Not one, but six fake journals from Elsevier. Waited until now to say something besides “GREEDY PUBLISHERS *SNARGFARG* COMMUNITY PUBLISHING *PITCHFORKS* STUPID TENURE TRACK *FOAMFOAM* SCIENCE” Sent an email to my buddies in academia last week: “Where’s your credibility, status and all that fluff now? Stop feeding your work to these companies and think, be proactive about how it reaches the broader community where it belongs.” Most responses were “Get professional societies to switch to online publishing and cut out the middleman,” while Dr. Ennis Singh of the Mutiny states “it’s still as prestigious to be an editor at one of the big traditional journals. I’ve seen some efforts to do what you’re suggesting out of Berkeley Press, but honestly, they haven’t been as good.”
I disagree, large publishing houses earned their stars over the years, why can smaller, online, community versions not do the same, especially when these juggernauts raise their prices so much even large university libraries cannot afford to carry their journals? The time to drop the middleman publisher is now, before he realizes his impending extinction and gets more legislation enacted on his behalf. But, where to start? In other words, my most prized structural geology text is was published by Springer, but how to motivate editors to generate this quality of material without being beholden to large publishing houses?
