Writing for Research

Writing for Research

At the same time - and not by coincidence - an amazing number have been taken over
by big publishing corporations. Often in deals which looked good to cash-strapped
scientific societies but have come back to bite them. By 2013, more than half of all peer-
reviewed articles were published in journals owned by just five corporations: Reed-
Elsevier, Springer, Wiley-Blackwell, Taylor & Francis, and Sage. Wiley, by the way, got
Annalen der Physik.

These corporations make their money by selling journals to university libraries (which
must have them) at inflated prices, by setting up paywalls around online publications,
and by charging royalties for reprinting articles, e.g. for teaching. The corporations
benefit from an enormous input of free labour from all the researchers who make the
journal system work.

This is now a billion-dollar business, and it makes accessing knowledge more and more
expensive in rich countries, and prohibitive for poor countries. There’s a rising revolt
against this. “Open access” is the new demand, and people are experimenting with
ways to get it, mostly using the Internet. The most famous is PLOS ONE , an online
open-access journal that began in 2006. It is peer-reviewed, charges the author a
publication fee, and then distributes the paper for free.

But the Internet isn’t accessible to everyone in the world, and the PLOS model too has
its problems. Under intellectual-property laws and pro-business neoliberal governments,
and with great pressure on academics to publish in mainstream journals, the corporate
hold on our collective knowledge system is still hard to break.

The source of the trouble! (Image: "Printer^

in 1568-ce" by Jost Amman - Meggs, Philip

B. A History of Graphic Design. John Wiley

& Sons,. 1998. p 64. Wikimedia Commons)

In fact it grows new tentacles. The

expansion of university systems and the

management pressure on academics to

publish and keep publishing, have

created a market for ruthless

entrepreneurs to exploit. They do this via

imitation journals, sometimes called

“predatory journals”. These are online

sites set up by fringe corporations

presenting themselves under impressive,

academic-sounding titles. They trawl for

business by sending out millions of

emails – I get several per week myself –

offering to publish my research, peer-

reviewed, quickly, in their “journal”. What

they don’t say upfront is that they will

charge me a lot of money, that the peer

review is imaginary (it would cost them

money to do real peer reviews), and that

if I do take their offer and pay them, no-

one will ever read my work because no-

one takes any notice of their journal.