Maybe I’ll stop being hypothetical… maybe. Maybe you’ll read this and it does give you ideas about your approach to getting into the industry. Maybe you’ll read it and think, “Duh! Obviously.” Maybe you’ll be ahead of others and actually know pretty much everything I refer to. Maybe none of this will be groundbreaking. I want to give you tips to make sure you can get the skills you need from work placements, gain them if you don’t have such placements and be able to demonstrate them successfully within a CV or covering letter. How do you make sure you get these skills from internships or work experience placements? Importantly, how do you get them if you don’t have any work experience in the industry yet? How do you prove you have them without just saying, “I have them, honest”? It is easy to reel them off without thinking too deeply: eye for detail, communication skills, organisational skills, IT skills, initiative etc etc etc. I’m sure you’ve read plenty of job descriptions and visited career sights telling you exactly what skills you need to possess in order to succeed in the industry. (I really hoped I stopped that from getting too weird, too quickly!) Skills! We’ll talk about skills here, not sex.
Let’s talk about all the good things and the bad things that may be. If you find this content helpful in any way, please consider donating to BTBS. Before leaving the blog, Carl raised money for The Book Trade Charity (BTBS) by running the London Marathon. "Ultimately, the question is whether the services provided to the scientific community by these publishers warrant the growing share of university budgets allocated to them.This post was written by the previous writer and founder of That Publishing Blog, Carl Smith. "Our findings question the real added value of big publishers," said Larivière. Still, hopefully research such as this will help scientists realise that they don’t need publishers to help them distribute their content anymore. And as long as the most important research in each field is stuck behind a paywall, universities will pay for their researchers to access it, creating a cycle that keeps the big publishers in business. The Cost of Knowledge campaign, which calls for a boycott of Elsevier’s journals, has been signed by more than 15,000 researchers.īut unfortunately while young academics still need to publish in high impact journals to get hired, scientists will have to submit their articles to these companies. This isn't the first time the publishing model has been criticised - over the past couple of years, researchers and universities have begun to protest against the monopoly in publishing. However, our study shows that there is no clear increase in terms of citations after switching from a small to large publisher," said Larivière.
Is business a good major for publishing for free#
In fact, publishers don't even pay for quality control - which is done by other scientists for free in the form of peer review - and their overheads are much lower since the arrival of the Internet.Īll of this begs the question: what exactly are we paying these big publishers for? "One would expect that a major publisher acquiring a journal would have the effect of increasing the latter's visibility. What makes things worse is that the publishers have now established an incredibly lucrative business model based on taking advantage of scientists to create content for them for free, and then selling it to back to them once it's published. But the team found that almost 70 percent of journal articles published in chemistry, psychology and social sciences are owned by the big players. Some fields are more independent, in particular the areas of biomedical research, physics, and the arts and humanities. But over the past two decades, that has rapidly increase thanks to a slew of rapid mergers and acquisitions. Publishing their results in the open-access journal PLOS ONE, the team looked at all scientific articles published in the Web of Science database between 19, and found that five companies have published more than half of them since 2006: Reed-Elsevier, Taylor & Francis, Wiley-Blackwell, Springer and Sage.īack in 1973, the same publishing houses controlled just 20 percent of the journals, and 30 percent in 1996. "While it’s true that publishers have historically played a vital role in the dissemination of scientific knowledge in the print era, it is questionable whether they are still necessary in today's digital era."
"These large commercial publishers have huge sales, with profit margins of nearly 40 percent," study leader Vincent Larivière from the University of Montreal in Canada said in a press release. The study also found that, while these companies charge large fees for people to access this research, they don't add much value themselves - suggesting that the current model is no longer in the best interests of scientists or universities.
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