I have been thinking lately a little about scholarly journals and how scholarship is disseminated.
Many publishers are using the free professional services of academics to write, referee, and edit scholarly journals, and then they turn around and charge those same scholars and their libraries enormous sums for access to the journals.
According to data from a survey by the American Math Society, the most expensive publishers of academic mathematics are
Publisher | Average cost per page |
---|---|
Wiley | $2.43 |
de Gruyter | $1.93 |
Taylor and Francis | $1.69 |
Springer Verlag | $1.35 |
Elsevier | $1.23 |
On the other hand, many of the very best journals are published at very low cost. Some of the main publishers in this elite class are
Publisher | Average Cost per page |
---|---|
Princeton U Press | $0.09 |
AMS | $0.19 |
SIAM | $0.26 |
Many excellent journals are also free online, including the outstanding Geometry and Topology.
One of the most important things scholars should do is post their preprints online at major preprint servers, like arXiv.org, and on your own website. Of course, it is also important not to sign copyright agreements with publishers that interfere with ability to freely disseminate your work. You can either choose to submit papers only to journals that have good copyright agreements, or you can renegotiate the agreement before signing it.
For more about this topic, you might try The Cost of Knowledge and Nature's take on this.
Copyright © 2000-2005. Tyler Jarvis.