[tlug] Journals, Authors and 'Free Peer Review'

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2018-09-20 22:14 +0800 (Thu), Raymond Wan wrote:

> Still with publishing, some authors choose to release their work
> publicly first on open access preprint repositories ... Journals
> have to accept this... with some conditions.  (i.e., that you've
> declared it and that, after all the pretty formatting is done by the
> journal, this final version isn't made public).

Except that it seems that the pretty formatting is almost invariably
done by the author, not the journal. At least in the world of
LaTeX-using journals, they expect a source file using their templates
and whatnot that will produce camera-ready copy.

> I'm not so sure if this works as it seems to be a way for authors to
> "have their cake and eat it".... They get "free peer review" via
> their peers on Twitter...

Oh come on. Journals don't pay for peer review (via real reviews, not
Twitter) either. They expect people working in the field to do review
for them for free. Nor do they usually pay their editorial committees,
either.

> But it's the state of some research fields now and I think journals
> are forced to accept it in order to compete with others [for now]?

The problem is that the journals aren't providing much beyond some
coordination work, printing (for those still taking paper copies) and
another place to download the PDF. Given the massive increases in
subscription prices for many of them, it's no suprise a lot of authors
wonder just what the journal is doing for the quite nice profits most
of them are making. (And this is why predatory journals have grown so
much over the last decade or so: it's just not very much work to
produce a new 'journal' now.)

cjs
-- 
Curt J. Sampson      <cjs@example.com>      +81 90 7737 2974

To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
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