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

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull.stephen.fw@example.com>]

Benjamin Kowarsch writes:

 > If any of you are publishing articles, just put your work on
 > ArXiv.org before you submit it to any journal.

 > More and more articles are now published in this way and the
 > journals don't treat this as an impediment, they treat the
 > rendering as it appears in the journal as their property while the
 > "pre-print" version published on ArXiv.org remains the property of
 > the author, licensed to ArXiv.org under non-exclusivity.

I think this is going to be the model in the future.  But for now,
make sure that this is accepted practice among the likely journals for
publishing your work!

I think a defection by the editorial staff of a top Elsevier or Wiley
journal, is what's needed to start the dominos toppling.  It won't be
a field-wide journal, but rather a more tight-knit specialty journal,
probably not quite in the top 10 in the specialty, who can take most
of their "stable" of authors with them by offering them guaranteed
long-term access to the widest readership (I know my university is
gradually cutting off the funding for the closed-access networks;
ScienceDirect and JStor remain, but who knows...).  If that turns into
a movement, it will gut the scientific publishing industry as we know
it.  The field-wide journals will have to follow suit.

I think the publishers can recover something, at much lower profits,
by curating original collections taken from the open-access sources,
with well-paid scientific editors, and by providing nice bound volumes
for libraries -- I don't think those will ever go away.  But how the
mighty will fall. :-)