Foreign experts suggest that academic publishing de -commercialization

On June 14, Robert M. Kaplan, a professor of part -time medical professor at Stanford University and former vice president of the National Institute of Health, published an article on the Times Higher Education Website of the UK, calling on the academic community to get rid of the business publishing house Dependence, exploring new academic publishing models.

Capland said that in the past half a century, a profit -seeking academic publishing institution has earned a lot of profits at low cost -they hired leaders of various disciplines as free colleagues and charged high journal subscription fees from scientific research institutions, and they The research published in these journals is often completed with the funding of public institutions. Thanks to the progress of digital technology, the publication and distribution costs of academic journals have decreased significantly compared with the paper era, but publishers have not reduced their prices. Capland said that from the following three points, academic publishing should return to the original purpose, that is, to spread high -quality scientific information to the extensive audience as possible at the same cost as possible.

First, the peer evaluation system is unsustainable. In the past, well -known experts in various fields were usually willing to provide "volunteer services" for peer reviews. Today, after the journal editor issued a dozen invitation letters, only one or two answers could be received.

Second, even in the open access mode, submitters often need to pay a high amount of articles to handle fees, and scholars who work in non -issued countries or inadequate scientific research institutions often cannot afford this fee. This means that academic journals may publish more research results of scholars with superior economic conditions rather than scientific research.

Third, the publisher refuses to raise the transparency of the journal subscription contract. A study by the professor of economics at the University of California Santa Barbara Economics, Theodore C. Bergstrom, etc., analyzed the academic publishing four giants Elsevier, Shi, Springer, Taylor & Fraancis, SAGE, and many universities in the United States have signed contracts. The results showed that in the same year, the costs of the same publisher for the same subscription content to different universities were significantly different, with a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

In Kapland's view, in order to replace expensive and dysfunctional business academic publishing systems, national and even global digital libraries can be edited and published by scientific articles evaluated by peers. This requires the establishment of multiple institutional alliances to expand the scale of college libraries and hire more professional libraries. Each disciplinary committee will plan the content of the new digital journal and set up an editorial team. The supervision function can be fulfilled by a well -known non -profit organization.

In addition, peer reviews will generally follow the current method, but it can encourage scholars to participate in peer evaluation by establishing measures such as databases and reward and punishment rules. For example, each academic personnel are required to bear a certain amount of peer evaluation work each year as the basis for promotion evaluation; scholars who continue to refuse to serve as colleagues' reviewers will cancel their qualifications for submission to academic journals within a certain period of time. Journal editors will evaluate the quality of peer evaluation and submit an evaluation opinion to the institutions where the judges are inaugurated. This will help improve the effect of peer reviews, while helping the members of the members themselves.

In the past ten years, British universities spent more than 1 billion pounds to subscribe to academic journals, and American universities have a lot higher than Britain. These funds can be used for the construction and maintenance of digital libraries. Reducing marketing costs, reducing duplicate work, and centralized management can further save funds. This can improve the quality of peer evaluation, expand the scope of scientific communication, and reduce the pressure on the handling of articles to handle the article processing fee. In addition, the number of universities in the digital library can be required to share a larger proportion of costs.

Capland said that the above proposal may not be unanimously recognized by the academic world, but the main purpose of the proposal is to start discussions. "As long as we start our brains, we will have the opportunity to improve the academic publishing process, reduce the economic burden of scientific research institutions and scholars, and introduce high -level scientific research results to more readers."

Source: China Social Science Network-Journal of Social Sciences of China

Author: Wang Youran/Compilation

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