Fee Fi Foe

Did I jump the gun in mocking Psychological Reports for its author charges? Commentator Lance Gritton thinks so:

Actually most journals charge the author a per page fee

That hasn’t been my experience in the humanities, but a bit of digging around on the net has brought up some other examples. For example, The Office of Scholarly Communication at the University of California charges for its open access journals; in 2001 science publisher Jan Velterop argued that “Author Charges are the Future“. I also found journals that have submission fees, but that’s a bit different. There is, though, a sense that academic publishing is in financial crisis, as articles in the journal Learned Publishing suggest.

I’d be interested to hear from anyone who knows a bit more about charges for scholarly publications.

(Not that this does anything for Paul Cameron. Lance goes on:

…the stats brought up are totally bogus. It appears that the author calls any abuse by the same sex parent “homosexuality”, when it should say “pedophilia”. When you look at child abusers the official FBI profile is white middle aged heterosexual men. The author substitutes his own terms and definitions to match his own prejudices. The scary thing is that this was supposed to be peer reviewed. Another reason that I think psychology is more pseudo science than substance.

And of course, even with the terms used by Cameron we’re still looking at a tiny fraction of foster carers overall. There’s also a comprehensive article on the topic in the latest Wall Street Journal; see the update to my entry for yesterday.)

Of course, in relation to general publishing, self-publishing makes more sense than it did a few years ago: an individual can distriubute his or her work on-line, and we all know that thanks to Murdoch and other media consolidation forces it can no longer be assumed that a decent book must get picked up by a “normal” publisher.

UPDATE: By coincidence, Terry Krepel is currently investigating a dodgy conservative science journal over at ConWebWatch.

2 Responses

  1. […] UPDATE: Was I wrong to mock the journal’s author charges? See today. […]

  2. It may be more common in the physical sciences. ASME journals, for example, have voluntary charges of $75/page (which entitle the author to 100 free reprints). There are mandatory charges of $200 per page above the ninth, and for four-color graphics.

    (I’ve seen a number of articles with this disclaimer: “The publication costs of this article were defrayed in part by payment of page charges. This article must therefore be hereby marked “advertisement” in accordance with 18 USC section 1734 solely to indicate this fact.”)

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