>
> Naive thought for the day. If academics are encouraged to publish by
> their institution, and are paid by their unis for writing journal
> articles, then why don't unis pay them to edit journals too?
Editing a journal -- acquiring and reviewing articles --may count as
scholarship,
but the technical work of copy-editing, laying it out in InDesign,
etc., do not. Those
must be done by paid professionals (or, in some cases, by graduate
students, but even they get a stipend for it, usually.)
>
> And why
> don't the unis pay to print and distribute journals? Then the journals
> would be in the hands of academics, not for profit companies.
Surely you know that there are many university presses,
subsidized by their institutions. Nevertheless, they are required
to pay at least part of their own way by charging for their
products.
Other academic publishers: -- Continuum, Blackwells, Ashgate,
Equinox, Rowman & Littlefield, and many others -- are simply
for-profit enterprises that publish for particular niche markets.
You seem to have a problem with people being paid
to do editorial and publishing work, or you think that universities
have unlimited sources of money. Maybe a few of them
in the Persian Gulf States do ...
As for Wikipedia, I appreciate the procedural clarification,
but I wonder if it won't (a) evolve into something else or
(b) collapse under its own weight one day.
Chas
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