Paul raised an interesting question. However, my experience with both kinds of journals leads me to believe that the commercial publishers keep hands off the day-to-day issues of the sort he raises. I could imagine an extreme case in which the publisher might step in, but I have never seen it happen. There is invariably an academic editor-in-chief (who, in the case of a commercial journal, gets paid an amount which was once described to me as "substantial", with no details) and I have never heard of an author going beyond that level, although they could try. I would like to take exception to Paul's "NOTHING AT ALL" comment. As far as I can tell, the value added by commercial publishers is actually NEGATIVE, since by owning the copyright they attempt to keep the papers out of general circulation. An Elsevier flack writing to respond to my posting two years ago tried to justify price increases in the face of falling costs by raising the issue of paper costs. Now I buy a sheet of letter-size paper for about 1 cent (and the shriveled Canadian cent at that). I don't know what Elsevier pays, but I would be surprised if they pay half of that. But maybe the common market supports the price of paper, so take that 1 c as given. JPAA costs about $4000 for 2000 pages (that's Canadian $). So it costs $2 per page. Now tell me how a rise in the cost of paper can be a significant cause in the doubling of the subscription price over the decade? The flack made other, equally spurious claims. In the past five years all my papers have been published in TAC, in Cahiers, and I now have one submitted to the electronic HHA (Homology, Homotopy and Applications). Michael On Wed, 30 May 2001, Paul Taylor wrote:
I completely agree with the views about commercial journals in - Mike Barr's article in the "Newsletter on serials pricing issues" (29 May), - Peter Johnstone's resignation letter as an editor of JPAA (15 Jan), - James Meek's article ("Guardian", 26 May) on the cost of journals (28 May). (The dates refer to "categories" postings.)
As Mike Barr pointed out, but James Meek seems not to know, the journals no longer do the work of typesetting papers, so in the Web age the commercial publishers do NOTHING AT ALL.
Without meaning to diminish my agreement that we should stop giving our research and our institutions' money to the commercial publishers, I would like to be "advocatus diaboli" on an issue of management.
My question is this: Is a commercial (or university) publisher, being outside the academic community, better able to deal with complaints against editors than an academic managing editor can be? An academic editor is subject to other pressures, which may be summed up as "not falling out with colleagues", whereas a commercial manager can be more ruthless in enforcing the rules.
I am thinking of complaints of a management rather than intellectual nature, of course. For example, failing to pass papers from authors to referees and the referees' reports back again within a reasonable time.
(This has been a real issue for me, but I have no intention of naming names. I would like to see a discussion of professional standards of editing and refereeing sometime, but not on THIS occasion.)
The kind of answer that I'm looking for would be an (anonymised) account of some incident where a commercial publisher has dealt with a complaint better or worse than an academic managing editor would.
Paul