[LINK] Open publishing strike - editorial board resigns

[Tom Worthington]

On 01/04/13 12:54, Nick Ross wrote:
> I can't believe that authors wouldn't spend a bit of effort
> publishing their own work so that it can be free. ...

Believe it. Most academics are indoctrinated during their training to 
publish in prestigious journals and have their books published by 
prestigious (ie: expensive) publishers. Most academic librarians are 
complicit in this arrangement, acting as unpaid marketers for the 
commercial publishers.

> More the odd paper... It must be simple these days.

No, publishing is not simple. It is easy to put something on the web, 
but having it found and taken seriously is extremely difficult. I have 
spent years working how to do this. Some of it can be counter intuitive. 
For example, I found the best way to get professors of information 
systems to take free e-journals seriously was to offer to sell them 
paper copies. They do not actually buy the paper edition, but knowing it 
is available makes the publication more real to them. I do this with my 
books: only one in ten sales are for the paperback, but this makes it 
seem like a real book.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
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Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/