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JGWeissman comments on The Shabbos goy - Less Wrong
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You mean like the academic journals that charge subscription fees?
People wouldn't have a problem with an academic journal that they believed charged a reasonable fee. But consider a typical journal published by Springer-Verlag or Mary Thomas Liebert:
They have a problem with having a small number of subscribers. But many hobbyist groups manage to publish quality journals to equally-small audiences at a cost of under $10/issue.
The fact that people aren't jumping in to compete with lower-costs journals makes me suspect that it isn't that easy. But it's still not at all obvious why academic journals cost so much.
(The big ones, Science and Nature, are relatively inexpensive.))
Sure it is. Subscriptions are mostly paid for by institutions, rather than individuals. Any given article effectively has a monopoly on it's own content, so once a university has subscribed and the profs are used to getting free access to that content, it's politically difficult for the university to un-subscribe. Then the journal incrementally increases the prices. Soon, the university's accounting department is on the losing end of a frog-boil.
I'm stealing this expression.
The more widely-accepted term for nondestructive appropriation of creative content is 'piracy.'
It's not one I accept. I think it's a very bad analogy, and refuse to use the word with that meaning.
How about, I'll use it fairly with attribution where possible
Vocabulary is not creative content.
Vocabulary absolutely can be creative content -- boiling something down to a few words is a difficult art.
I would agree with it not being covered by various intellectual property laws.
We have no disagreement here.
I just want to call someone a frog-boiler.
Apparently I gave the wrong impression that I was arguing that academic journals are evil.
I actually meant to challenge the idea that an academic institution charging for its services is evil, using academic journals as an example of institutions that currently do so and get away with it. Other examples include text book publishing and undergraduate tuition.
I assumed that was what you meant; so I explained why I still think academic journals are suspect.
I don't think either of us has a definition of "evil" that would support argument on this topic anyway.
Huh? People are most certainly jumping in with zero-cost (to read) journals such as PLoS and others. The open-access publishing movement is not obscure and I'm surprise to see that people here aren't aware of them.
The reason existing journals cost so much is that publishers can charge monopoly rents based on their ownership of a high-status imprint. That game is not going to last very much longer, IMO.
PLoS is a non-profit, and I'm certainly aware of it. If, however, for-profit academic journals charge much more than it costs to produce them, I would expect to see for-profit startups competing with them.
The "impact factor" measure is a part of this; you can't just start up a new journal and have a high impact factor.
PLoS claims to be sustainable on internally generated revenue at this point. I was just at their conference.
Possible explanations for not seeing that: