Information Research Weblog

Heather Morrison's pro-OA blog has a nice comment on PRISM - the publishing lobby against OA. Noting:

PRISM, the Coalition of the highly profitable publishing industry developed by a branch of the Association of American Publishers, is alerting us to their concern that they believe that the hundreds of millions of dollars a year of revenue they enjoy is at risk, and that we average citizens and voters MUST act to join their lobbying effort, and share our deep concerns about this with our U.S. representative.

I am sure that you, dear reader, are every bit as concerned as I am about this horrendous possible loss of profits for the wealthy. Urgent action is needed, now!

Let's set up a charitable foundation to help out these poor profit-makers. We can call it, "Save the Millionaires!".

Nice one, Heather!

I have another suggestion: since the publishers are spending so much money on the peer review process, isnt't it time that those who do the reviews were properly paid for it? The University and College Union in the UK, I believe, has a recommended daily rate for consultancy and similar work - or at least the Association of University Teachers had such a rate and, when I last looked, it was £650

It takes me, typically, about a day to properly review and write my comments on a paper, so £650 would seem a fair return for the work.

However, apart from that, the real issue is that the commercial publishers are making the running in trying to persuade the population to support their ludicrous claims - so what are the academics going to do? Sit back and wait to be rolled over? Business as usual? There's only one response to this development and that is to fight it. What are the American Association of University Professors and the UCU going to do in response? Can we expect them to lobby Congress and Parliament to counter the action of the publishers? I don't live in the US, but perhaps someone could write to the AAUP and ask them, and I shall do the same here in the UK asking the UCU how it proposes to counter any developments here.

And there is something else, which is long overdue, that all academics can do: resign from the editorial boards of non-OA journals, and state their daily rate for reviewing. Let's have a bit of action! I doubt if anyone will notice it when I resign from the two commercially-published journals on which I serve (one of which I founded), but if we have concerted action from thousands of academics then perhaps the publishers will understand that setting up PRISM to peddle their lies is counter-productive.