Re: How many (peer reveiwed) journals are there?

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

There are surely such scams going on, and I am investigating one 
now. Once I have sufficient evidence, I will report it to this 
list.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University PRess


>I've been puzzled about some publishers starting scores of OA
>journals, wondering, what is the point? And finally the penny has
>dropped.
>
>'Publication costs' are frequently referred to as $xxxx per
>article, and its not feasible to recoup those kind of costs
>through author fees. Of course, costs are only of that order if,
>say, management of publishing companies indulge themselves with
>high wages and agreeable surroundings; its possible to run lean
>operations, and so have lower costs. But of course costs there
>are, however efficiently the basic publishing operations are run.
>But if you skip most of the basic publishing operations and in
>effect stick someone's submitted document on a website, with
>little more than a bit of re-styling by the typesetters, you
>don't have much in the way of costs. And a fairly low author fee
>more than covers that cost. And you don't need much in the way of
>sophisticated technology to bash out thousands of emails
>soliciting papers. A few chumps reply with cheque, and the
>publisher laughs all the way to the bank. Someone tell me that
>this is not really happening! Bill Hughes Multi-Science
>
>----- Original Message -----
>From: "David Prosser" <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk>
>To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
>Sent: Friday, November 07, 2008 2:11 AM
>Subject: RE: How many (peer reveiwed) journals are there?
>
>>  Joe was careful to make clear that his question was not to do
>>  with the business model of journals, so it is unfortunate that
>>  Phil could not resist the dig at OA publishers.  Having looked
>>  at the first 20 titles listed by BMC I can't see one that
>>  hasn't published papers this year.  Some have only published a
>>  few papers, some have published many.  Maybe I've just missed
>>  the 'scores' of titles that publish no papers, but frankly I'm
>>  not going to check them all.  I'll just wait for Phil to
>>  produce some evidence to back-up his claim.
>>
>>  David