When I tell people how important and how epically flawed the current system of academic journal publishing is I'm often met with blank stares. Can you imagine any other industry where the people doing most of the work aren't compensated financially and conglomerates make most of the profit.
You can try to make parallels to the record industry at its worse, but those people at least receive advances.
And with journal publishing, it's not some random niche. This is where "new knowledge" becomes validated. You're not hearing talking heads on television mentioning some new thing mentioned in a first year college textbook – instead you hear "a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine."
Scholars need to and are adopting ways to take scholarly communication into their own hands. A sociology journal called Sociological Science, with an editorial board out of Stanford and Cornell has recently made a buzz by taking the process into their own hands: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/group-sociologist...
(Full disclosure: this is a problem my startup works on)
You can try to make parallels to the record industry at its worse, but those people at least receive advances.
And with journal publishing, it's not some random niche. This is where "new knowledge" becomes validated. You're not hearing talking heads on television mentioning some new thing mentioned in a first year college textbook – instead you hear "a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine."
Scholars need to and are adopting ways to take scholarly communication into their own hands. A sociology journal called Sociological Science, with an editorial board out of Stanford and Cornell has recently made a buzz by taking the process into their own hands: http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/group-sociologist...
(Full disclosure: this is a problem my startup works on)