journals

“OCCUPY” THE OUTDATED PUBLISHING MODEL FOR SCIENTIFIC JOURNALS

/ pragwater / Leave a comment

The problem with publishing scientific articles with the traditional publishing companies is

1. Usually, the Federal government (e.g., NSF, NASA, NIH, etc.) pay for the research.
2. The University pays the salary of the researcher who writes the paper.
3. The researcher submits the paper to the publishing company and the Science Editor (usually a volunteer) finds reviewers (volunteers) to review the paper.
4. The Researcher pays the publishing company to publish his or her paper.
5. The University pays the publishing company for a subscription to access the journal article.
6. The taxpayers that paid for the research cannot access the journal article without paying for an expensive subscription.

Does something appear to be wrong with this picture?  Why do we need the publishing company??  Other than the production of hardcopy books, they really are not necessary.  And the Direct Publishing/Print on Demand movement has shown that it is possible to publish hard copy documents and make them available to a mass market.

The following links provide detailed information related to the problems with the old publishing model and ideas for moving toward more open access.

On Reading Old Things

/ pragwater / 1 Comment

On Reading Old Things is a great article by Jacquelyn Gill. All graduate students should read this article. At the beginning of this semester I assigned a reading by Gautier et al.(1980) and remember feeling a little embarrassed that the article, which is about satellite technology, was so old. Despite its age, however, the article is excellent and forms the basis of the satellite technology which we use to obtain the current hourly and daily solar radiation in the northern Caribbean. I could list other examples of old articles that are foundational and which should be read by anybody working in those fields. Gill mentions, and I have personally observed, that some journal reviewers sometime pressure authors to use recently published references and discourage older ones. Another practice that I have observed is that a journal will require that at least three references in the paper be from their journal. The reason for this of course is to jack up the rating of their journal, since they are rated on the number of times that their articles are cited. Anyhow, I highly recommend that you read On Reading Old Things.

From Gautier, C., G. R. Diak, and S. Masse, 1980: A simple physical model to estimate incident solar radiation at the surface from GOES satellite data. J. Appl. Meteor., 19, 1007–1012.