Tuesday, February 07, 2012

The future of journals

I have been watching the reaction to Timothy Gower's blog post about the future of mathematical journals, and the stranglehold a small number of commercial publishers have over the printed results of mathematical research.

It occurs to me that one obvious response is to ask for payment for work done for commercial publishers.



I personally prefer to publish with on-line journals like Theory and Application of Categories; I put all my papers first in Arxiv.

Added It so happens that I have recently been asked to write a referee report not by a scientific colleague but by the editorial office of a journals of a commercial publisher (which journal was previously unknown to me). I wrote back asking about the fee for the work, and was kindly informed that refereeing for journal is a voluntary activity and that there has never been financial incentive.
I am surprised that in all the discussion I have read there it seems to be taken for granted that refereeing papers for a commercial publisher should be done without compensation. I have always been surprised that the evaluation of research by impact factor in the hands of commercial interests should be taken seriously.

Labels:

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home