Friday, February 10, 2006

Pay for your scientific credentials!

I thought poetry was the least economically viable form of writing. But hello? It's not true. Now, I don't have that much knowledge of the production process for peer-reviewed science journals. But I do know quite a bit about peer-reviewed humanities production. And thus the publication policy of Avian Conservation and Ecology absolutely creeps me out.

It starts off so well! Manuscript submissions are blind refereed by experts. Peer review! A serious journal! So far so good. But then the hook: successful authors have to pay 750 Canadian dollars for their paper to be published. Online, that is.

Good grief, that's almost four hundred pounds. Does this kind of thing go on all the time? Tell me. And, peer review notwithstanding, how is this not vanity publishing?

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