Timothy Gowers is bent on proving academic journals can cost nothing

http://www.vox.com/2016/3/4/11160540/timothy-gowers-discrete-analysis

by robertwalsh0 • 10 years ago

94 11 10 years ago

vox.com

adenadel• 10 years ago

Here's two of Gowers' blog posts about Discrete Analysis, the journal:

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2015/09/10/discrete-analysis-an...

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2016/03/01/discrete-analysis-la...

logicrook2• 10 years ago

"Timothy Gowers's first big assault on academic publishing started almost by accident.

In 2012, the Cambridge mathematician took to his blog to write a post bemoaning the exorbitant prices that journals charge for access to research. Gowers vowed to stop sending his papers to any journal from the world's largest academic publisher, Elsevier. tim gowers

To his surprise, the post went viral — and spurred a worldwide boycott of Elsevier, [...]"

Be top scientist
Publish a statement of intent on your widely followed blog
People who have felt the same way but could not express their opinion without damaging their career follow
be surprised

How much is this article insulting the reader's intelligence?

nkurz• 10 years ago

How much is this article insulting the reader's intelligence?

I didn't get that sense. Could you explain why you feel it's insulting?

logicrook2• 10 years ago

Well, Gowers went at great length explaining its motivations [0] (see the following quote, from [1]). So saying that Gowers started attacking Elsevier "by accident" and "was surprised that it grew as a movement" is very disrespectful to Gowers, to truth, and also a bit to the reader.

"Once I did hear about Elsevier’s behaviour, I made a conscious decision not to publish in Elsevier journals and I started to feel bad about cooperating with them in any way. [...] Now, however, I have decided that my previous quiet approach was not enough."

[0] https://gowers.wordpress.com/category/elsevier/

[1] https://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-...

shas3• 10 years ago

A real estimate is available for JMLR, a reputed machine learning journal, about $10 per article (!): https://blogs.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-j...

Blahah• 10 years ago

See also scholastica (https://scholasticahq.com/) which is also around $10 per article before you add bells and whistles.

bitJericho• 10 years ago

Actually for high quality scientific research, that doesn't seem to bad when you consider people will drop 10-20 dollars to go see a movie. Too bad the authors don't see any of it.

unchocked• 10 years ago

It's a testament to the skill of publishers' FUD that we're still having this conversation. Authors don't get paid, reviewers don't get paid, product is disseminated via pdf, and there is still a "debate" outstanding such that a Fields Medal winner has to get involved to push things forward a bit.

Timothy Gowers is bent on proving academic journals can cost nothing

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