Publishers: Why Not Replace Authors with ChatGPT and Raise Subscription Rates?
May 11, 2023
Note: This essay is the work of a real and still-alive dinobaby. No smart software involved, just a dumb humanoid.
I read another article about professional publishers. Nature Magazine reports that 40 editors have bailed from medical journals due to the fees Elsevier imposes on authors. The individuals who publish peer reviewed journal articles are often desperate for getting their name in what one supposes is a prestigious journal. I remember hearing at the Cornell Theory Center years ago that online “free” publications would not be considered for tenure evaluation or for certain grant applications. Why? Hey, that’s what universities want: Old school scholarship, thank you. Professional publishers cheerfully support the scheme. Libraries have to pay big subscription fees; commercial database producers are hamstrung due to restrictions on certain content; and the aspiring PhD student or starving adjunct professor is supposed to pay hundreds of dollars for output to proof. Yeah, that’s a great approach.
Now some professors (presumably with tenure) are doing a bit of the crawfish thing; that is, backing up and getting away from what is now viewed as a bit of a scam. I used to review articles for publishers. Guess what? I did not get paid. I was improving the quality of the publication. Yeah, right. As soon as I rejected papers written in incomprehensible English with statistics which actually did not add up, I learned via a friendly chat that I should not reject so many papers.
Oh, right. I quit. What baloney.
If you want to read about Elsevier’s explanation of the fees in today’s Word to typeset page fees, check out the original. I am not an academic, a fact I happily share with crazy publishers who want me to write for their “prestigious” journals. I write stuff and have for decades. Now I post information in my blog and I write monographs which I make available to those in my lectures.
Publishers are not for me. Most are dead tree types, snared in the craziness of slicing and dicing non reproducible research results, specious cross references to legal and accounting content, and pretending that their industry is essential to the smooth running of the knowledge centric world.
Nope. Too bad it has taken decades for a handful of editors to wake up and smell the ersatz which passes for real coffee.
Stephen E Arnold, May 11, 2023
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