i'm sorry but this is a *complete* red herring with regard to the discussion Richard has raised.
i know of *no* for-profit publishing in humanities journals, and a very few and marginal ones (SAGE, John Benjamins) in social sciences. that goes for books, too, which I am half-expecting to come under attack here next. what we are talking about here is *non-profit publishing*. that is what I and presumably Richard see as under attack on this list, for reasons that are both clear and very disturbing to me. not only not making "billions": making* no profit at all*. JSTOR, previously attacked here, is a complete non-profit, and nobody has yet cogently argued that JSTOR wasted the funds it was paid to archive over 100 years of academic journals. I do not know why it is somehow morally wrong for them to have been paid a reasonable, non-profit figure to do good work, or why that work is only morally OK if it is done for free. your arguments against Elsevier are probably sound, and I support the boycott of Elsevier you cite below, but the original petition that started this all did not name Elsevier, and on its face calls for the US Government to intervene in the business of charging for* not-for-profit* academic publications. it could be taken to be asking the US government to outlaw the charging of subscription fees for non-profit journals. these things are not even in the same ballpark. Richard Jensen's carefully considered post named the *costs* involved with running an academic journal; i did not read any defense there of the idea that the journal should earn a profit. I am 99% sure that journal is a non-profit. I am at a loss to understand why the fact that people are paid a reasonable wage to recompense their non-profit labor should be a target of attack on this list. Is *any *wage labor OK? Do all of you somehow magically pay your rent, clothes, and food costs while earning no money whatsoever? If so, please show me where that gravy train is, as I would dearly love to get on it. On a side note, in the US, few if any colleges and universities are funded much if at all through tax dollars. Many institutions (Harvard, Yale) are almost entirely private; many public institutions (Michigan, Chicago, Berkeley, U-Virginia) derive 10% or less of their funding from taxes. Calling the work we professors do "taxpayer-funded" gives a very inaccurate picture of where the money comes from. The NIH policy cited earlier refers to research projects performed almost entirely with NIH funding--an entirely different kettle of fish from ordinary research done by professors on salary, the great majority of which does not come from taxpayer funds. there are crowd-sourced and self-organized journals; there are also not-for-profit ones. why is that a crime? On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 7:33 PM, Piotr Konieczny <pio...@post.pl> wrote: > > On 5/22/2012 6:55 PM, FT2 wrote: > >> Is there any particular reason why high quality peer review cannot be >> crowd sourced or self-organized? >> > > Tradition / organizational inertia / vested interests who are making > billions of $ in the current model (yes, billions!*) > > "In 2010, Elsevier reported a profit margin of 36% on revenues of $3.2 > billion." http://www.nytimes.com/2012/**02/14/science/researchers-** > boycott-elsevier-journal-**publisher.html?_r=1<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/science/researchers-boycott-elsevier-journal-publisher.html?_r=1> > > -- > Piotr Konieczny > > "To be defeated and not submit, is victory; to be victorious and rest on > one's laurels, is defeat." --Józef Pilsudski > > > > ______________________________**_________________ > Wiki-research-l mailing list > Wiki-research-l@lists.**wikimedia.org<Wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org> > https://lists.wikimedia.org/**mailman/listinfo/wiki-**research-l<https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiki-research-l> > -- David Golumbia dgolum...@gmail.com
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