13 - Academia [Massive Teaching]

Academics tend to look down at issues of
copyright and ignore their implications.

As a consequence, as a community, they
make mistakes that can prove very costly.

The most obvious example of these mistakes
is with scientific publishing of papers.

Lets look at the submission process for a
paper in a mathematics journal.

After I write that paper, my submission
will follow the peer review process.

Couple of other mathematicians will look
at it to give a referee report, and

a journal editor will decide to accept it
or not, based on those reports.

Neither the referee's or the journal
editor will be paid very much for this.

If my paper gets accepted, most of the
time, I have

to seek copyright to the journal, I have
to sign a contract.

Then the paper gets published, university

libraries around the world, including my
own

that of the referee's or the editor will
buy a copy of the journal.

I can't get it directly to them, or all

the other universities because I don't own
the copyright anymore.

Because of this dominating position of
publishers,

the owners of journals, most subscriptions
are very

expensive and charge a price that does not
reflect the value added by the publisher.

In fact, there is little work done by the
publisher in mathematics.

The state of the paper at the moment of
submission is

very close visually to the state at the
moment of publication.

Because we are already using similar tools
to edit formulas as book copy editors.

So in the end, the mathematics community
pays publishers

a lot of money for buying back their own
work.

It's a crazy system, but one that has

evolved because academics did not pay
attention and

that their most prestigious brands, the
historically most

prestigious journals be bought by big
publishing companies.

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