[ih] call for cash: digital humanities and web archives

[John Gilmore]

Kees Teszelszky via Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> The International Journal of Digital Humanities is a peer-reviewed academic journal...

It is also a money-making scam.  Kees, why are you volunteering your
time to suck authors into this scam?

You can write your own article and submit it, and it'll be reviewed by
an unpaid group of volunteer peer reviewers, and you can even publish it
under a CC license -- if you pay the Springer corporation thousands of
dollars in "Article Processing Charges" for the privilege.  You won't
find out how many thousands until you do all the work and submit your
article; they don't publish their price list for open access
contributions, probably because it would shock too many people.

If you can't or won't pay, then they will copyright your article by
themselves, and overcharge librarians and the public for it, with the
result that few people will read it.  And if you don't agree to either
option, then they won't publish your article at all.

Here's a paper about this, published by the Springer journal Scientometrics:

  Published: 29 February 2020
  Market power of publishers in setting article processing charges for open access journals
  https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11192-020-03402-y

Unfortunately, you can't read the paper -- it costs $40 to download it.
But they published a nice abstract.

Far better to write something and publish it as an RFC, or on your own
website, or in a real open-access journal that doesn't feed your own
money to a very profitable academic publishing oligopoly.

	John