The University of California recently walked away from negotiations with academic publisher Elsevier. This move could represent a major dramatic change in the relationship between universities and publishers. We discuss publishing costs, and the role of publishers in higher education.
We discuss a recent argument between the Washington Post’s Robert Samuel and sociologist David Brady.
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One thought on “UC Walks Away from Elsevier”
Hi, I just heard the discussion about journal publishing, and while I learned some interesting things about the sociology professor perspective, you badly needed a librarian as part of this discussion. Three corrections out of many that were needed: 1. Elsevier is Dutch, not French, so the pronunciation is ELL-suh-veer, not el-SEH-vee-yea. And 2. libraries have been managing tons of individual subscriptions with single-journal publishers for decades. It’s not a problem, because there are companies we (I am an academic serials librarian) call “serials jobbers” that we and the journal publishers pay small fees to, to act as subscription managers. The biggest is EBSCO, but there are many others. And 3. you don’t have to pay a lot to actually manage your editing or digital serial content – there are content management systems like OJS that are open source, so you only have to pay a small website hosting fee to self-host your journal content. OJS also helps open access journal editors with the manuscript review and editing workflow. And if you don’t want to be responsible for self-hosting the final product, you can pay a company to host your journal for you without paying them to be your publisher. EBSCO, Highwire, and Ingenta are three companies that come to mind that will provide the hosting/access services for online journals without any involvement in the editorial/publishing process.