Academic presses

I recently came across a reference to the work of one Viktor Sarris and to a book of his called 'Relational Psychophysics in Humans and Animals: a Comparative-Developmental Approach', said to contain lots of good stuff about such matters as whether you can train chickens to tell you that, for example, one cube is big for a red cube, while another cube of the same size is small for a green cube.

It was unlikely that I was ever going to read such a book all the way through but it would have been interesting to take a look, so off to the computer to see what I could do. Oddly, despite having a proper reference, I got no further than finding out that the author came from the Goethe University at Frankfurt upon Main. I try again a couple of days later and find the book both at the publisher at £60 for 176 pages and at Amazon at a variety of prices between £60 and £45. No idea what went wrong the first time. Small discount, £3, on the full price for Kindle.

I decide that for the moment that this is a bit strong and remember all about all the moans and groans in the NYRB about prices of books reporting publicly funded research from commercial academic publishers, the likes of Elsevier (see http://store.elsevier.com/). Where does all the money go? Why not just stick the thing out on the web for free, not even hiding it behind a paywall?

A few days later I happened to hear a talk by a chap from, I think, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (see http://new.huji.ac.il/en), all about his experience of writing an article for a printed encyclopedia and comparing that with his rather more extensive experience of writing articles for Wikipedia. It seems that Brill are still very much into specialist encyclopedias of the printed variety and they asked him for an article about the evolution of the use of vowels in Hebrew for the then forthcoming 'Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics'. This was all very flattering and would look well on his CV, so off he went.

But off he went, more or less without support from the boys at Brill. He was more or less on his own, an experience quite unlike that of a Wikipedia editor where there is lots of generally helpful support, both from other editors and from written guidance (in the form of Wikipeda articles, naturally). I think he said that there was some kind of a refereeing process, but it was refereeing with a very light touch. Just enough so that the article would count as a peer reviewed publication, important from the point of view of aforementioned CV. And when he had done, he had to sign away all rights to use his own material except in certain very limited ways. His only reward was a 15% discount on the $1,330 cover price of the finished encyclopedia, a price which meant that no-one other than an academic or specialist library would buy the thing, which meant in turn that his article was inaccessible to anyone without access to such a place. He never got to the bottom of where all the money went.

Turning to Wikipedia, which is free to all by design, he could not have published the article there, as it stood, both because articles have to be verifiable and he could not cite any published work in support and because original research is not allowed. Wikipedia is a tertiary not a secondary, never mind a primary, source. Although he could now, as he could cite the encyclopedia, the only remaining catch being the Brill copyright.

All very tricky. But it remains a bit irritating that work which is in very large part publicly funded should only be available to that public at such unrealistic prices from a profit-taking press.

I wonder whether I will raise enough steam to persuade some library in London to let me take a look?

PS: to be fair to Brill, they look to be taking a leap into the world of open access themselves. See http://www.brill.com/.