scientific publishers. If they are making a profit out of my work and I don’t, there are two options—which unfortunately, are not mutually exclusive: either scientific publishers are slavers or I’m a dupe.

In a very broad generalization, there are two ways to increase profit for any type of company: innovation or cutting down the costs of labour. Basically like any other big corporation, big scientific publishers are going down the second path and in order to make profit not only they exploit our labour, but also public funding, since libraries have to pay hefty fees for journals. To make things worse, we are complacent, as Dan Lusthaus correctly points out, or even grateful sometimes. This article (thanks to Andrew Ollett for reminding me of it) explains it very well:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-business-scientific-publishing-bad-for-science

This is a very telling passage from it (cursive mine): “In order to make money, a traditional publisher – say, a magazine – first has to cover a multitude of costs: it pays writers for the articles; it employs editors to commission, shape and check the articles; and it pays to distribute the finished product to subscribers and retailers. All of this is expensive, and successful magazines typically make profits of around 12-15%. The way to make money from a scientific article looks very similar, except that scientific publishers manage to duck most of the actual costs.”

One of the costs they duck is to pay us for our work. Try and ask a famous author of fiction not only to write her or his novel for free, but also to have to pay to read it once published and then you’ll hear how the answers sounds. My educated guess is that it will probably sound like a raspberry.

Best wishes,

Camillo

________________________________

Dr Camillo A. Formigatti
John Clay Sanskrit Librarian

Bodleian Libraries
The Weston Library
Broad Street, Oxford
OX1 3BG

Email: camillo.formigatti at bodleian.ox.ac.uk<mailto:camillo.formigatti at bodleian.ox.ac.uk>
Tel. (office): 01865 (2)77208
www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk<http://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/>

GROW YOUR MIND
in Oxford University’s
Gardens, Libraries and Museums
www.mindgrowing.org<http://www.mindgrowing.org/>

From: Jonathan Silk [mailto:kauzeya at gmail.com]
Sent: 27 March 2019 23:04
To: Dan Lusthaus <prajnapti at gmail.com>
Cc: Indology <indology at list.indology.info>
Subject: Re: [INDOLOGY] question about a soliciation from publisher MDPI

Dear Dan
I hope I am not seen as a shill for publishers, but I would like to point out that what you say is not quite right. How are contributions to be found? How is their continued presence to be assured? How are materials to be distributed? There are many more questions like this that your brief explanation omits, but that are vital. All of us have experienced multiple times a 404 message when following a link to an article or contribution of interest. If we want our publications to last, this is not a viable model. This statement is not a positive assertion of what is in fact the optimal model, but it does point out a weakness in your questioning. I think that there are some viable options out there, but it's not nearly as simple as you suggest.
Jonathan

On Wed, Mar 27, 2019 at 7:11 PM Dan Lusthaus via INDOLOGY <indology at list.indology.info<mailto:indology at list.indology.info>> wrote:
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<mailto: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

_______________________________________________
INDOLOGY mailing list
INDOLOGY at list.indology.info<mailto:INDOLOGY at list.indology.info>
indology-owner at list.indology.info<mailto:indology-owner at list.indology.info> (messages to the list's managing committee)
http://listinfo.indology.info (where you can change your list options or unsubscribe)

--
J. Silk
Leiden University
Leiden University Institute for Area Studies, LIAS
Matthias de Vrieshof 3, Room 0.05b
2311 BZ Leiden
The Netherlands

copies of my publications may be found at
https://leidenuniv.academia.edu/JASilk

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://list.indology.info/pipermail/indology/attachments/20190328/f0ca72b8/attachment.htm>