 I'd like to introduce our lecturer, our speaker today, Dr. Mitchell Allen, who is an art research associate who may or may not have been able to meet him. He just started being associated with art this year, and so he's here to help us, because as you may know, he's been a publisher and an archaeologist for many years. Now, he is working on a lot of archaeological projects, but today he's going to wear his publishing hat from his title, and give us some clues and insights about that. And so his title is interesting, P-Transformed, I guess. I don't know if I know what P is, published? I don't know. A mapping change in the archaeological publishing landscape. So thank you for coming. Thank you. I heard about it. Publishers are used to sitting in the back of the room and taking notes and saying, yeah, is this thing worth publishing or not? Well, it's a real change to be up here on the firing line. So apologies if I'm not as smooth at it as I am sitting in the back scowling. One more commercial. My affiliation with ARF also includes the fact that I agreed to provide some workshops on publishing to ARF members. And I'm going to be doing one on April 10th, which is a week after the break, on helping archaeologists figure out how to get journal articles published. This is going to be a more theoretical thing. That's going to be hands-on, get your elbows into it, kind of practice workshop. And I forgot exactly what time it is, but it's posted again here somewhere. Anyway, April 10th. So P-Transforms. Well, obviously everybody who's in archaeology knows what I'm talking about. Thank you, Michael Schiffer, for that. His C-Transforms and N-Transforms have a natural environment and cultural environment change things. Well, P-Transforms... P-Transforms is a riff off of that to just talk about how the publishing environment changes not only what you're thinking about publishing in the future, but what you've already published in the past. And those things will both be involved. So, what am I doing here? Well, I spent 20 years working for Sage Publications. I started Altamira Press, which I hope many of you are familiar with, and ran it for a decade. And then started Left Coast Press and ran that for a decade. I also have a PhD in archaeology from the other University of California campus farther south. And I'm now a research associate here. My fieldwork's been in Afghanistan, Israel, and a little bit in California. Hopefully next year I'll be invited back to talk about the actual fieldwork I'm doing, but publication work I'm doing from the archaeological work in Afghanistan that I'm working on right now. Since I sold my publishing house Left Coast Press to Routledge about a year ago, and since then I've started a small public consulting business helping both scholars, universities, and publishers try to figure out how to do it better. The irony of all this is that now that I'm no longer a publisher, I have a lot more time to read about trends in publishing. If I'd known then what I know now, Left Coast might have been much more successful than it was. Anyway, here are the things I want to talk about. I'm hoping I'll leave plenty of time for questions because everyone has questions about publishing since it's so important to success in the academic world. I won't go through them, but we'll cover those one at a time. If there are other themes that people want to talk about, and you want me to come back and talk about them again, I'll be happy to. No, I'm hitting the button somewhere and it's popping up something that's not allowing me to... Well, whatever. Okay, so for the first 20 years of my 40-year publishing career, things were pretty stable. You knew who was publishing in journals, you knew who was publishing textbooks, you knew who was publishing monographs, and things changed a little bit. The invention of e-books changed, and e-journals changed things somewhat, but those were just a different medium to do the same thing. Over the last two decades, changes in the economic nature of universities in publishing and also the ability to do things digitally have transformed this kind of... the changes that made them happening much more quickly to the point that even now that I'm reading it out constantly, I still can't keep up with them all. Some of you may have better idea of some of these changes than I do at this point. First thing that has happened is the consolidation of the publishing industry. It has gone from being a large set of duchies to a few very, very large publishing houses. There are a few remnants left, largely in university presses, but there are a few very large publishers, people like Elsevier and Springer, people that you know about and have to buy things from regularly. And it's a mature industry. The industry is not growing. There are not more academics being produced in great quantities. There's not more bigger budgets in university libraries, you wish, I wish. But so the thing is static, and so how do you grow if you're a large corporation under those kind of conditions? Will you end up buying out your competitors or buying out companies that could have been competitors and expand that way rather than the, let's publish more books this year than we published last year. So part of this consolidation has to do with the fact that you have a flat or in fact in some ways a shrinking market and you want, and these larger companies want to get bigger because that's how you succeed in the business world. You can increase your prices, which is also something that you've all seen. You can expand the number of books you do, you can expand the number of journals you do, but to grow quickly, you need to do something like Purchase. For example, Left Coast, which was purchased last year by Routledge. We were like the fifth or sixth company they purchased last year, Academic Publishing House. And since we were published 14 months ago, I know of these three others that they've taken on. And again, this is just to grow larger for a purpose, and a purpose we will talk about in just a minute. In any case, it's now, it's a fairly large industry. The STM Industry Science Technology Medicine is about $25 billion, of which about $10 billion is journal publication and about $5 billion in books. And some of the companies involved in this are also extremely large. You all know the Elseviers and the Springers. Elseviers is about $7 or $8 billion a year. Springer, Informa, who owns Routledge and Wiley are somewhere between $1 and $2 billion a year. So there's big businesses involved here and lots of money involved, which is why people pay a lot of attention and why publishers are hard to deal with because there's so much money at stake. And of course, part of when the advantage here are being large is that you can take advantage of economies of scale. You only have to build up one production system, whether you're producing 10 books or 10,000 books. And so the economies of scale are in fact part of the reason why these companies grow so large so quickly. One of the results of all of this is that content has been aggregating as well. Very rarely now do you find a library like the Berkeley Library going and subscribing to a journal. They're subscribing to an aggregation of journals. When you have a company like Elsevier that has 2,500 of them, they can create what they're calling the big deal. Okay, Berkeley, you can buy all 2,500 journals for the cost of 800 of them. Berkeley may not want all 2,500, but when you figure out the cost-benefit analysis, it makes a lot more sense for them to buy the whole thing instead of buying them one at a time, which will end up costing more than the 800 that they really want would cost. And of course, that goes again to Market Share. If the Berkeley Library spends several million dollars on the Elsevier collection, can they also afford to spend several million dollars on the Wiley collection? And can they still afford to buy the one journal that Left Coast Press published? Well, we published 12, but that was different. But it's that kind of gamesmanship. Now, the library is responded by saying, well, we'll buy one subscription to all of these journals, but we can't afford it ourselves. Let's get the whole UC system in or let's get Berkeley and Stanford in together. And so Consortia were created to be able to match these publishers' insistence on ever-larger purchases. And so these battles of the Titans, pig wrestling is probably a pretty good metaphor for it, has been going on for about the last decade, 15 years or so. There are times when one party oversteps, for example, I think it was about five years ago that Berkeley decided they were going to stop getting nature and all the related publications to nature because the price was just too high. And then the publisher stepped back and did a one-on-one negotiation and suddenly Berkeley has nature again. This last fall it was the country of Germany. Every library, university library in the country of Germany wanted the nature group of publications. But again, the price was too high and they announced to everybody in the German academic community, well, you don't get nature next year. Tough luck. And then of course Elsevier, who owns nature. I think it's Elsevier. Springer? I forget which one. They're all the same. And we negotiated a deal with the German government so they could afford it. So this pig wrestling has been going on and will continue to go on. It's part of the reason that's pushing this aggregation of companies ever larger. Now there are small companies still. And so third parties have stepped in to try to help them out. There's companies, people like EBSCO and ProQuest have programs for people who only have a dozen journals or 15 journals or 50 journals. JSTOR is trying to do the same thing with contemporary issues as well as back issues. Project Muse, which you might be familiar with, at Johns Hopkins. Also for nonprofits is trying to do the same kind of thing. But they're being dwarfed by these large companies who have so much money at stake. So part of the response... Come on. Sorry. Doesn't seem to... There we go. Going the wrong way. Part of this response, of course, was the open access movement. Information should be free. Publishers aren't paying you for your articles, right? They're not paying you for being reviewers. Half the time they don't pay you for being a journal editor. Why should they collect all this money? And Elsevier, for its billions of dollars two years ago, showed a 37% profit. And that sort of... everybody's heads exploded when they saw that. So scholars revolted, tried to create an open access movement where the information could be free. There's only one problem with this. It costs to provide that information. It's not free to produce journals. Those servers and the people who run those servers, people who edit their manuscript, people who do the design, people who do the publicity so people know that you actually got articles or books or whatever it is, that all costs money. So some, the question comes down to who ends up paying for all this. And this has been the problem with the open access movement. You can do it with one journal. You've got volunteers, people who are willing to do it. Napa Pacha ran that way forever, until the left coast ended up taking it over. Now it's part of Routledge. But to do it for the enchantled, tired journal ecosystem of some people estimate 100,000 journals requires more volunteer work than there is around to be able to do it with. So the open access movement has sort of devolved into a variety of kinds of things. Green open access, this actually goes ties into government agencies wanting the money that they're giving to provide free information for their citizens. And same thing with grant funders. You have to provide it open for free in some kind of repository. So then negotiations started between the repositories and the publishers. Well, no, we're not going to publish this stuff and then give it to you and let you give it away for free. You can have the first manuscript before we do our editing work on it. You can have it and publish it after a year. We've had it. A variety of different kinds of models have created this green open access. Gold open access is the place where it was actually free. And that's the gold standard, right? But the commercial publishers took that as being licensed to say, okay, well, we can make your article open access, but you have to pay us some money for it. So the author ends up paying now. Again, someone has to pay for it, right? If the publisher's not going to pay for it and the library's not going to pay for it, it then gets dumped onto the author. And so now you can go to a large number of the archeology journals and say, I want my article open access and they'll say, fine, just give us $3,000, which I think is the price for Springer these days. And we'll be happy to. Now, is that a democratizing movement? Of course not, because if you're rich or if you have a part of a big NSF grant that can afford to pay for it, you're doing fine. If you don't, then you're in trouble. And then, of course, the predators have snuck in. Also, I'll talk about them in a minute. So we're going to talk a little bit about these different elements of the publishing, these different kinds of products in the publishing landscape. The journals are the biggest and most important and more profitable ones. Because they are big and profitable, there's an increasing number of journals. The journals are popping up daily. And for example, people like Elsevier who have 2,500 already, they said last year they started 75 more. I'm on the board of directors for Burgon, which is a small anthropology-based press. And they look at their balance sheet and they say the most profitable thing we have is journals. Can we start more of them? Mitch, can you help us find some more journals to start? That's what makes money in the academic publishing world. So the number of journals is increasing. The existing journals are also expanding. There's some journals that I started where I was back in Puppy at Sage that had two issues a year, that are now up to 12 issues a year. Why? If you charge 12 issues a year, you can charge the library more. It's a bigger... And the cost of doing it of the additional production is not as much as the amount of money that you can ask the library to pay for it. So the journals that do exist are expanding in size. I can't think of an archaeology journal for a moment that is... Antiquity. Antiquity? 206. 206 issues. And I'm sure part of that is... They've also affiliated with Cambridge, is that right? Exactly. And I think that's part of that deal. The creation of mega-journals. We've heard of PLOS and things like that. There are now mega-journals all over the place. And these are journals that cross all kinds of disciplines. Anywhere you go, anywhere you want, you can get published. The one I know best is the Sage one because I worked for Sage for 20 years. They have something called Sage Open. Has anyone ever submitted something to them? Sage Open has an editorial board of 600 members. And I think they've published something like 1,500 articles in the last five years. Across the disciplines. If it's social science, including archaeology, you can publish there. And there'll be board members on the Sage Open board who will read it for you. What you don't read is the fine print. Which, when you come to a journal, who actually makes the decision as to whether to accept an article or not? It's never the reviewers, which is what this list of 600 people are. It's always the journal editor. The journal editor decides. And if you look at the fine print of Sage Open, the journal editors are all employees of Sage. These open journals survive by charging authors, what's called APCs, author processing charges. So their incentive to publish is the more people we publish, the more articles we publish, the more money we make. So while it used to be exclusive, if you want to get into a good journal, they reject 95% of the articles they receive. So if you get in there, you have a lot of prestige for getting in there, to current anthropology, for example. But 95% of people are going to say no. Here in these mega journals, the exact opposite is true. The incentive is to say yes. So the rule is no longer, is this the best of the best? The rule is now, is this acceptable? And so it dilutes the value of having published a journal article. Because things are, because the incentive is to take more rather than taking less. Privatory journals have popped up. Have you run across this term before? Yes? No? Somebody? Anybody? Things out of India, out of China, out of Russia, even out of the United States, where they just say, we'll call it, and the best example of any one historical archaeology listserv. Barb Voss said, I just got this thing from this journal called The Journal of Historical Archaeology and Anthropological Sciences. You got this? Well, it's published by a publisher called mega, something, I forget the name of them. Sorry. It's called Med Crave, it's the name of the publisher. And Med Crave started 100 journals on one day. And all they say is to send it to us, we will review it. We will review it, and then if we like it, we'll publish it. When you ask find out how many articles they've actually rejected, the answer's probably zero. But it's going to cost you $100, which is cheaper than going to Springerwood, it costs you $3,000. But the question is, if you publish in the Journal of Historical Archaeology and Anthropological Sciences, do you get any academic credit for it? Basically, it is a framework that allows people to publish things without any barriers. Now, if you're not in the academic world, and you just want to get it out, there's no reason for that. Or if you're in a country, I've got an analysis of this, if you live in Nigeria and the only criteria for getting credit for an article in Nigeria is that the journal is published in a different country besides Nigeria, why wouldn't you publish with them? Because you don't have to worry about going through the review process in the middle and getting ground down to nothing. So there's logic to this, but these predatory journals are out there. There are thousands of them. And there was a website by the library at the University of Colorado called Jeffrey Beale, which who listed these publishers in these journals so that you would be aware when you went to submit to them that these guys are scam artists. He was sued by publisher after publisher and got hassled by them, and he took the thing down about a month ago. So Beale's list no longer exists. They're supposedly a replacement coming up. If you ever run across a journal that you want to submit to and you've never heard of before, I would go check that list before you go there. But in any case, it's a way of making money. And if all you have to do is set up a website and host this stuff and the stuff comes in, this journal that Barb Ross was mentioning, Chris Decors is listed as the editor of the journal. And I was going to email him and ask him, by the way, do you know that you're the editor of this journal? The possibility is that he doesn't even know that he's been made the editor of that journal. Christine Hastrow, you're the editor of the International Journal of Andean Archaeology. Just put your name and take your picture off the website and put it up there. And you may never find out about that until 20 people have submitted articles and they're there. So anyway, to help determine what is a good journal and a bad journal, part of the growth of the importance of impact factors has been that. I'm hoping you all know what an impact factor is. I don't have to go through the beginning. It's a measure of how important the journal is that you're publishing it. So it's become a... This kind of metric has become the key to whether you're going to get promoted, whether you're going to get grants, how well your university is going to do, by what journals you publish in and what impact factor those journals have. But it does help in some cases by allowing you to sort of assess a journal whether there's something there or not. I'll talk more about impact factors later. Now, with all those journals and all those journal slots out there, there's actually some good news. There's more publication opportunities for you as a junior scholar. With all these open journals, with all these mega journals, with all the expansion of journals, there are a lot more slots to publish than there were 10 years ago. So it's actually good news in some ways. But by the same token, it dilutes the value of them and makes it harder to assess whether or not where you're publishing is good. It doesn't examine whether your article is any good, but it does assess the value of the publication you're publishing in. And this is where impact factors make more and more of a difference. And as I said, some of these publications are worthless. But for interestingly, part of these things that's being developed and one thing that might be a positive thing for all of you is everyone goes to a conference, everyone's going to SAA next week, and you go to a session, oh, what a great session we should get this published. And then you try to figure out where to get it published. Well, with all these new outlets there who are basically dying for more material so they can bring more stuff in and make more money, the possibility of getting those sessions published has now been increased. The fact that SAGE Open that I was talking about, they specifically say if you have a special issue, a theme issue, let us know and we'll, you know, because that way they get 10 articles at once rather than having to get them one at a time. You still have to pay the $395 an article, but it allows for more possibilities to get things published. And depending upon the value and the rating of that journal, it might be worth your while to get to take your session and look at one of those as a source for publication. Monographs. You know, Coin of the Realm has always been a journal article. Second Coin of the Realm when you're a second stage academic is writing a monograph about something. Well, monographs have problems, and here's some data to help you with. A recent study done maybe a month ago, and I can give you the citation if you want, if anyone wants it. There are about 4,000 monographs published every year by university presses in the United States. That doesn't count the edited volumes and it doesn't count the commercial presses that are publishing monographs, but the university press is 4,000. If you want to increase that number by all the other ones, it might be 12,000, 15,000, somewhere in there. Another study done through the university presses is how much does a monograph cost to publish, and that's not just the printing and copyediting. It's also the marketing and the cost of the building, and the average cost was about $40,000 for an average university press monograph. Then this first study that was telling you about the first data point above, they tried to figure out from data they were getting from university presses how much does a monograph make. Average monograph sells 500 copies, at $45 a piece, $22,000. So if you look at monographs, publishing is a losing proposition for university presses or for anybody. Based upon the university press publishing model. So there's no incentive for commercial presses, for example, or even for university presses who are getting ever more squeezed by their universities to publish monographs. And so this environment has also been changing. If you can find a way of making a little bit of money, $1,000 per monograph, but publish 1,000 monographs, that's $1,000,000 of profit, which if you only publish 50 of them, that's only $50,000. So there's an incentive again to publish more. Finding ways of doing them on the cheap. Print on demand has helped enormously that you don't actually have to print a book until someone's actually bought it, and there are now publishers who don't have warehouses anymore. They wait for order to come in, they go to the printing facility, the printer prints it out, ships it out, and if you want to return it or because it's bad, they tell you just throw it away, or they take it and they throw it away and print you another one because it's cheaper than maintaining a warehouse. Again, more ways of trying to save money. More work is being put back on the author. Don't expect royalties. With some presses now, you can expect them to expect you to pay for copy editing or typesetting or producing them a camera-ready product for them to sell. If you want to go to a conference, they'll say, sure, go right ahead. You can buy your own booth at the conference and sell your book all you want, but we're not going there. So a lot more is being put back on you and the author. Again, with this difference in cost between the cost of the income, many publishers will publish you, but you have to subsidize them. The same model that's going on in the journals is now being taken over by books. UC Press has started this Luminose series where they will publish your research monograph, but you've got to give them $7,500. But it's part of this, how do you balance off the cost versus the income? And finally, they're feeding the books now into the collections that used to just consist of journals. So they're finding a second way of selling it. Remember, if the journal collection is 2,500, if you can add 10,000 books to those 2,500 journals, and keep adding more every year. I mean, journals, you always are getting more material every year. So the library can't expect that the price is going to increase because they're getting more and more material every year. But if you can start throwing in books every year, you know, 50 books this year, 500 books the next year, that publisher can then charge the library more and more and more and more until the bubble explodes, which has happened on and off. But in any case, those are the... The books have now joined the journals as being part of these collections. And I'll talk a little bit more about that when we talk about reference books. Same thing happened. So let's talk about reference books. Okay, how many of you have got an imitation in the last five years? Can you write an encyclopedia article on... Well, there's a reason for that. And that's because these reference books have become very, very popular. The gold standard here is Oxford University Press, who in the past five years has published 700 encyclopedias or handbooks. 700 of them, including 24,000 articles. In archaeology alone, and I'm sure you've run across these, there's 31 of them that have all been developed in the last five years that have been published or about to be published. 31 Oxford archaeology, just in archaeology, and about 1,500 articles involved in all that. Why? Same process. They don't care about selling the Oxford encyclopedia of Andean archaeology. What they're selling is Oxford handbooks, I think it's called handbooks, Oxford handbooks online. All 700 of those to a university library with thousands of articles. And it doesn't really matter which handbook or encyclopedia those articles show up in, as long as they show up in this big... And Berkeley I know subscribes to the Oxford handbooks online because I've used them. So, again, it goes back to this gigantism. It goes back to these collections, these aggregations. Now, if you're the editor of one of these handbooks, and in front of mine just had one come out from Oxford, and it's not exactly what you want, you might care a lot, Oxford doesn't care, because all they really want is the 900 articles that are in your hand, or the 90 articles that are in your handbook, that they can stick into this database. Whether they sell individual copies of your handbook, they don't really care. But the database is what's going to make them the money, and therefore that's where they focus their efforts. And it's not just Oxford, right? Sage has a similar thing, Routledge has a similar thing, Wiley has a similar thing, all the large publishers are doing this. Textbooks. It used to be back in the good old days, everyone went to McGraw Hill, or what was then Prentice Hall is now called Pearson, or what was then called Wadsworth, which is now Cengage, and you bought your textbooks, you gave them to your students, probably less so in Berkeley than most places. But it was a very well functioning system. The problem with, developed that used books were killing that system. And as the used book system got more and more efficient, where the first buyer would buy the book, and then this used book got bought rather than a new copy from the publisher for the second semester, and third semester, and fourth semester. And publishers, these textbook publishers tried everything, they tried shrinking the window from one edition to the next edition from five years down to four years down to three years down to two years. You all experienced that as instructors. They tried to add data banks and student activities that you had access online, so that the students had to buy that, whether or not they bought the textbook. They tried everything to try to get this model to work, and eventually they failed. The textbook, these big three textbooks now have all rebranded themselves as learning companies. You go look at their websites and they don't say their textbook publishers anywhere. And in fact, what they're trying to do now as their new business model is go to probably less Berkeley than Diablo Valley College and say, we can provide the textbook material for all your classes online if you as Diablo Valley College just buy into our system. Again, it's the same gigantism approach. Buy the whole collection, give us a bunch of money, and your students will get it for free or your students will pay it as part of the registration fees and you'll never have to worry about it again. And they'll all have the same thing year after year after year. So that's where they're going. But textbooks aren't going away. What they've done is migrated to other process. And so now when you're looking for textbooks for your archeology classes, if you look for a intro text, if you want to borrow Brian's Fagin textbooks, it's not from Pearson anymore. They're now all available from Routledge because Pearson sold them all off to Routledge last year. So there's a new wave of publishers that are doing these kinds of textbooks and they also do the more upper level textbooks as well. Now, they're not going to solve this model either and they're going to face the same problem. But the second level of publishers tend to be smaller and therefore are not only dependent upon the textbooks. It's one of their many things they do. So they're grabbing the money while they can. And when the same problem that be doubled, the big textbook publishers, it's them, they'll figure out a possibly different solution. Don't really know yet. Databases, another new kind of product that has developed and of course made possible by electronic, by the available free electronic publication through universities. I'm not going to say much about these things other than the fact that you can put all your data in rather than summarizing it all into a site report. There's probably a lot of people here who know more about this than I do because Berkeley's the center of where all this stuff is happening. So go find Mike Ashley or Sarah Kansa and they'll tell you all about it. But this is another sort of new thing that's been developed largely in the sciences but now it's moving into social sciences and of course it's in archeology as well. And then of course there's all the other new media. People are blogging, people are using social media, people are creating virtual archeological sites and virtual archeological objects. I'm sure you've all seen things like this. The only thing that's preventing this from taking over is the fact that the academic reward system hasn't changed it. As long as the academic reward system rewards articles and books from in refereed form, then this stuff is not going to happen. Now fighting against that is this whole movement towards public engagement which again Berkeley is sort of on the forefront of. So I know there are people here who are blogging, people here who have their own websites, people here who are doing community-based work which is all to the good because of expanding archeology outside this small category of people in this room. But by the same token, it's not probably going to help you all that much in your academic career yet if the academic system changes then it will because for the moment these things are there and they're just good things to do. So thank you all for doing them that are doing them. The other thing that's sort of come up and this is sort of expanding very rapidly in 100 different directions is that if these publishers having realized that they may have maxed out how many more journals can you buy? How many more journals from small presses are out there to buy? How much more money can we squeeze out of libraries? They're now looking to provide other kinds of services beyond just we're going to produce them, we'll sell them to you and make them available to you. And so there's a whole cafeteria menu of other kinds of services that these publishing companies we're going to call them information companies maybe are providing most of them are online types of things. But if you want to publish your own book you can go to Amazon and publish your own book. You don't need any publisher. Now getting the academic credit, getting into libraries that's a different problem. But the production distribution services are there and available to you. There's marketing services available. Anyone want to cross kudos? Have you heard of that? It's a small company that was done as a test by one of the foundations trying to help academics get their word out that allows you to rewrite what you've done written in an article or a book in more popular language and helps you find social media and other media to be able to produce that, send it out so that you can get your message out to a broader world. It's a company that's doing that and it's free for academics. If you're a publisher it costs you money and it'll probably cost for academics eventually. This whole idea of being able to produce your raw data this database thing. Pre-publication drafts, this is another thing that's not big in the biomedical sciences less so in the social sciences but there are places where you can send your first draft and get commented on publicly social science research network. Anybody familiar with that? Yes, someone? But those kinds of things are out there as well. There's also bio-archive and archive and Mendeley and interestingly enough Elsevier has bought Mendeley which is one of these people with the idea and still free but I'm assuming that at some point their idea is going to be that they're going to make from the point you start writing an article or doing research till the point that that thing is out of print or lost to the world forever they will be able to monetize your research every step of the process. Crossref, most of you know an easier way of getting from one journal article. Next, peer reviews there are companies now that will allow you to send the article to them rather than to a journal and they will send you the peer review back they will find reviewers and the peer review back for a fee and then you can send it off to the journal saying here it's already peer reviewed and the journal can decide whether or not to accept it. There are some of these peer review companies that actually work with the publishers so they outsource peer reviewing rather than trying to find oh god who knows something about the Chimu anybody who knows just about Chimu Pottery I've got to find somebody so I can get them to review this article first by people who said no right well the publisher can pay for that service. Citation indexes we've talked about already there's a much longer discussion on that and maybe at some point we can do we can do a whole single talk about that but there are it used to be the Web of Science was it they gave you an impact factor that was the value of that journal that you're publishing in so you can decide which journal you want to publish in to get the most academic credit. There's now a whole range of these things ranging from Google Scholar to H-Index one of the competitors to Web of Science Springer has some that created something called site source which intending to directly compete with the Web of Science impact factor and someone did an analysis and discovered that Springer journals do better on their using their criteria their algorithm than they do in the Web of Science so that you know there's obviously some self-interest involved there archiving I'm sure a lot of you send your stuff off to ResearchGate and academia.edu so that people can see the material you've got and these are all services and then finally there's search capabilities of improving search for example there's now a new company called Meta that does artificial intelligence modeling for searches to help you find things that you're looking for that just got bought by the Chan Zuckerberg initiative. Do you know who those are? Zuckerberg? Sound familiar? So Facebook now owns a piece of one of these academic search capability kinds of models and that to me is what I worry about the most is that's going to be the next step in academic publishing just way to a Google I mean they haven't done this before none of these big companies have done this before because the academic world is so small but the academic world in the one place in the publishing world that is still profitable those journey of the else of your 37% profit that year and publishing companies in academic publishing do make a profit so I can always see at some point one of these companies is going to say oh gee we should probably try experimenting in the academic world and see if we can do things better than these publishers have been at for a century or two have been at it. I'm glad I'm out of it because I don't want to have to go up against Google so what does it all mean for you? okay both systems still intact held together by the academic review system there's too much money for it to go away the publishers aren't going to go away and then suddenly you have your own open access system and figure it all out yourself there's too much money involved and there's too many ways that these publishing houses can co-opt any kind of progressive movement toward democratization of knowledge that they won't do it if they can figure out a way of monetizing it rather than being a stable system it's one that's changing daily it sounds like most people aren't familiar with most of the things I just rattled off as these publishing services these are all things that have come for the last couple of years and I didn't know about most of them until I stopped publishing and started reading electronic publications aren't the solution but they're not the problem either you're going to read stuff in your pajamas at home that's great but it's not going to solve all the problems it's not going to create all your problems there's the open access movement because of the way it gets co-opted and the problems of sustainability it has it's easier to get published but it's harder to justify those publications given the fact that things are being sliced and diced in large databases you should think about writing modularly if you have a very long book that's a very complex argument just know that someone's going to buy chapter 3 or read chapter 3 in one of these databases and not get the rest of it so to think modularly is probably something you should think about more in terms of writing discoverability is important again, when you have a 2,500 journals and 10,000 books or 50,000 books in a database how are you going to be found? keywords are important, abstracts are important good titling is important things will change in this publishing eco-scape when the reward system for academia changes and not until then and then finally the tech companies might step in and change everything for better or worse so those are kind of this is like a 30,000 foot overview of what I see going on in publishing I'm now as a retired guy I'm now writing my own stuff on a blog called scholarly roadkill here's some of the topics I've done just type in scholarly roadkill and you should be able to find it and that's all I've got to say, any questions? yes comment in relation to the database the thing, just recently I asked two books that I did one of them was a white press on them revising my textbook the first time ever that's happened I wanted abstracts of each chapter of the book and keywords for each chapter is this because of the slicing modular relation, yes, absolutely I've never seen that before that's where they want it and that would mean that people would just search for that and not take the whole they would just buy or somehow get that one out of it that's the discoverability, they would find before accessing your chapter just imagine well you know, because you all use the library here imagine how big these databases are thousands of journals, tens of thousands of books you're not going to go and read every last one of them you want to get a succinct library first and then oh yeah, that's worth my reading and then you go home it's not terrible how, you know, from books like they're going to actually use these abstracts and keywords what databases are they going to be UC Press probably probably has it on Project Muse and might have it on JStore and the university presses themselves are trying to create something to compete with the commercial presses to do the same kind of thing now they may not be big enough when you put all the university presses together they may not be big enough to compete but to do so, you need to have this kind of discoverability capability and that's what you're looking for other question, yeah the comment you had about modularly if I were to try to translate that modular thinking and writing into other formats I mean, you don't do write modularly a new journal article but if you were to think about how your work fits into maybe a broader like a collection, like a way to edit volumes or anything like that you're already doing modular writing for that right, so I mean in effect the modular thing you really may apply to but again, that assumes that the basic unit of reading is going to be the journal article if someone is looking, well if you have your whole database out there or if you're writing some and people just want your argument or just want your table three they might just go well, that's what I was looking for I was looking for how many books how many journals are published by the main journal publishers, that's all I was looking for I didn't read the whole article I just looked for that information that Elsevier has written in her journals I pulled that out of the article and that was it that's all I looked at if I didn't get it on page five I probably wouldn't have gone that far I would have looked at somewhere else that modularization may become really granular it's like really long figure captions in your figure captions make sure you put in the right keywords because if someone is just going to get that figure and nothing else those keywords are crucial otherwise they won't find you good I think that seems to me what you're saying is mainly depressing it doesn't seem that there's any kind of idea of maybe the world has too many articles or too many books and certainly what you're predicting is going to happen these sort of multiplicity of handbooks and psychopathies and so on I mean it's just and you've got something there a problem with digital books so there's not very much what you're saying which would encourage a sort of revolutionary way of publishing on the writing well the academics will always produce information and right now the systems that they the systems were stable for a very, very long time now they're all in flux and they're consolidating into very few small centralized groups to control that information what's going to happen on the horizon I don't know maybe Google will come and make it all free because for them it's a rounding error so they'll make it all everybody can get any academic publication they want and they can pay for it I mean so it's you're right it's kind of a depressing and part of the reason why I ended up selling Left Coast Press a year ago was that I was a small publisher who was publishing 50 books a year and had a dozen journals didn't stand a chance somebody at Apple could sneeze and decide archeology I'm going to publish archeology and then Left Coast Press would go under and I was just too small now even these big companies even Elsevier and Springer when they compare to the tech companies they're just they're little minnows so which direction is going to go and the other thing is if you look at archeologists you look at the long view of things there have always been these waves of consolidations before in publishing and then somewhere for some reason down on the ground floor underneath all the leaves a new generation of things evolved I have no idea what that's going to look like and I'm too old to be the one to create it but there's very likely going to be something down there you know on the forest floor with all these behemoths marching around that's going to replace them how long it's going to take I don't know whether it's going to happen in my lifetime it's certainly not my professional lifetime I'm done but in my our lifetimes I don't know if that's going to happen or not as being depressing is you know I'm going through looking at articles and doing research on publications I see the same article published in several different very slightly different formats in different journals that's actually always been true yeah there's whole intelligence and as you say the devaluation of what you're writing and how carefully you're writing it seems to me being encouraged by the whole publication I don't think it's also by academia because that was the thread potato you know the number of publications on your tv per year is what was important so that's why there are people that would write the same article five months before you had that whole thing when it was right on by the value so those ratings the academic award system is the other key factor whereas if you switch that around and said it's more important to have really good publications and not be redundant so you just say it once you might refer to that article but you say it once encouraging if everybody encouraged people to do that and you were rewarded for that in theory that's what the citation is supposed to be doing by having everything only in nature of science but that's just not the reality and so people have to have there's another reason for it too and that reason has to do with audience if you're doing something on and Ian medicine you might publish a journal in medical anthropology who would never think about being an American antiquity and they would get your information you'd create an audience for yourself you'd have to use a lot of the same stuff but by twisting the argument to meet what their needs are and this is one of the things I'm going to do in this workshop on April 10th is talk about taking the same piece of information and repackaging it in a variety of different ways as a good thing rather than as a bad thing yes there is some overlap but in a lot of ways it actually also helps you find new audiences for your work I'm just going to comment on the roof I'm seeing the same with respect to what I was on the budget committee I don't know what term it was that you committed for the work but and we saw this and often actually in some of the sciences and what a term for it was called salami slicing I think it takes the whole salami but we were actually but it takes a lot of work but we found some cases where we call it self plagiarism and we actually get off the verse we said you self plagiarize you know repeat the same tables and worse old paragraphs and things but if you're going to maintain quality you have to have a review it actually says it needs area it's all worth to do but it goes on I'm going to ask people what you saw as the main barrier is that there are two groups that have already moved into being are attempting to be serious players in publishing to get into this last bit of a popular publishing it's too small when you talk about selling iPhones your audience is three billion how many got six million however many people on the planet when it comes to academic publishing it's in a few millions so it's a much smaller universe but it's a profitable universe and academic publishers have known that I probably could not have started Left Coast as a general publishing house publishing novels and memoirs and history books and stuff like that that world is just too big and too hard to make a break into but in the academic publishing world I was able to do that simply because I had a very small limited audience and could stick with that you mentioned academia.edu it's archived but given their nebulous legal status I wonder if the long term I wonder what you anticipated the long term is this could be a lawsuit one of these days someone's going to get tired of having all their articles because the people the academics that put them up there ignore the fact that no you're not allowed to put up the final article you can only put up a draft of it they ask you for it too they write you and say hey I see you put this up I wanted to put this up so there's going to be a big lawsuit and then how are that plays out in our comment for me because I'm pretty young you did the whole politics of publishing and everything but you mentioned some grassroots movement open access and the different variations have you ever seen like a cooperative or a union of academics interested in publishing and forming most of the open access that are truly open access meaning it doesn't cost anybody except it does cost the university to put things on the server which is the problem when you take an individual journal idea as an open access and expand it to 100,000 journals which is what the universe of journals is but most of those open access journals are run by collectives of some sort and in fact most academic journals are in a lot of ways those kinds of things the editorial board the reviewers are all people who are volunteering their time to try to make their colleagues work better and there's a huge amount to be said for that the people who actually do a lot of reviewing for journals, the people who serve on editorial boards I mean that's an enormous amount of work and anybody who's ever done this will know how much work it is and how often and if you've been on the other end where you've been a journal editor for example and trying to get people to do things just the ability to be able to say hey I need you to do a review for me would you do it and someone says yes and delivers back in two weeks or two days that's just wonderful I'm a book review editor for a journal right now so there's some payoff because you get a free copy of the book but the amount of work involved in reading the entire book thinking it through doing the review going through the publication process I mean it's a lot of work it's a lot of work for someone to do for a free book so there is a lot of volunteerism in the academic world already and that shouldn't be minimized yes so does anyone know what it is I think a woman in Russia who went to one of these giant conglomerations and information and downloaded literally millions of articles and put it up for free on a website in Russia where it can't be reached well it's actually a slightly different system technically she doesn't have the articles what she has is passwords to every other university system provided by collaborators so you just go to this site it's all in Russian so I mean good luck but you use this little search bar and you put it in the DOI and it pops it out using a password from somebody some conspirators sort of deep pockets of passwords in various university systems I hadn't heard about the new humanities one yeah I just saw it a couple days ago like I said the landscape changes daily and there are pirates out there yes it's having an impact at all on Elsevier's models it can only have a problem if it can be consistently maintained if it becomes a system that is there the site had started about a year ago two years ago maybe so for that huge amount of stuff yes but for it to be maintained for the long term over the next decade the libraries will say well why do we need a subscription for all the Elsevier journals because we can just send everybody a sigh of and they'll get it that way by the way I never used a sigh of so thank you for telling me how it works I never even knew but at some point I had to figure out how to shut it down they've already been in court a couple of times in my understanding but they just moved the servers to yeah and it's like it's like the pirate the old fashioned pirates someone's got a golden galleon floating around there so someone's going to go after it so you build a navy around it I don't see the old second at some point and I'm sure there's people who hack their way into the Berkeley server every day to access whatever not yet no new changes yet yeah I mean if there's no way of solving that piracy problem then it becomes a problem but I think for the short term it's just something that the libraries and the universities need to figure out a solution to and they will which will probably be making it hard for us to get online we have these proxies and stuff but it will make it more difficult for us to get our work done it's what will be the solution yeah before any devolution did I answer your question adequately I mean I talked about it was just about volunteerism but more about making a sustainable business model where somehow the authors and the reviewers all put in a portion of the profits the profits can you mention some of these big publishers make $28 billion a year and 37% profit so I mean if it can somehow I don't know there are some journals that in fact do that how long was it for 25 years before I went to a commercial publisher so they were bringing enough money to be able to pay for itself well it was all volunteer work the problem with volunteerism is sustaining it for the wrong one you can sustain it I'm doing a consulting job for a woman who has an online journal on multicultural education she's been doing it for 20 years and she's tired of how we can find a way of creating a sustainable home for it and that probably means going to some existing publisher so it seems like one of the solutions to the piracy problem is open access and that $8 million a year could be spent on providing and publishing money for those who don't have institutional support like perfectly scholars that support free non-governmental but we can support them at the point where they started talking about open access they said well the libraries are spending these millions of dollars on buying these subscriptions why don't we spend all those millions of dollars and publish these journals ourselves then you get there's 4,000 university libraries in the US so how do you get them to Berkeley you take 4,000 journals and Stanford you take 4,200 because your library budget is bigger so what happens when Berkeley library gets a budget cut what happens to those journals or when someone gets a huge influx of cash from Zuckerberg and Stanford gets a huge influx of cash from Zuckerberg that means they double the number of journals so developing a cooperative community of libraries to be able to pull it off is not impossible and the amount of money involved could probably do that but to get all those libraries to coordinate and work out the problems between them that would be very, very difficult particularly since they're not they have to sort of pay attention to what their universities are telling them to do sounds like everyone wants to go anyway thank you all for your time don't forget April 10th a workshop on how to get your journal article published if you want to come back again