The Dreaded Finch Report Report

There’s no good way to write this.  I’m going to hack off someone, just because this is a horribly charged issue—even saying I read the Finch Report on open access is going to lose me Twitter followers.  All I can do is refer you all to my disclaimer and hope nobody with the power to hire, fire, or ask for revisions ever reads and takes issue with anything here.

Furthermore, anything negative I accidentally happen to imply about STEM* journal publishing should in no way be construed as reflecting on any publishing or editorial enterprise I’ve ever been a part of—humanities journals are, by and large, run pretty ethically by any reasonable standard.  Humanities scholars have no idea what a “page fee” is, for instance, and tend not to believe you when you tell them what (and how much) they are—simply put, we don’t pay ’em.  They try to have you committed when you tell them how much science journals charge for subscriptions—even those that charge page fees and run ads.  It drives our STEM cousins nuts when they hear about life on our side of the divide.

Alright, enough ass-covering, it’s time for diplomacy.  If the State Department’s hiring, I hope they’re reading this.

Academic Publishers: A Semi-Completish Taxonomy

So, I know I talk a lot about academic publishing, how it isn’t trade, how nobody loves us because we’re dry, dusty, and boring, etc., etc., etc.

But, of course, I’ve been speaking imprecisely.  It might be forgivable because everybody else does it, it might be understandable because, well, it doesn’t get more academic than the smallish university press with a well-defined audience, but there’s a lot of variety in academic publishing, with a bushel and a half of differences between publishers who get called “academic.”

And so, with the understanding that I’m inevitably going to leave a few people out in the cold—no, I’m not snubbing you, yes, I can be slightly forgetful, yes, I will edit this/later editions—here’s a list of what people might mean when they think of “academic publishing.”

Soliciting is a crime

If anyone in the audience has any experience with publishing humanities/social sciences journals and wouldn’t mind talking about it/passing along information from The Inside, I’d appreciate it.  Being a semi-former academic, most everything I hear about them can more-or-less be summarized by saying that they’re evil, make obscene profit margins, and keep hard-working scholars down.  Granted, it may be that we book people are just nice, but I suspect there’s more to the story than you hear from outraged Gruniad opinion writers.

Or I hope there is.  If not, then I’m in the wrong line of work.