It raises in a very interesting way Derrida’s critique of the other. Namely, can we presume there are “non-fake” medical journals? I’m not so sure.

But entertaining nonetheless.

NS

Don’t forget editorial advisory board member Cees Baas, who apparently no longer practices medicine (if homeopathy can so be called) but does enjoy an active career in writing, acting, and speedskating.

Hahaha, look at the affiliations of the members of the journal’s editorial advisory board: Duke, U Maryland, U Arizona, U Washington, etc. Silly universities.

You often say things like this, and I wish you wouldn’t because it’s just not true. Do you really mean to suggest that JAMS and the Annals aren’t prestigious?

Of course there’s a collective action problem here, but if we as researchers were all to stop submitting to Elsevier, then the Elsevier problem would go away. As individuals, we can and should do our part by submitting our papers to affordable journals. Throwing up our hands and saying, “Well, the Springer/Elsevier/Wiley axis controls everything, so there’s nothing we can do but post rants on blogs,” in addition to being false, is counterproductive because it discourages people from making the effort to find high-quality but less expensive alternatives.

And, again, those alternatives exist, probably in substantially larger numbers than they did, say, 15 years ago. Nowadays you have some extremely cheap, top-rated journals like G&T, which not so long ago didn’t exist. There have also been several excellent journals that have left the big three in the last few years–not just the ones everybody talked about like Topology, but also some lower-drama cases like Commentarii and Ann. Sci. ENS.

If you go to eigenfactor.org, pick a number n (anywhere between 5 and 100), and look at the top n mathematics journals, I think that you will find with surprising consistency that the number of those n journals which are published either by a university press, a Society, or a mathematician-run publisher like MSP or Intl Press, is pretty close to n/2. Now I would certainly tend to say that, out of the hundreds of mathematics journals in the world, there were significantly more than two comparable-quality reasonable possible destinations for most of the papers I’ve written. If the same is true of most papers in mathematics, it would seem to follow that the majority of papers, at many different quality levels, could be submitted to a non-corporate journal at very little cost to the author’s reputation. (There would, admittedly, be exceptions to this, as occasionally it would happen that all of the reasonable destinations for a particular paper–or, more broadly, a particular subject–would turn out to be expensive Springer journals. But these cases would be in the minority).

Speaking personally, I probably wouldn’t refuse to submit a paper to the big three if I really believed that doing so would incur a substantial cost in quality (this is part of why I haven’t signed the Banff protocol), but when all else appears basically equal I do try to choose the more reasonably-priced journal. By this point in my career I’ve submitted to around 10 journals; none of them have been owned by Elsevier or Wiley, and the one Springer journal that I’ve submitted to is actually rather inexpensive. So my own experiences suggest to me that it just isn’t that hard to find cheap journals of appropriate quality to submit to–though I admit that my particular field may be unusually suitable for this.

“Why is it that intelligent people can not come up with intelligent distribution of information?”

They can. However, most scientists aren’t very interested in this problem. They’re interested in doing their work, and as long as they continue to have access to the information they need, they’re happy.

So, universities pay vast amounts of money to the “Big Three” publishing houses (Reed-Eslevier, Springer, and Wiley-Blackwell), who have a stranglehold on the information distribution system - but as long as scientists keep getting the information they want, most of them don’t care.

Also: professors at universities get promoted by publishing in “prestigious” journals. Guess who owns most of these? The Big Three. They’ve bought them all up.

In short, we have intelligent but oblivious scientists versus clever businessmen who spend all day scheming how to extract more money from the universities who buy the journals.

Unfortunately this, I am sure, is a cause of lots anti selection.
Truckloads of smart people just don’t want to work in such a flawed environment.

Why is it that intelligent people can not come up with intelligent distribution of information.