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Apropos of Sagar’s wish to foist the A.I. industry by its own petard, this article appeared in print in yesterday’s…
I teach both large courses, like Jurisprudence and Critical Legal Thinking (a.k.a Legal Argumentation), and small seminar-based courses at Edinburgh…
Surely there is an answer to the problem of AI cheating which averts the existential threat. . It’s not great,…
I’d like to pose a question. Let’s be pessimistic for the moment, and assume AI *does* destroy the university, at…
Hear hear
I agree with all of this. The threat is really that stark. The only solution is indeed in-class essay exams,…
I’m not sure I’d yet go so far as to call LLMs an existential threat to universities. But I do…
…an open access journal on the same topic. An interesting strategy. Are there any Elsevier philosophy journals that might warrant such a transformation?
I recall you hosted an excellent discussion on "ending for-profit journals" many years ago: https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2006/09/time_to_end_for.html
It was mentioned in a comment there that the journal *Topology* apparently did something similar. It would certainly be nice to see philosophy editorial boards following suit!
In a comment over on my blog, the Director of the University of Michigan's Scholarly Publishing Office was very encouraging: "If you know of journals in search of "adoption," please do not hesitate to be in touch. I might be able to be of assistance."
https://www.philosophyetc.net/2008/12/adopting-open-access.html?showComment=1229977020000#c4621282695670054056
The statement from the editors is that there is a "feeling" within the community that high profits are both unethical and unsustainable. Feelings are wonderful things, but it would be a real advance if there were some rigorous thought given to the notion of "fair pricing." I don't believe — though I could be wrong — that no one has done much better than define fair as what the market can bear. I'm also very curious about what "sustainable pricing" looks like on a dying planet increasingly beset by authoritarianism, but no need to go there now.
What is also remarkable about the current moment in scholarship is that the notion of pay-to-publish has been so rapidly adopted with so little critical commentary from within the academic community. It is one thing to say that subscription prices are too high — which is how all this started. (And it was started by librarians, incidentally, who no longer had budgets to pay for all the available journals, the numbers of which, like the individual pieces of research themselves, just keep on increasing from year to year.) It is something very different to say that the best way to address high subscription prices is by making the authors pay to have their research published.
This by itself has done absolutely nothing to prevent commercial publishers from enjoying revenue and profit growth, nor has it created an environment of fair pricing for author charges. If you want to publish an open access paper in Nature, you will have to cough up over $11,000. The fact that that price hasn't changed suggests that there is a market that can bear that fee.
Additionally, if your research has not been financially supported by a grant or your home institution, you might not have an extra $1,500 or $2,000 to devote to publication. Many commentators who should know better have perpetuated a myth that all scholarship is funded by "taxpayer dollars." That's not even close to being the cases in the sciences, let alone the social sciences or humanities.
The academic publishing industry has taken the form it has because academia itself has been both unwilling and unable to assume the full burden of disseminating the research that it generates. It effectively outsourced much of that function to third parties that increasingly became profit-maximizing entities. At the same time, the criteria for assessing the quality of researchers and scholars became narrowly quantitative, with the increases in output becoming a major proxy for quality. Simply writing more papers is a sign of high performance in many disciplines and institutions.
This in turn has led to even more perverse outcomes, including a growth in plagiarism, outright fraud, and in some cases, sheer gibberish getting through the frequently feckless peer review process.
What really needs to happen is a recalibration of academic quality criteria that go beyond the purely quantitative. That will require a great deal of effort and possibly fewer high-paying administrative positions, so self-reform may prove impossible. Forcing reform on others will likely continue to be a more satisfying gambit.
Also the editors of Lingua, including Kai von Fintel (whom philosophers will know), eight years ago, reported here:
I, a librarian, am largely in agreement with Publishing Veteran, although I'd quibble a bit about the first paragraph. Isn't the editors' behavior itself evidence that the market can't bear the status quo? Aren't they essentially putting their money (and expertise, labor, and time) where their "feelings" are?
Here is an example of how academia–in particular, an academic library–has begun to address perceived unfairness and real constraints on access to research: https://www.lib.berkeley.edu/about/news/wiley-2023
"…that no one has done much better than define fair as what the market can bear."
What market?
Academic publishing is dominated by an oligopoly. Much, really most, of the editorial work for journals like Neuroimage is uncompensated. Elsevier and its few competitors are employing market power based on a pool of largely free labor.
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