Uncommon Descent Serving The Intelligent Design Community

Is scientific publishing bad for science?

Share
Facebook
Twitter
LinkedIn
Flipboard
Print
Email

Because it is so profitable? Galileo would sure be amazed. But now this: From the Guardian:

The core of Elsevier’s operation is in scientific journals, the weekly or monthly publications in which scientists share their results. Despite the narrow audience, scientific publishing is a remarkably big business. With total global revenues of more than £19bn, it weighs in somewhere between the recording and the film industries in size, but it is far more profitable. In 2010, Elsevier’s scientific publishing arm reported profits of £724m on just over £2bn in revenue. It was a 36% margin – higher than Apple, Google, or Amazon posted that year.

The way to make money from a scientific article looks very similar, except that scientific publishers manage to duck most of the actual costs. Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place. More.

Unfortunately, these drudges are living off the reputation of Galileo as well as off tax dollars.

See also: Peer review “unscientific”: Tough words from editor of Nature

Comments

Leave a Reply