<story><title>Elsevier journals – some facts</title><url>http://gowers.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/elsevier-journals-some-facts/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>dougmccune</author><text>Throwing this out there for anyone working on a startup in the academic journal space. I&amp;#x27;m on the board of SAGE Publications, which is (depending on how you count), the 5th or so largest publisher in the space. See this diagram for where SAGE fits: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/vis/images/?src=4e3c02ab/journal_publishers.png&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.oii.ox.ac.uk&amp;#x2F;vis&amp;#x2F;images&amp;#x2F;?src=4e3c02ab&amp;#x2F;journal_pub...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;If you’re doing a startup in this space and want to reach out, please contact me. I live in SF and would happily take you out for coffee or meet up for a beer. My contact details are on my HN profile.&lt;p&gt;SAGE is a 100% family owned business. My grandmother is chairwoman, my dad and I are on the board. I&amp;#x27;m a coder working in an unrelated startup for my day job, living in SF. We’re not dinosaurs trying to bleed the system dry until our business model collapses, but at the same time I wholeheartedly acknowledge the fundamentals of the journals business are antiquated and I believe they will radically change eventually. Academia is incredibly complicated and moves at a glacial pace.&lt;p&gt;So if you’re interested in seeing the world of academic journals from the inside, please get in touch. I can get you in contact with anyone in the SAGE organization at every level.</text></comment>
<story><title>Elsevier journals – some facts</title><url>http://gowers.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/elsevier-journals-some-facts/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>robertwalsh0</author><text>When I tell people how important and how epically flawed the current system of academic journal publishing is I&amp;#x27;m often met with blank stares. Can you imagine any other industry where the people doing most of the work aren&amp;#x27;t compensated financially and conglomerates make most of the profit.&lt;p&gt;You can try to make parallels to the record industry at its worse, but those people at least receive advances.&lt;p&gt;And with journal publishing, it&amp;#x27;s not some random niche. This is where &amp;quot;new knowledge&amp;quot; becomes validated. You&amp;#x27;re not hearing talking heads on television mentioning some new thing mentioned in a first year college textbook – instead you hear &amp;quot;a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Scholars need to and are adopting ways to take scholarly communication into their own hands. A sociology journal called Sociological Science, with an editorial board out of Stanford and Cornell has recently made a buzz by taking the process into their own hands: &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/news/headlines/group-sociologists-launch-new-online-journal&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.gsb.stanford.edu&amp;#x2F;news&amp;#x2F;headlines&amp;#x2F;group-sociologist...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;(Full disclosure: this is a problem my startup works on)</text></comment>