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I imagine the academic publishing industry is either hurting from or worried about digital theft, just like all other publishers. But some of the pressure is coming from other quarters.
As I've discussed on this blog before, academic publishing is a strange industry. Researchers need to publicize their research. Publishers need research to publish. So researchers give their work for free to publishers on the understanding the publishers will publicize the work. The publishers print and distribute the work and retain all the money.
Fundamentally, publishers need researchers since there is no other source of research. Researchers, on the other hand, don't need publishers, they need distribution. And with the advent of the Internet, it's no longer so clear that expensive printed journals are the best method.
I'm thinking about this as I listen to a task by Kenneth Crews called "Protecting your scholarship: copyrights, publication agreements, and open access." He is currently suggesting that we negotiate our publication agreements with journals. For instance, he argued that academic authors should not be transferring their copyrights to publishers, but rather license the copyright to the publishers. This way, the authors retain ownership of the work, which would eliminate strange transactions where authors have to get permission from the publisher to quote from their own work in a future book.
This would seem to suggest that we have some bargaining power. And, as open-access options become more prevalent, it seems that we should. Has anyone reading actually negotiated a publication agreement?
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Comments
Academic publishing
May 26, 2009 by Anonymous, 23 weeks 4 days ago
Comment id: 36859
Academic publishing would not seem to be a strange industry if one would understand what is involved and expected. Indeed "Researchers..... need distribution" but more important readers need assurance that what is published has scholarly integrity, meets certain traditional standards. Otherwise, it may result in a fiasco like " Six fake Australian medical journals produced by Elsevier."
Regarding your question
" Has anyone reading actually negotiated a publication agreement?"
Academic Exchange Quarterly http://rapidintellect.com/AEQweb/maca.htm would be the one to suite your needs. Best wishes.
S. Slawomirski, RIG
slawomirski@yahoo.com
peer review
June 2, 2009 by coglanglab, 22 weeks 4 days ago
Comment id: 36987
Anonymous: certainly peer review is an important part of the publication process...but it's not something that the publisher contributes. The peer reviewers are typically volunteers. So the money we pay journals simply doesn't go into the peer review process.
Sure, you can say that the money goes to paying the editor to pick some peer reviewers, but you're going to have a hard time convincing me that's the only way to arrange things. For instance, suppose we have an open-access journal with a set list of reviewers, organized by subject matter. When you submit a paper, you select the subject, and a random subset of the reviewers for that subject are assigned to do the reviews. Many conferences in my field actually do something like this in order to select conference papers and posters.
You could even do something more sophisticated, where you analyze the text in the paper and select other researchers who (in the judgment of the algorithm) write about similar topics. Will this be as good as a live editor? Maybe, maybe not. But it couldn't be much worse, and it would eliminate the need to pay a publisher altogether.
Open Access
May 18, 2009 by Anonymous, 24 weeks 5 days ago
Comment id: 36703
While I have not negotiated a publication agreement, I have published in open access journals where the author retains the copyright.
Open access publishing is a rapidly growing format that seems to work well, at least in my experience. Places like BioMed Central and the Directory of Open Access Journals are two open access publishing resources worth exploring.
Even the NIH is getting into the swing of it with their PubMed Central, though in many cases, there is a waiting period before the papers are free for viewing by the public. I do not know what their copyright policy is.
There are a number of
May 11, 2009 by Anonymous, 25 weeks 4 days ago
Comment id: 36584
There are a number of existing Author Addenda designed to help with such negotiations:
http://www.google.com/search
?q=author+addendum
Just put that url back together (had to do that or the spamfilter will kill the comment) to see all the most well known ones on the first page of hits.
(Bill; www.sennoma.net)