[Taxacom] Fw: Zootaxa Re: Monbiot editorial on academic publishing

[Michael Heads]

Hi Rod,
 
I wasn't moaning about Zootaxa in particular. Most of my teaching has been in third world universities and every year one main task is to decide which large batch of journals to cut. In these places international science is becoming less and less accessible. If the prices could be justified (we all know the amount of work that goes into a taxonomic paper) it wouldn't be so bad. But the journals per se add very little value to the raw manuscripts - the referees do, but they're not paid. It's interesting to see that even very rich countries such as UK are now starting to complain - again, not just about the price itself, but the whole model. Perhaps the physicists are ahead of biologists with their arXiv project.    

Michael

Wellington, New Zealand.


My papers on biogeography are at: http://tiny.cc/RiUE0

From: Roderic Page <r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk>
To: taxacom at mailman.nhm.ku.edu
Sent: Wednesday, 31 August 2011 7:31 PM
Subject: Re: [Taxacom] Zootaxa Re: Monbiot editorial on academic publishing

I usually don't rush to the defence, but let's keep in mind that Zootaxa:

1. Has transformed taxonomic publishing in zoology

2. Is not a major operation like Elsevier/Wiley/Springer. Adding DOIs (which I'm a huge fan of and have prodded Zhi-Qiang Zhang to consider on several occasions) requires resources (such as depositing article metadata in specific formats) that aren't abundant.

3. Is published in New Zealand, so would the fellow Kiwi's knock off the moaning and instead celebrate another thing that is  "World Class in New Zealand" ;)

Regards

Rod
---------------------------------------------------------
Roderic Page
Professor of Taxonomy
Institute of Biodiversity, Animal Health and Comparative Medicine
College of Medical, Veterinary and Life Sciences
Graham Kerr Building
University of Glasgow
Glasgow G12 8QQ, UK

Email: r.page at bio.gla.ac.uk
Tel: +44 141 330 4778
Fax: +44 141 330 2792
AIM: rodpage1962 at aim.com
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Home page: http://taxonomy.zoology.gla.ac.uk/rod/rod.html

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