Where There Is Smoke There Is Fire
How nice it was this week to see our very own David Worlock, honored by ALPSP, receiving the ALPSP Award for Contribution to Scholarly Publishing. He joins an esteemed and elite group of individuals who have made a difference in the field, and he continues to do so each day.
David knows the scholarly communications world well. I have always been inspired by his encyclopedic mind, his passion for our industry, for chronicling change, and for challenging our thinking. It’s a pleasure and privilege to work closely with David since 2006 and before that as industry observer running our respective businesses. It’s with great admiration and respect we share this news this week. David — well done, well-earned, well-deserved. Thank you for inspiring us each day!
And in parallel, news reports on Reuters and Bloomberg about a class-action being taken against major academic and scholarly publishers by a neuroscience professor in California for restrictive practices. Leave it to the crazy Californians.
The argument: they have agreed together not to pay fees to peer reviewers, and by agreeing together that researchers may not make multiple submissions to journals, the publishers and their trade association, STM, have acted against US fair trade and monopolies legislation and diverted millions of dollars of research funding into their own pockets!
It’s fascinating an association is being lumped into this mix.
The odds of this going anywhere are low given the pace with which things like this wind their way through the slow wheels of progress in the court system. The industry promises to look different by the time anything is resolved. But where there is smoke there’s fire and this speaks to the upset people have about a system, they believe to be unfair and broken, more than anything else.
Just last week, we wrote about the non-distribution of profits to authors from licensing deals with big tech; or an inability for opt-outs and the poor optics of all this despite who is in their legal rights and who signed them away.
There is the letter of the law; there is the spirit of the law. And then there is just spirit. HPE sues Mike Lynch’s family for $4 billion under the auspices of having to do what is right for shareholders. Egad — now? Does it have to be right now? Who sits in board rooms and makes this stuff up?
But it happens. And it seems just like with HPE our closer-to-home scholarly comms community has once again created a PR problem for itself. Otherwise, constant crankiness like this lawsuit wouldn’t persist. And it’s been there in some form or fashion for most of the time we’ve been analyzing this industry.
As David wrote to me earlier this week after his experience at ALPSP:
….I see a rising bank of hostility towards commercial players in a world where over 50% of newly published articles are free to end users at source. And while I found lots of people who wanted to talk about OA and lots of people who wanted to talk about research integrity, I found very few people who wanted to talk about the erosion of journal branding, journal consolidation, self-publishing by institutions via contracted publishers or anything else about the survival of the journal business model. As always in the world of change, entrenched players see everything else as changing except the piece of terrain upon which they happen to be standing at the time!
Well said David. Well said.