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[GWL]: Scientific journals

On 1/17/02 2:56 PM, "Margaret Lauterbach" <melauter@earthlink.net> wrote:

> This seems to be the way scientific journals work.  The best ones have a
> 'jury" of editors who decide that Dr. X's study is worth publishing.  Then
> they tell him how much it will cost him to get his work published (and once
> published, that's a boost toward promotion, etc.).  To me, it makes
> scientific journals suspect, and I'd certainly be suspicious of any
> consumer magazine that lets people buy their way into news pages. Margaret
> Lauterbach

Margaret, as a publishing scientist and sometime scientific journal editor I
have to take serious issue with your implication that scientific journals
are "suspect" because authors contribute to the costs of publication.

First, the "best ones" do not have such charges--and here I am talking about
such journals as SCIENCE or NATURE.  Why do they not have what we call "page
charges?"  Because they have big circulations. very high subscription prices
and they also take advertising (which to my way of thinking makes them much
more "suspect" than if they had page charges).  They are self-sufficient,
and in fact NATURE is a for-profit venture of MacMillan Publishing.

Nearly all European scientific  journals are highly subsidized by their
governments and as a result do not have page charges.

Many American journals manage to finance themselves from library
subscriptions (usually many times higher than individual subscriptions) or
from dues payments to the socieites or associations that publish them.  They
may have no page charges or offer reduced rates for students or for those
not supported by grant money.

Those scientific journals that do have page charges usually waive them if
the author can show an inability to pay.  They have to charge because they
may circulate to only a few hundred individuals and libraries and could not
possibly support themselves otherwise.

But I must emphasize that any worthy journal submits all manuscripts to peer
review, and if an article passes that review, it almost always gets
published one way or another.  More importantly, there is no way that an
article rejected in peer review can get published without the prescribed
revisions, even if the author could pay for an entire press run of the whole
issue of the journal.  YOU CANNOT BUY YOUR WAY INTO SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS.

Admittedly this oversimplifies the process, but I definitely want to counter
your suggestion that scientific journals operate in the shady way "New York
glossies" evidently do.  Information in a scientific journal is perhaps the
most unbiased and reliable of any available!

Bill Shear
Department of Biology
Hampden-Sydney College
Hampden-Sydney VA 23943
(434)223-6172
FAX (434)223-6374
email<wshear@email.hsc.edu>
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"The editors of newspapers, the popular clergy, politicians and orators of
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Henry David Thoreau, Journals, Aug. 9, 1858.

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