TA journals charging both authors and readers
Martin Rundkvist, Greed and Buffoonery in Academic Publishing, Salto Sobrius, September 29, 2006. Excerpt:
I agreed to a really crappy business deal today….
For a long time, academic journals from commercial publishers have grown in number and become more and more expensive. Individual scholars can no longer afford subscribing to them at all, and most research libraries have to prioritise strictly when choosing which ones to take. There is a successful resistance movement against these tendencies, Open Access publishing on the net. But culture changes slowly, and commercial journals are still indispensable reading in many fields of inquiry.
Last spring, Cornelius Holtorf at the European Journal of Archaeology kindly offered me a review copy of Martin Carver’s massive publication on the excavations at Sutton Hoo in the 80s and 90s. I accepted gladly, I got the book [and wrote a review]….
You never get paid for writing in academic journals. Scholars and journals have a symbiotic relationship where one could not survive without the other. We feed the journals material, and they feed our CVs. A review copy of an expensive book is all the tangible remuneration you can hope for as a contributor. But in this case I had to pay to get my review published.
“Author pays” is a common funding model for Open Access journals….But the European Journal of Archaeology isn’t OA. It’s a commercial product put out by Sage Publications….
