I imagine publishers can put a lot more pressure on the "long tail" of small univerisities and researchers...
The publishers have little pressure to apply. The only reason for-profit journals still exist is that (a) they have a big existing audience (everyone reads Nature) and (b) they supply a seal of quality. (If you get published in Nature, people know you're a Big League Scientist and you get tenure faster and/or get more grants.)
Point (a) is extremely fragile in the age of the Web. A journal which charges exorbitant subscription fees is one tiny tipping point away from losing its entire audience to a website run from a $9.95 Dreamhost account.
Point (b) will be the last stand. And this move from MIT threatens to undermine it, because MIT manuscripts carry prestige, and any venue where they appear gets prestige by association, and those manuscripts will no longer appear in any exclusively-closed journals.
Meanwhile, technical book publishers have no pressure to apply at all. None of those books make any significant money for their authors. [1] Far from applying pressure, the publishers of scientific books must beg and plead for contributors to commit to writing chapters, and then those chapters routinely run years late, because book writing is the lowest priority on a professor's calendar. From what I've seen, many of them end up being ghostwritten [2] by postdocs in their spare time, and as a rule postdocs don't have a lot of spare time. It's a miracle that we have any decent graduate textbooks at all. A lot of fields don't, in fact.
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[1] Except for freshman-level college texts, which are a weird little monopolistic world of their own. God, I hope MIT's rule applies to those as well. That would be awesome.
[2] Okay, that's an exaggeration. Grad students and postdocs get credit for co-writing books and book chapters. That's the least they deserve for doing the majority of the work. ;)
The publishers have little pressure to apply. The only reason for-profit journals still exist is that (a) they have a big existing audience (everyone reads Nature) and (b) they supply a seal of quality. (If you get published in Nature, people know you're a Big League Scientist and you get tenure faster and/or get more grants.)
Point (a) is extremely fragile in the age of the Web. A journal which charges exorbitant subscription fees is one tiny tipping point away from losing its entire audience to a website run from a $9.95 Dreamhost account.
Point (b) will be the last stand. And this move from MIT threatens to undermine it, because MIT manuscripts carry prestige, and any venue where they appear gets prestige by association, and those manuscripts will no longer appear in any exclusively-closed journals.
Meanwhile, technical book publishers have no pressure to apply at all. None of those books make any significant money for their authors. [1] Far from applying pressure, the publishers of scientific books must beg and plead for contributors to commit to writing chapters, and then those chapters routinely run years late, because book writing is the lowest priority on a professor's calendar. From what I've seen, many of them end up being ghostwritten [2] by postdocs in their spare time, and as a rule postdocs don't have a lot of spare time. It's a miracle that we have any decent graduate textbooks at all. A lot of fields don't, in fact.
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[1] Except for freshman-level college texts, which are a weird little monopolistic world of their own. God, I hope MIT's rule applies to those as well. That would be awesome.
[2] Okay, that's an exaggeration. Grad students and postdocs get credit for co-writing books and book chapters. That's the least they deserve for doing the majority of the work. ;)