From the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus comes this entertaining parable that sheds some light on the way academic publishing works:
David Wiley: The Parable of the Inventor and the Trucker
…
“The inventor had to sign all the intellectual-property rights to her product over to the truckers.
The truckers would keep all the profits from sales of the inventor’s product.
The shipping deal had to be both exclusive and perpetual, never subject to review or cancellation.
…
Since we faculty already write and review the articles, and we have direct access to the most efficient distribution system in the history of humanity, why are we still handing over billions of dollars of increasingly scarce resources to journal publishers?”
