References on Academic Publishing

I got an email last week asking if I had written up the talk on the Political Economy of Peer-Reviewed Academic Publishing that I gave at COA a few weeks ago. I haven't written a paper on this, nor do I even have any reasonable notes. My talk was videotaped, and I'm working on finding a way to have at least the audio from the talk put online. In the meantime, here are some links to some of the references I've found particularly useful.

Ted Bergstrom, professor of Economics at UCSB, has written a number of papers on journal pricing, and has assembled a very useful webpage about journal pricing. I'd recommend starting with "Free Labor for Costly Journals?" (Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2001), available here. This paper is an excellent overview.

A Morgan Stanley report on Elsevier makes interesting reading. I also found Reed-Elsevier's annual report to be quite interesting. The 2004 annual report, which I used for my talk, can be found here. And the 2005 report, which I've not read, is here. In brief, the financial statements make it clear that Elsevier is making lots and lots of money.

Bergstrom, Preston McAfee, and Vera te Velda have put together a website, http://www.journalprices.com/, that lets the user search for journals by keyword and discipline and will display a number of statistics, including cost, cost per article, and cost per citation. The output can be saved as a spreadsheet for further analysis.

Patchouli, turtles, and almost summertime

One more week to go and the term is over. Graduation is Saturday, June 3. After graduation there's still quite a bit of work to do. Not only is there grading to do and evaluations to write, but I'll have a lot of administrative work. I'll need to help write the academic annual report, and there are a lot of other administrative tasks that I've let slide that I'll have to start paying attention to again: re-writing the academic portion of our website and helping draft some documents for our re-accreditation.

But this weekend I haven't been thinking about any of this. Although it's late May, summer seems to have arrived. Both Saturday and Sunday the high temperature was around 80. The air was heavy and humid and still, as it often is in the summer. I went for relatively long bike rides yesterday and today. I probably should have been doing other things, but the weather was just too nice. One of the highlights was seeing three painted turtles hanging out on one of the carriage roads near Aunt Betty's Pond. I like turtles. They're cool.

I did a bunch of gardening this weekend, as well. I dug up a new flower bed and then went to various nurseries to get flowers to plant. In the process, I learned something amazing. Patchouli is a plant! Who knew? I just assumed it was a scent that someone cooked up a while ago and which then became inexplicably popular with certain segments of the population. Well, it turns out that Patchouli is not a human invention, but is a product of nature. Golly. This doesn't explain why this scent is so popular, but at least now I know where it comes from.

Anyway, I got two patchouli plants and planted them in the herb garden by our front deck. They're smallish -- less than a foot tall, and have roundish, shiny leaves. Rub the leaves a little bit and your fingers will smell like Patchouli. Amazing.

So, just one more week of classes. Chaos and Fractals is mostly student presentations. And in Calculus IV we've finished the material we need to cover, so I've been presenting semi-random special topics the last week. Tuesday I'll talk about countable and uncountable infinities, and will go through the demonstration that the real numbers are uncountable. Seems like a fun way to end the year.

Shop like it's 1999

I was at the grocery store in Bar Harbor tonight a little bit after 8. Much to my amazement, Prince's "1999" was being played through the store sound system. Not a muzak version -- the real version. Either I shop at a very hip store, or Prince isn't quite as edgy as he once was. Ok, maybe Prince wasn't ever edgy. But still ... I don't think of him as grocery store material. It's hard to know what to make of this.

Update: A friend of mine has pointed out that Prince was recently named the World's Sexiest Vegetarian by PETA. Interesting. Also interesting is that I heard "1999" last night when when I was in the produce section.

The home stretch

Week nine of our ten-week term begins tomorrow. I think things are basically under control, although I have an enormous amount of work to do. I'm behind in a number of tasks, but not more than usual, which I consider a small victory.

This weekend was absolutely beautiful. Spring in Maine requires a lot of faith -- one just has to believe, against all evidence, that summer will come, even though there is much to convince one otherwise. Then, seemingly all of a sudden, we get a weekend like this: warm, sunny, and every shade of green imaginable. Finally one remembers what summer is like. The blossoms on the lilacs in our yard are almost open, the apple trees are more or less in bloom, and there are multiple hummingbirds vying for our feeder.

Saturday I forced myself to not go on campus. It was the first time in a couple of weeks that I did so, and it surely will be the last time I'll spend an entire day away until after graduation. It wasn't a day off, though, as I still did around four hours of grading. I also did much satisfying work around the house: I mowed and raked the lawn, did some laundry, and did lots of dishes. I realize that this probably doesn't sound very exciting, but it was just what I needed.

Student presentations start tomorrow in Chaos and Fractals. I have a few more things to do in class, but it's mostly the students' show from here on out. And Calculus IV is winding down nicely. We've finished what we needed to cover. So now I'm just picking some fun topics. Last Friday was Lagrange multipliers. Next Tuesday -- who knows? -- maybe some numerical optimization techniques or applications of Gauss' law in electrostatics.

As the term winds down, I hope to post more frequently. The first part of this week will be busy and hectic, but I think things will gradually start to calm down after Wednesday.

U-Turns and Springtime

When I started this blog, around six months and 50 posts ago, I had large pile of work to do and I hoped that blogging would be an entertaining and perhaps productive form of procrastinating. Actually, my procrastination often takes the form of housework -- laundry, dishes, cooking, and working in the yard. Anyway, it's the time of the term when work is piling up. There are problem sets to grade, student papers to read, administrative memos to write, and a crush of meetings. We have just three weeks of the terms left, so we're in a crunch to finish all sorts of administrative tasks, which means an unusually high density of meetings, appointments, phone calls, and correspondence. This, in turn, means that there are lots of reasons to procrastinate.

Last week was rainy. It rained every day, but at unpredictable intervals. Often it would look like it was clearing, and yet it would then transition abruptly to a downpour. Then it would drizzle softly for a few hours, and then downpour again. But it wasn't too cold, and the rain has made the grass unbelievably green. Leaves are coming out on most of the trees, so the foliage is a delicate light green that complements the darker, lusher green of the grass. Despite the wetness, it's been a nice spring.

One sign that the spring/summer tourist season is arriving is that cars have started turning around in our driveway again. We live on a main road, just past the turn-off for another main road. This turn-off is very clearly marked. Nevertheless, often cars miss it and then our driveway is the place they turn around. During July and August we have, at times, had roughly one turn-around in our driveway an hour. Usually the cars are from New York or Massachusetts.

While I find this a little annoying, it bothers Doreen quite a bit. So a few summers ago she made a "No Turns Please" sign. To do so, she used a Sharpie to write on a medium-sized piece of old plywood. The plywood had been painted white, so the black writing stood out nicely. She propped it up in our driveway and helped to cut down on the number of cars making U-turns in our driveway.

However, the paint on the plywood was old and flaking, and eventually the part where the "T" was written flaked off entirely. The result was that we now had a sign that said "No urns Please." This doesn't quite deliver the same clear message as the previous text. I like to imagine a conversation that might go on inside a car whose driver is thinking about making a U-turn. "Hey, let's turn in there." "Wait, it says 'no urns'." "Let's see, we have a few vases, a chalice, two flagons ... but no urns." "Ok. Then we can do it."

After a while, Doreen got a can of paint and painted "No Turns Please" on the board. The text is now quite visible, although it's in unevenly sized block letters that suggests a marginal degree of literacy. The letters look like they were written by someone who doesn't write much. But perhaps this lends the text a certain intimidation factor. The sign looks a little scary. We've also put a rope over one end of our driveway. (It's a semicircle, which is perhaps why it makes such an appealing target for a U-turn.)

We now still occasionally get people turning around in our driveway, but it doesn't happen that often. But one can still tell when tourist season is starting up, because we'll get one or two U-turns happening in our driveway on weekends and holidays.

The benefits of my new phone

Almost two months ago I wrote about my new fancy phone, and said that "I'm sure it will make my life more complete in some difficult to specify way." Well, I think I can now specify one concrete way it has improved my life.

Yesterday morning I was on a phone call and all of a sudden there was a lot of noise from outside my office. A large backhoe was moving earth and ripping things up and I couldn't hear. What to do? Would I have to finish the conversation some other time?

Nope. My new fancy phone has a volume button right on the front so I was able to punch the volume of several notches higher. This allowed me to easily hear the conversation, and I thus could finish the phone call without further interruption.

End of Week Five

It's the end of week five of our ten-week term. Work has overwhelmed me -- I'm feeling swamped and more behind than I like to be at this time of the term. I haven't had time to post much. So, in lieu of an actual entry, below is the abstract from a talk I gave last Tuesday. The presentation was part of COA's ongoing Human Ecology forum.


The Political Economy of Peer-Reviewed Academic Journals

I will begin this talk with an overview of the process of publishing
in academic peer-reviewed journals, highlighting the extent to which
journals rely on uncompensated labor; neither authors nor peer
reviewers are paid. Many academic journals are owned and operated by
non-profit professional societies, such as the Society for Human
Ecology or the American Physics Society, and hence pro-bono or donated
labor on their behalf seems is seen by many as a professional
obligation. However, there are also many journals that are owned by
for-profit companies such as Elsevier or Springer.

I will summarize a number of studies that show that journals owned by
for-profit companies charge between three and six times more per
article than non-profit journals, and that there is little difference
in quality between for- and non-profit journals. The extra cost of
for-profit journals is borne almost exclusively by non-profit
educational institutions and the tax-payer dollars and donations that
support them. The largest academic publishing group reported a profit
of 1.7 billion euros in 2004. The net result is that for-profit
journals limit access to information that rightly belongs in the
public domain while extracting huge profits from the academic
community.

I will argue that the issues around for-profit academic publishing
provide a useful case study that may help shed light on broader
questions concerning how costs and benefits are distributed between
the public and the private sector. In addition, I will suggest that
the persistence of for-profit journals can serve as an interesting and
somewhat subtle example of a market failure.

To conclude, I will put forth some ideas for individual and collective
actions that researchers can take to improve the situation, and will
briefly present several successful examples of such action.

End of Week Three

It's the end of the third week in our ten-week term. Grading is piling up and spring is unfolding in slow motion. The end of last week was spent at a mini-retreat for the team that is preparing our report for re-accreditation. The retreat was an interesting mix of some good ideas, fun colleagues, and soul-crushing administrative despair. The re-accreditation team is great, and I think we'll explore some interesting ideas. But some aspects of the work are about as exciting as watching paint dry while someone tries to push a blunt object -- perhaps a dull pencil or a tongue depressor-- through your temple into your brain.

Some end-of-week-three numbers:

• At the start of the term my inbox was completely empty. It currently has 99.
  
  
• In the first three weeks of the term I have sent 364 email messages.
  
  
• Yesterday was the first day all term that I didn't spend some time on campus. In fact, I only left my house twice: once to move my car so that Doreen could go somewhere, and once to empty the compost.

Reasons to Live

There are lots of reasons to live: good friends, a sense of purpose in life, good house music, nice sunsets, etc, etc. But here are two more:

Jay Zeezer's mash-up of Jay-Z's "99 Problems" and Nena's "99 Luftballons (Red Balloons)". You can get it here: 99 Luft Problems. (Warning: Explicit and possibly offensive lyrics.)

Creature Comforts. This is a British TV show that is difficult to describe. It's a claymation thing by the Wallace and Grommit folks. The show creators interviewed ordinary folks about a bunch of different topics. The interviews were unscripted. The interviews are then set to claymation. Hard to describe, but it might just be one of the most amusing things ever. It's on Fridays at 10:20 on BBC America.

First week of the term

Week one of our ten-week term is over. Being back from sabbatical and back teaching has been mostly quite good. Monday was an odd day of culture shock. I had forgotten how busy and intense things can get. And all the students look so much older than I remember -- especially the first-year students.

This term will be busy, but I feel like it's off to a great start. The weather was beautiful this week: nice and spring like. When spring term starts with sleet and snow and rain, it's always a little tough. But this week was sunny and relatively warm.

I'm teaching two classes this term: Introduction to Chaos and Fractals and Calculus IV. I've taught both before. However, I'm doing a bunch of new things with the Chaos class. For one, I've decided to write a textbook based on the notes and materials I've developed for the class. There isn't really a book on Chaos appropriate for the class, so I figure it's time I write one. It seems to me that there might be a market for such a text. I'll look for a publisher perhaps as early as this summer, although I'm sure it will be a few years before it's completed. Even if I don't get it published, I'm convinced it will be a worthwhile project, as it will be really nice to have a book for future versions of the course.

As of this evening I have six chapters done out of what I expect to be between 25 and 30. The writing process has been surprisingly enjoyable thus far. It's actually a nice distraction. I find that when I'm working on it it's easy to "get lost" in it. In contrast, when I'm doing other work, like grading or administrative memo writing, I find it almost impossible to avoid get ting distracted. What's going to be a bit of a chore, however, is making the figures. Thus far it's gone fine, but I can see that it's starting to get tedious. The chapter I wrote tonight, on graphical iteration, had fourteen figures. Anyway, I hope that I can maintain throughout the term the pace I've set the last two weeks throughout the term. If I can, I'll have a pretty decent draft by early June.

I'm also adding some labs to the course. This will also take a bunch of work. I'm not sure that I'll be able to add as many as I had originally hoped, but I think I'll be able to do most of what I had planned. I think they'll add a lot to the course; even some simple demonstrations should help make some abstract ideas more concrete for students.

There's not too much new coming down the road in Calculus IV: no textbook writing and no labs. We start with multidimensional integration, which is something I've always enjoyed. The class is small -- technically it's a tutorial -- and it's a fun group.

This upcoming week will be especially busy. In addition to all my usual work, our board of trustees meeting is Friday and Saturday. Earlier in the week our president-elect will be on campus, and I'm a part of several meetings with him in addition to all the usual trustee and administrative meetings. So blogging may be light for the next week.