If you’ve been around for a while, you know that I’m not a fan of academic journal publishers and their rent seeking. Happily, those days are years behind me now but for thousands of academics the process and its indignities are a daily reality.
One of the points of my rants is that it’s hard to see exactly what value the publishers bring to the process. Bastian Rieck has a post that provides some insight into that question. It turns out, according to Rieck that mostly they just add work for the authors. Read his post for an infuriating list of examples.
What’s ironic is that’s many of the things that Rieck finds annoying are simply the result of “that’s how we publishers have always done things.” The irony lies in the fact that the reason they can continue doing things the same old way—and seeking rents—is that academics also insist on doing things the way they’ve always done them: Want tenure or promotion? Publish in the top journals. Want to publish in a top journal? Abide by their annoying and nonsensical rules.
Rieck’s solution to this problem is a bit different from mine. I think either the publishers must be eliminated entirely or they must change their business model to charge for publishing instead of reading papers. Rieck just wants them to be a little more transparent about how they spend all that money they make and maybe share some of it with the people doing all the work. He’d also like the publishers to hire more competent people to do the final tweaking of the LaTeX. No doubt all this would help but the problems run deeper with than that.
Even if you aren’t in academia, Rieck’s post is a revealing peek into the publishing process. Doubtless, we all have similar inanities in our own jobs so it’s comforting to know others are suffering their own Sisyphean trials