This is probably more of an act of self-therapy on a Friday afternoon to alleviate some frustration, but it is an important issue all the same.
An Open Letter to academic publishers:
Why, oh why, do some of you take so bloody long to publish our papers online after acceptance?
I have been known to complain about how the general academic-publishing industry makes sickening amount of profit on the backs of our essentially free labour, and I suppose this is just another whinge along those lines. Should it take weeks to months to publish our papers online once they are accepted?
No. it shouldn’t.
I’m fully aware that most publishing companies these days outsource the actual publishing side of things to subcontracting agencies (and I’ve noticed more and more that these tend to be in developing nations, probably because the labour is cheaper), and that it can take someone some time to work through the backlog of Word or Latex documents and produce nice, polished PDFs. Read the rest of this entry »
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