Discussion: View Thread

Dear colleagues,

Below pls. see the new development at OBHDP. Hope you like it.  cheers,

Xiao-Ping

open online version

Hi everyone,

I just checked this out, and the fee for making an article open source at OBHDP is $1800. Here's some material from posts I sent to the RMNET listserv (and a few responses) when I discovered that the Sage Choice program (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/sagechoice/faq.sp) also announced an open access policy. At the risk of ranting, I'd like to ask if others are as bothered as I am by the fact that we – the producers and evaluators of our research articles – are being told we need to pay $1500 to Sage or $1800 for OBHDP to make our work open access (or $3000 for Science, Technology, and Medical articles at Sage)? In this electronic day and age, how can such a ridiculously high sum be justified? Are publishers really making that much money from every article we publish?

Here's the justification Sage offers for that high price: "The fee, to be paid by the author(s) prior to publication, will offset publishing costs inherent in article submission and peer review, typesetting, tagging and indexing, hosting on dedicated servers, supporting sales and marketing costs, permanently archiving the final article, and posting to the requisite repositories that will house the article for public view." That seems excessive to me, and I'm curious about other's feelings and opinions. Is it that much to ask that we be allowed to freely make our work public domain, post our own research on our university or personal websites, and be allowed to have our institutions post PDF copies of our work on institutional repositories? I'm somewhat aware of the open access movement (see the beautiful video here on it: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1533), though – like most academics - I probably don't know nearly as much as I should.

It just seems unjust to me because when we review manuscripts for the publishers of our discipline's journals for free, WE – scholars – ARE giving away something for nothing. And that high credibility certain journals have is entirely provided by us (for free). I guess we get the "honor" of doing those reviews (lucky us)... Also, we do typically give away the right to share our work with others in the form of posting our research on our personal or institutional websites, and sometimes even the right to freely distribute our work to our own students (without needing to wonder if we're violating copyright agreements that often only lawyers can truly understand).

I asked the RMNET to imagine this thought experiment: The entire editorial board of Journal X decides to quit and start a new open-source journal. Any expenses of that new journal could be funded by a university. Overnight, the new journal would BE, for all practical purposes, the exact same journal (with a new name) – at least in terms of what we should primarily care about, which is the quality of the research. Would it be that expensive to get such a new journal listed so that it appears on Google Scholar? Where are all these valuable marketing costs that supposedly exist? Seth Spain pointed out that this thought experiment actually happened in mathematics. The board of the journal Topology resigned and founded the Journal of Topology:

http://www.ams.org/notices/200705/comm-toped-web.pdf

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Topology

I also commented that if ASQ publishes about 20 articles a year, then at $1500 per article, we're talking about $30,000 per year to make that an open-source journal. Couldn't Cornell just absorb that expense for having the honor of housing ASQ? Other journals would cost more (since they have more articles), but I think we as Academy of Management members should demand this, at least for the AOM journals, or demand for a much more transparent explanation for what value we're getting by signing away our rights.

One more point: Rohny Saylors made the great point about how "it seems PeerJ can do for $100 for what Sage charges $1500 for" (and OBHDP wants $1800 for) and he then asked "what's Sage offering for its 1400% surcharge?" Actually, Sage can do it for $99 too via SAGE Open. That RMNET thread (and an offshoot) was quite interesting, and I hope this post kicks off a similar one on the OB listserv. Personally, I look forward to collectively enacting change so that we better protect and retain our intellectual property rights in the near future.

Finally, I'd like to ask a follow up question: Has anyone attempted to negotiate provisions allowing the authors to post articles to their websites or institutional repositories? I've seen certain authors who do have their articles in PDF format, but I always wonder about the legality of that, and whether they got special permission. I'd love to hear experiences from within the Management discipline and with our top (so-called A or A-) journals.

Best,

Marc

Marc H. Anderson

Associate Professor

Department of Management

College of Business

Iowa State University

2350 Gerdin Business Building

Ames, IA 50011-1350

Ph: 515-520-2217

Fax: 515-294-7112

email: mha@iastate.edu

Dear colleagues,

Below pls. see the new development at OBHDP. Hope you like it.  cheers,

Xiao-Ping

open online version

One of the benefits of publishing in journals like OBHDP is exposure. Nobody can read every article published everywhere. But many of us believe that OBHDP tends to publish high quality research, so we tend to monitor articles in that journal. Your research has a better chance of being influential if it is widely read, and it is more likely to be widely read if it is in a journal like OBHDP than if it is in an open source outlet that does not have the same draw for readership.

Any time I'm fortunate enough to have an article accepted in OBHDP, I'll simply choose to not pay to have it open access. I think the vast majority of those who would read my research have access to OBHDP anyway through university libraries. But it is nice to know that OBHDP provides the option for open access, and I'm glad other people have the opportunity to take that option if they want.

Chris Barnes

Hi everyone,

I just checked this out, and the fee for making an article open source at OBHDP is $1800. Here's some material from posts I sent to the RMNET listserv (and a few responses) when I discovered that the Sage Choice program (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/sagechoice/faq.sp) also announced an open access policy. At the risk of ranting, I'd like to ask if others are as bothered as I am by the fact that we – the producers and evaluators of our research articles – are being told we need to pay $1500 to Sage or $1800 for OBHDP to make our work open access (or $3000 for Science, Technology, and Medical articles at Sage)? In this electronic day and age, how can such a ridiculously high sum be justified? Are publishers really making that much money from every article we publish?

Here's the justification Sage offers for that high price: "The fee, to be paid by the author(s) prior to publication, will offset publishing costs inherent in article submission and peer review, typesetting, tagging and indexing, hosting on dedicated servers, supporting sales and marketing costs, permanently archiving the final article, and posting to the requisite repositories that will house the article for public view." That seems excessive to me, and I'm curious about other's feelings and opinions. Is it that much to ask that we be allowed to freely make our work public domain, post our own research on our university or personal websites, and be allowed to have our institutions post PDF copies of our work on institutional repositories? I'm somewhat aware of the open access movement (see the beautiful video here on it: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1533), though – like most academics - I probably don't know nearly as much as I should.

It just seems unjust to me because when we review manuscripts for the publishers of our discipline's journals for free, WE – scholars – ARE giving away something for nothing. And that high credibility certain journals have is entirely provided by us (for free). I guess we get the "honor" of doing those reviews (lucky us)... Also, we do typically give away the right to share our work with others in the form of posting our research on our personal or institutional websites, and sometimes even the right to freely distribute our work to our own students (without needing to wonder if we're violating copyright agreements that often only lawyers can truly understand).

I asked the RMNET to imagine this thought experiment: The entire editorial board of Journal X decides to quit and start a new open-source journal. Any expenses of that new journal could be funded by a university. Overnight, the new journal would BE, for all practical purposes, the exact same journal (with a new name) – at least in terms of what we should primarily care about, which is the quality of the research. Would it be that expensive to get such a new journal listed so that it appears on Google Scholar? Where are all these valuable marketing costs that supposedly exist? Seth Spain pointed out that this thought experiment actually happened in mathematics. The board of the journal Topology resigned and founded the Journal of Topology:

http://www.ams.org/notices/200705/comm-toped-web.pdf

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Topology

I also commented that if ASQ publishes about 20 articles a year, then at $1500 per article, we're talking about $30,000 per year to make that an open-source journal. Couldn't Cornell just absorb that expense for having the honor of housing ASQ? Other journals would cost more (since they have more articles), but I think we as Academy of Management members should demand this, at least for the AOM journals, or demand for a much more transparent explanation for what value we're getting by signing away our rights.

One more point: Rohny Saylors made the great point about how "it seems PeerJ can do for $100 for what Sage charges $1500 for" (and OBHDP wants $1800 for) and he then asked "what's Sage offering for its 1400% surcharge?" Actually, Sage can do it for $99 too via SAGE Open. That RMNET thread (and an offshoot) was quite interesting, and I hope this post kicks off a similar one on the OB listserv. Personally, I look forward to collectively enacting change so that we better protect and retain our intellectual property rights in the near future.

Finally, I'd like to ask a follow up question: Has anyone attempted to negotiate provisions allowing the authors to post articles to their websites or institutional repositories? I've seen certain authors who do have their articles in PDF format, but I always wonder about the legality of that, and whether they got special permission. I'd love to hear experiences from within the Management discipline and with our top (so-called A or A-) journals.

Best,

Marc

Marc H. Anderson

Associate Professor

Department of Management

College of Business

Iowa State University

2350 Gerdin Business Building

Ames, IA 50011-1350

Ph: 515-520-2217

Fax: 515-294-7112

email: mha@iastate.edu

Dear colleagues,

Below pls. see the new development at OBHDP. Hope you like it.  cheers,

Xiao-Ping

open online version

Chris, thank you for your email; very well said; I cannot agree more.

It is just one more option for people who like to use Open Access.  Cheers,

xiaoping

One of the benefits of publishing in journals like OBHDP is exposure. Nobody can read every article published everywhere. But many of us believe that OBHDP tends to publish high quality research, so we tend to monitor articles in that journal. Your research has a better chance of being influential if it is widely read, and it is more likely to be widely read if it is in a journal like OBHDP than if it is in an open source outlet that does not have the same draw for readership.

Any time I'm fortunate enough to have an article accepted in OBHDP, I'll simply choose to not pay to have it open access. I think the vast majority of those who would read my research have access to OBHDP anyway through university libraries. But it is nice to know that OBHDP provides the option for open access, and I'm glad other people have the opportunity to take that option if they want.

Chris Barnes

Hi everyone,

I just checked this out, and the fee for making an article open source at OBHDP is $1800. Here's some material from posts I sent to the RMNET listserv (and a few responses) when I discovered that the Sage Choice program (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/sagechoice/faq.sp) also announced an open access policy. At the risk of ranting, I'd like to ask if others are as bothered as I am by the fact that we – the producers and evaluators of our research articles – are being told we need to pay $1500 to Sage or $1800 for OBHDP to make our work open access (or $3000 for Science, Technology, and Medical articles at Sage)? In this electronic day and age, how can such a ridiculously high sum be justified? Are publishers really making that much money from every article we publish?

Here's the justification Sage offers for that high price: "The fee, to be paid by the author(s) prior to publication, will offset publishing costs inherent in article submission and peer review, typesetting, tagging and indexing, hosting on dedicated servers, supporting sales and marketing costs, permanently archiving the final article, and posting to the requisite repositories that will house the article for public view." That seems excessive to me, and I'm curious about other's feelings and opinions. Is it that much to ask that we be allowed to freely make our work public domain, post our own research on our university or personal websites, and be allowed to have our institutions post PDF copies of our work on institutional repositories? I'm somewhat aware of the open access movement (see the beautiful video here on it: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1533), though – like most academics - I probably don't know nearly as much as I should.

It just seems unjust to me because when we review manuscripts for the publishers of our discipline's journals for free, WE – scholars – ARE giving away something for nothing. And that high credibility certain journals have is entirely provided by us (for free). I guess we get the "honor" of doing those reviews (lucky us)... Also, we do typically give away the right to share our work with others in the form of posting our research on our personal or institutional websites, and sometimes even the right to freely distribute our work to our own students (without needing to wonder if we're violating copyright agreements that often only lawyers can truly understand).

I asked the RMNET to imagine this thought experiment: The entire editorial board of Journal X decides to quit and start a new open-source journal. Any expenses of that new journal could be funded by a university. Overnight, the new journal would BE, for all practical purposes, the exact same journal (with a new name) – at least in terms of what we should primarily care about, which is the quality of the research. Would it be that expensive to get such a new journal listed so that it appears on Google Scholar? Where are all these valuable marketing costs that supposedly exist? Seth Spain pointed out that this thought experiment actually happened in mathematics. The board of the journal Topology resigned and founded the Journal of Topology:

http://www.ams.org/notices/200705/comm-toped-web.pdf

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Topology

I also commented that if ASQ publishes about 20 articles a year, then at $1500 per article, we're talking about $30,000 per year to make that an open-source journal. Couldn't Cornell just absorb that expense for having the honor of housing ASQ? Other journals would cost more (since they have more articles), but I think we as Academy of Management members should demand this, at least for the AOM journals, or demand for a much more transparent explanation for what value we're getting by signing away our rights.

One more point: Rohny Saylors made the great point about how "it seems PeerJ can do for $100 for what Sage charges $1500 for" (and OBHDP wants $1800 for) and he then asked "what's Sage offering for its 1400% surcharge?" Actually, Sage can do it for $99 too via SAGE Open. That RMNET thread (and an offshoot) was quite interesting, and I hope this post kicks off a similar one on the OB listserv. Personally, I look forward to collectively enacting change so that we better protect and retain our intellectual property rights in the near future.

Finally, I'd like to ask a follow up question: Has anyone attempted to negotiate provisions allowing the authors to post articles to their websites or institutional repositories? I've seen certain authors who do have their articles in PDF format, but I always wonder about the legality of that, and whether they got special permission. I'd love to hear experiences from within the Management discipline and with our top (so-called A or A-) journals.

Best,

Marc

Marc H. Anderson

Associate Professor

Department of Management

College of Business

Iowa State University

2350 Gerdin Business Building

Ames, IA 50011-1350

Ph: 515-520-2217

Fax: 515-294-7112

email: mha@iastate.edu

Dear colleagues,

Below pls. see the new development at OBHDP. Hope you like it.  cheers,

Xiao-Ping

open online version

Dear all

I am not sure why some of our colleagues so set on attaching our publishing companies.  These companies have been our partners for many, many years, and have traditionally done a fantastic job of making sure our research is published in an orderly fashion.  They are for-profit commercial enterprises, however, and therefore try to stay in business and aim to make profits for owners and shareholders.  Nothing new here.  It's what for-profit companies do.  These companies also exist in a very competitive environment where other companies will attempt to undercut their prices in order to gain market share.  We are already seeing this, with the cost of open access coming down from over $3000 to the amounts quoted in Marc's letter.  If you want your work to be freely available, clearly someone has to pay for this access.  It has traditionally been our libraries that have paid for this service, but there is now an option for us to pay the costs up front.  I don't see there's much of a big deal here.  What I do know is that, if we tried to do it ourselves at an equivalent level of quality (including marketing and hard copy production), it would cost a whole lot more!

Cheers

Neal Ashkanasy

Hi everyone,

I just checked this out, and the fee for making an article open source at OBHDP is $1800. Here's some material from posts I sent to the RMNET listserv (and a few responses) when I discovered that the Sage Choice program (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/sagechoice/faq.sp) also announced an open access policy. At the risk of ranting, I'd like to ask if others are as bothered as I am by the fact that we – the producers and evaluators of our research articles – are being told we need to pay $1500 to Sage or $1800 for OBHDP to make our work open access (or $3000 for Science, Technology, and Medical articles at Sage)? In this electronic day and age, how can such a ridiculously high sum be justified? Are publishers really making that much money from every article we publish?

Here's the justification Sage offers for that high price: "The fee, to be paid by the author(s) prior to publication, will offset publishing costs inherent in article submission and peer review, typesetting, tagging and indexing, hosting on dedicated servers, supporting sales and marketing costs, permanently archiving the final article, and posting to the requisite repositories that will house the article for public view." That seems excessive to me, and I'm curious about other's feelings and opinions. Is it that much to ask that we be allowed to freely make our work public domain, post our own research on our university or personal websites, and be allowed to have our institutions post PDF copies of our work on institutional repositories? I'm somewhat aware of the open access movement (see the beautiful video here on it: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1533), though – like most academics - I probably don't know nearly as much as I should.

It just seems unjust to me because when we review manuscripts for the publishers of our discipline's journals for free, WE – scholars – ARE giving away something for nothing. And that high credibility certain journals have is entirely provided by us (for free). I guess we get the "honor" of doing those reviews (lucky us)... Also, we do typically give away the right to share our work with others in the form of posting our research on our personal or institutional websites, and sometimes even the right to freely distribute our work to our own students (without needing to wonder if we're violating copyright agreements that often only lawyers can truly understand).

I asked the RMNET to imagine this thought experiment: The entire editorial board of Journal X decides to quit and start a new open-source journal. Any expenses of that new journal could be funded by a university. Overnight, the new journal would BE, for all practical purposes, the exact same journal (with a new name) – at least in terms of what we should primarily care about, which is the quality of the research. Would it be that expensive to get such a new journal listed so that it appears on Google Scholar? Where are all these valuable marketing costs that supposedly exist? Seth Spain pointed out that this thought experiment actually happened in mathematics. The board of the journal Topology resigned and founded the Journal of Topology:

http://www.ams.org/notices/200705/comm-toped-web.pdf

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Topology

I also commented that if ASQ publishes about 20 articles a year, then at $1500 per article, we're talking about $30,000 per year to make that an open-source journal. Couldn't Cornell just absorb that expense for having the honor of housing ASQ? Other journals would cost more (since they have more articles), but I think we as Academy of Management members should demand this, at least for the AOM journals, or demand for a much more transparent explanation for what value we're getting by signing away our rights.

One more point: Rohny Saylors made the great point about how "it seems PeerJ can do for $100 for what Sage charges $1500 for" (and OBHDP wants $1800 for) and he then asked "what's Sage offering for its 1400% surcharge?" Actually, Sage can do it for $99 too via SAGE Open. That RMNET thread (and an offshoot) was quite interesting, and I hope this post kicks off a similar one on the OB listserv. Personally, I look forward to collectively enacting change so that we better protect and retain our intellectual property rights in the near future.

Finally, I'd like to ask a follow up question: Has anyone attempted to negotiate provisions allowing the authors to post articles to their websites or institutional repositories? I've seen certain authors who do have their articles in PDF format, but I always wonder about the legality of that, and whether they got special permission. I'd love to hear experiences from within the Management discipline and with our top (so-called A or A-) journals.

Best,

Marc

Marc H. Anderson

Associate Professor

Department of Management

College of Business

Iowa State University

2350 Gerdin Business Building

Ames, IA 50011-1350

Ph: 515-520-2217

Fax: 515-294-7112

email: mha@iastate.edu

Dear colleagues,

Below pls. see the new development at OBHDP. Hope you like it.  cheers,

Xiao-Ping

open online version

HI Neal

I don't think this is so much about attacking publishing companies or making a rational economic calculation about who can provide a service more cheaply.

I do think this is about asking fundamental questions about the purposes of publishing research:  What is it for?  Who is it for?  From an evidence-based practice perspective there is an important ethical issue in that the individuals and organizations who might benefit from reading and using research findings cannot get access to them (unless they are prepared to pay per article or are attached to a University in some way).  In medical research the ethical issues are clearer but if we believe management research has any practical value then the same or similar ethical problems arise.

A related ethical issue (or perhaps paradox) arises when you consider who pays for the research in the first place.  It's usually students (through fees) and taxpayers (through Government subsidies and grants to universities) and charities.  There's something questionable about taking the outputs of research that have already been paid for by students, taxpayers and charities and then charging people for them again by locking them up behind a pay wall.

So I don't think this I about attacking publishing companies as such but about considering these basic issues and asking who gains and who loses from the current way of doing things.

Cheers

Rob

Dear all

I am not sure why some of our colleagues so set on attaching our publishing companies.  These companies have been our partners for many, many years, and have traditionally done a fantastic job of making sure our research is published in an orderly fashion.  They are for-profit commercial enterprises, however, and therefore try to stay in business and aim to make profits for owners and shareholders.  Nothing new here.  It's what for-profit companies do.  These companies also exist in a very competitive environment where other companies will attempt to undercut their prices in order to gain market share.  We are already seeing this, with the cost of open access coming down from over $3000 to the amounts quoted in Marc's letter.  If you want your work to be freely available, clearly someone has to pay for this access.  It has traditionally been our libraries that have paid for this service, but there is now an option for us to pay the costs up front.  I don't see there's much of a big deal here.  What I do know is that, if we tried to do it ourselves at an equivalent level of quality (including marketing and hard copy production), it would cost a whole lot more!

Cheers

Neal Ashkanasy

Hi everyone,

I just checked this out, and the fee for making an article open source at OBHDP is $1800. Here's some material from posts I sent to the RMNET listserv (and a few responses) when I discovered that the Sage Choice program (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/sagechoice/faq.sp) also announced an open access policy. At the risk of ranting, I'd like to ask if others are as bothered as I am by the fact that we – the producers and evaluators of our research articles – are being told we need to pay $1500 to Sage or $1800 for OBHDP to make our work open access (or $3000 for Science, Technology, and Medical articles at Sage)? In this electronic day and age, how can such a ridiculously high sum be justified? Are publishers really making that much money from every article we publish?

Here's the justification Sage offers for that high price: "The fee, to be paid by the author(s) prior to publication, will offset publishing costs inherent in article submission and peer review, typesetting, tagging and indexing, hosting on dedicated servers, supporting sales and marketing costs, permanently archiving the final article, and posting to the requisite repositories that will house the article for public view." That seems excessive to me, and I'm curious about other's feelings and opinions. Is it that much to ask that we be allowed to freely make our work public domain, post our own research on our university or personal websites, and be allowed to have our institutions post PDF copies of our work on institutional repositories? I'm somewhat aware of the open access movement (see the beautiful video here on it: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1533), though – like most academics - I probably don't know nearly as much as I should.

It just seems unjust to me because when we review manuscripts for the publishers of our discipline's journals for free, WE – scholars – ARE giving away something for nothing. And that high credibility certain journals have is entirely provided by us (for free). I guess we get the "honor" of doing those reviews (lucky us)... Also, we do typically give away the right to share our work with others in the form of posting our research on our personal or institutional websites, and sometimes even the right to freely distribute our work to our own students (without needing to wonder if we're violating copyright agreements that often only lawyers can truly understand).

I asked the RMNET to imagine this thought experiment: The entire editorial board of Journal X decides to quit and start a new open-source journal. Any expenses of that new journal could be funded by a university. Overnight, the new journal would BE, for all practical purposes, the exact same journal (with a new name) – at least in terms of what we should primarily care about, which is the quality of the research. Would it be that expensive to get such a new journal listed so that it appears on Google Scholar? Where are all these valuable marketing costs that supposedly exist? Seth Spain pointed out that this thought experiment actually happened in mathematics. The board of the journal Topology resigned and founded the Journal of Topology:

http://www.ams.org/notices/200705/comm-toped-web.pdf

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Topology

I also commented that if ASQ publishes about 20 articles a year, then at $1500 per article, we're talking about $30,000 per year to make that an open-source journal. Couldn't Cornell just absorb that expense for having the honor of housing ASQ? Other journals would cost more (since they have more articles), but I think we as Academy of Management members should demand this, at least for the AOM journals, or demand for a much more transparent explanation for what value we're getting by signing away our rights.

One more point: Rohny Saylors made the great point about how "it seems PeerJ can do for $100 for what Sage charges $1500 for" (and OBHDP wants $1800 for) and he then asked "what's Sage offering for its 1400% surcharge?" Actually, Sage can do it for $99 too via SAGE Open. That RMNET thread (and an offshoot) was quite interesting, and I hope this post kicks off a similar one on the OB listserv. Personally, I look forward to collectively enacting change so that we better protect and retain our intellectual property rights in the near future.

Finally, I'd like to ask a follow up question: Has anyone attempted to negotiate provisions allowing the authors to post articles to their websites or institutional repositories? I've seen certain authors who do have their articles in PDF format, but I always wonder about the legality of that, and whether they got special permission. I'd love to hear experiences from within the Management discipline and with our top (so-called A or A-) journals.

Best,

Marc

Marc H. Anderson

Associate Professor

Department of Management

College of Business

Iowa State University

2350 Gerdin Business Building

Ames, IA 50011-1350

Ph: 515-520-2217

Fax: 515-294-7112

email: mha@iastate.edu

Dear colleagues,

Below pls. see the new development at OBHDP. Hope you like it.  cheers,

Xiao-Ping

open online version

Neil,

Please don't take our criticisms as necessarily attacking publishing companies. As you have mentioned, they have been our partners for many, many years and have simplified, organized, structured and to an extent legitimized our research. I don't think anyone on this list is suggesting we do away with journals and just self-publish.  

There are certainly costs associated with publishing journals, but that doesn't justify the massive price hikes that journals have made since the early 1980s. As the video cited in Marc's post notes, journal subscription prices have outpaced inflation by over 250% over the past 30 years (c.f., : http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1533, source: Association of Research Libraries).

And I also recognize that they are for-profit ventures, but they are not for-profit ventures in the traditional sense. Much of their labor is provided gratis – or generously put in a barter system. We research and review for these journals not for pay (though I am aware of some journals in marketing that have begun paying a stipend to their reviewers), but for lines on our CV (and the intrinsic benefit of the work). I don't think that our critical discussion of the pricing policies of journals (many of which are priced out of the range not only in smaller, less wealthy countries, but of smaller, less wealthy schools in the US) should be construed as an attack, but rather a candid, critical conversation about the nature of the relationship between scholars, journals and the purpose of academic research. I know the frustration of seeking an article and needing to wait for an inter-library loan because that journal or database is not available, or only available for a certain, shorter time period due to subscription costs.  

Many journals (and I just quoted the policies from OBHDP because that was the focal journal that spurred this conversation) do not allow researchers to post their OWN work on the researchers personal or university/college web page, instead we should post our references and a link to the journal cite. I understand that – there's a transfer of copyright, etc. But what do we get in return? I don't think asking for compensation or posting rights of our own work is akin to a Marxian revolution.

For an institution to subscribe JOB (Print and online) costs $3123 USD – and that's one journal. And I recognize that through the various publishing groups and databases there are ways to reduce these costs, but for smaller universities, access to JUST the "top" journals in the various fields is beyond their fiscal capabilities. Sure, as an individual I can subscribe to JOB for $398 – but how many journals (or society memberships) would I need to adequately conduct research?

And how, as a scholar, should I access the key articles? For some journals (like JOB) I can directly contact the author for a copy (but not find it on that author's website) and for others, if that author were to send me his or her work, they would be violating the copyright transfer agreement they signed.

The system for publishing scholarship is clearly in flux. There are challenges to find workable solutions. I believe that Marc and Neil (and others who I have not yet read) make salient points. And that is part of what a LISTSERV and an academic community is about: Discussion. Let's continue to find ways to make journals our trusted partners and make research accessible – not only to the wealthy schools, but to others whose contributions to our fields will advance ALL of our work. Academic research is already a pretty closed system – let's find ways around barriers, firewalls and other symbolic impediments to dissemination of ideas. And let's do it without burning any bridges too!

My 0.02,

Steve

********************

Dr. Steven A. Edelson, Ph. D.

Assistant Professor

The DeVille School of Business

Walsh University

(330) 490-7218

Dear all

I am not sure why some of our colleagues so set on attaching our publishing companies.  These companies have been our partners for many, many years, and have traditionally done a fantastic job of making sure our research is published in an orderly fashion.  They are for-profit commercial enterprises, however, and therefore try to stay in business and aim to make profits for owners and shareholders.  Nothing new here.  It's what for-profit companies do.  These companies also exist in a very competitive environment where other companies will attempt to undercut their prices in order to gain market share.  We are already seeing this, with the cost of open access coming down from over $3000 to the amounts quoted in Marc's letter.  If you want your work to be freely available, clearly someone has to pay for this access.  It has traditionally been our libraries that have paid for this service, but there is now an option for us to pay the costs up front.  I don't see there's much of a big deal here.  What I do know is that, if we tried to do it ourselves at an equivalent level of quality (including marketing and hard copy production), it would cost a whole lot more!

Cheers

Neal Ashkanasy

Hi everyone,

I just checked this out, and the fee for making an article open source at OBHDP is $1800. Here's some material from posts I sent to the RMNET listserv (and a few responses) when I discovered that the Sage Choice program (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/sagechoice/faq.sp) also announced an open access policy. At the risk of ranting, I'd like to ask if others are as bothered as I am by the fact that we – the producers and evaluators of our research articles – are being told we need to pay $1500 to Sage or $1800 for OBHDP to make our work open access (or $3000 for Science, Technology, and Medical articles at Sage)? In this electronic day and age, how can such a ridiculously high sum be justified? Are publishers really making that much money from every article we publish?

Here's the justification Sage offers for that high price: "The fee, to be paid by the author(s) prior to publication, will offset publishing costs inherent in article submission and peer review, typesetting, tagging and indexing, hosting on dedicated servers, supporting sales and marketing costs, permanently archiving the final article, and posting to the requisite repositories that will house the article for public view." That seems excessive to me, and I'm curious about other's feelings and opinions. Is it that much to ask that we be allowed to freely make our work public domain, post our own research on our university or personal websites, and be allowed to have our institutions post PDF copies of our work on institutional repositories? I'm somewhat aware of the open access movement (see the beautiful video here on it: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1533), though – like most academics - I probably don't know nearly as much as I should.

It just seems unjust to me because when we review manuscripts for the publishers of our discipline's journals for free, WE – scholars – ARE giving away something for nothing. And that high credibility certain journals have is entirely provided by us (for free). I guess we get the "honor" of doing those reviews (lucky us)... Also, we do typically give away the right to share our work with others in the form of posting our research on our personal or institutional websites, and sometimes even the right to freely distribute our work to our own students (without needing to wonder if we're violating copyright agreements that often only lawyers can truly understand).

I asked the RMNET to imagine this thought experiment: The entire editorial board of Journal X decides to quit and start a new open-source journal. Any expenses of that new journal could be funded by a university. Overnight, the new journal would BE, for all practical purposes, the exact same journal (with a new name) – at least in terms of what we should primarily care about, which is the quality of the research. Would it be that expensive to get such a new journal listed so that it appears on Google Scholar? Where are all these valuable marketing costs that supposedly exist? Seth Spain pointed out that this thought experiment actually happened in mathematics. The board of the journal Topology resigned and founded the Journal of Topology:

http://www.ams.org/notices/200705/comm-toped-web.pdf

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Topology

I also commented that if ASQ publishes about 20 articles a year, then at $1500 per article, we're talking about $30,000 per year to make that an open-source journal. Couldn't Cornell just absorb that expense for having the honor of housing ASQ? Other journals would cost more (since they have more articles), but I think we as Academy of Management members should demand this, at least for the AOM journals, or demand for a much more transparent explanation for what value we're getting by signing away our rights.

One more point: Rohny Saylors made the great point about how "it seems PeerJ can do for $100 for what Sage charges $1500 for" (and OBHDP wants $1800 for) and he then asked "what's Sage offering for its 1400% surcharge?" Actually, Sage can do it for $99 too via SAGE Open. That RMNET thread (and an offshoot) was quite interesting, and I hope this post kicks off a similar one on the OB listserv. Personally, I look forward to collectively enacting change so that we better protect and retain our intellectual property rights in the near future.

Finally, I'd like to ask a follow up question: Has anyone attempted to negotiate provisions allowing the authors to post articles to their websites or institutional repositories? I've seen certain authors who do have their articles in PDF format, but I always wonder about the legality of that, and whether they got special permission. I'd love to hear experiences from within the Management discipline and with our top (so-called A or A-) journals.

Best,

Marc

Marc H. Anderson

Associate Professor

Department of Management

College of Business

Iowa State University

2350 Gerdin Business Building

Ames, IA 50011-1350

Ph: 515-520-2217

Fax: 515-294-7112

email: mha@iastate.edu

Dear colleagues,

Below pls. see the new development at OBHDP. Hope you like it.  cheers,

Xiao-Ping

open online version

Colleagues,

This is a great conversation and I hope it leads to changes of significance in how we do business! Rob asked great questions: What is research for? Who is it for? But the answers I would probably give may not be as popular. Research is basically for faculty to get tenured! For the great majority of faculty members, once tenured the urge to do research and get published diminishes. I would ask how many people on the average read the published research? (I mean beyond the two or three reviewers)! What is its impact on practice? The answers to these question may not be too impressive! Rob also talks about the high cost of research in students fees and taxpayers money. I don't think we would want to perform a cost-benefit analysis on this! We are all great thinkers in business, then we should try something else instead on hanging on to a system that may become obsolete long ago!

I believe that a more valuable intellectual activity for business faculty would probably be not to get published, but to get "used"! I believe it is time for us to do something of value for our fields. And nothing I see as more valuable than working with business. The best contributions we can make is to use our intellect to resolve business problems and challenges on real time and with real applications. I believe that business schools should put more effort on faculty consulting or interventions in business. Faculty members should then should be evaluated by their intellectual contributions in the solution of real organizational problems! This way the business community can make a productive "use" of the intellectual abilities of the business faculty! In fact business organizations themselves might even help with cost of these efforts, and the universities can save research money for some other activity!

Thanks,

Ivan  

HI Neal

I don't think this is so much about attacking publishing companies or making a rational economic calculation about who can provide a service more cheaply.

I do think this is about asking fundamental questions about the purposes of publishing research:  What is it for?  Who is it for?  From an evidence-based practice perspective there is an important ethical issue in that the individuals and organizations who might benefit from reading and using research findings cannot get access to them (unless they are prepared to pay per article or are attached to a University in some way).  In medical research the ethical issues are clearer but if we believe management research has any practical value then the same or similar ethical problems arise.

A related ethical issue (or perhaps paradox) arises when you consider who pays for the research in the first place.  It's usually students (through fees) and taxpayers (through Government subsidies and grants to universities) and charities.  There's something questionable about taking the outputs of research that have already been paid for by students, taxpayers and charities and then charging people for them again by locking them up behind a pay wall.

So I don't think this I about attacking publishing companies as such but about considering these basic issues and asking who gains and who loses from the current way of doing things.

Cheers

Rob

Dear all

I am not sure why some of our colleagues so set on attaching our publishing companies.  These companies have been our partners for many, many years, and have traditionally done a fantastic job of making sure our research is published in an orderly fashion.  They are for-profit commercial enterprises, however, and therefore try to stay in business and aim to make profits for owners and shareholders.  Nothing new here.  It's what for-profit companies do.  These companies also exist in a very competitive environment where other companies will attempt to undercut their prices in order to gain market share.  We are already seeing this, with the cost of open access coming down from over $3000 to the amounts quoted in Marc's letter.  If you want your work to be freely available, clearly someone has to pay for this access.  It has traditionally been our libraries that have paid for this service, but there is now an option for us to pay the costs up front.  I don't see there's much of a big deal here.  What I do know is that, if we tried to do it ourselves at an equivalent level of quality (including marketing and hard copy production), it would cost a whole lot more!

Cheers

Neal Ashkanasy

Hi everyone,

I just checked this out, and the fee for making an article open source at OBHDP is $1800. Here's some material from posts I sent to the RMNET listserv (and a few responses) when I discovered that the Sage Choice program (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/sagechoice/faq.sp) also announced an open access policy. At the risk of ranting, I'd like to ask if others are as bothered as I am by the fact that we – the producers and evaluators of our research articles – are being told we need to pay $1500 to Sage or $1800 for OBHDP to make our work open access (or $3000 for Science, Technology, and Medical articles at Sage)? In this electronic day and age, how can such a ridiculously high sum be justified? Are publishers really making that much money from every article we publish?

Here's the justification Sage offers for that high price: "The fee, to be paid by the author(s) prior to publication, will offset publishing costs inherent in article submission and peer review, typesetting, tagging and indexing, hosting on dedicated servers, supporting sales and marketing costs, permanently archiving the final article, and posting to the requisite repositories that will house the article for public view." That seems excessive to me, and I'm curious about other's feelings and opinions. Is it that much to ask that we be allowed to freely make our work public domain, post our own research on our university or personal websites, and be allowed to have our institutions post PDF copies of our work on institutional repositories? I'm somewhat aware of the open access movement (see the beautiful video here on it: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1533), though – like most academics - I probably don't know nearly as much as I should.

It just seems unjust to me because when we review manuscripts for the publishers of our discipline's journals for free, WE – scholars – ARE giving away something for nothing. And that high credibility certain journals have is entirely provided by us (for free). I guess we get the "honor" of doing those reviews (lucky us)... Also, we do typically give away the right to share our work with others in the form of posting our research on our personal or institutional websites, and sometimes even the right to freely distribute our work to our own students (without needing to wonder if we're violating copyright agreements that often only lawyers can truly understand).

I asked the RMNET to imagine this thought experiment: The entire editorial board of Journal X decides to quit and start a new open-source journal. Any expenses of that new journal could be funded by a university. Overnight, the new journal would BE, for all practical purposes, the exact same journal (with a new name) – at least in terms of what we should primarily care about, which is the quality of the research. Would it be that expensive to get such a new journal listed so that it appears on Google Scholar? Where are all these valuable marketing costs that supposedly exist? Seth Spain pointed out that this thought experiment actually happened in mathematics. The board of the journal Topology resigned and founded the Journal of Topology:

http://www.ams.org/notices/200705/comm-toped-web.pdf

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Topology

I also commented that if ASQ publishes about 20 articles a year, then at $1500 per article, we're talking about $30,000 per year to make that an open-source journal. Couldn't Cornell just absorb that expense for having the honor of housing ASQ? Other journals would cost more (since they have more articles), but I think we as Academy of Management members should demand this, at least for the AOM journals, or demand for a much more transparent explanation for what value we're getting by signing away our rights.

One more point: Rohny Saylors made the great point about how "it seems PeerJ can do for $100 for what Sage charges $1500 for" (and OBHDP wants $1800 for) and he then asked "what's Sage offering for its 1400% surcharge?" Actually, Sage can do it for $99 too via SAGE Open. That RMNET thread (and an offshoot) was quite interesting, and I hope this post kicks off a similar one on the OB listserv. Personally, I look forward to collectively enacting change so that we better protect and retain our intellectual property rights in the near future.

Finally, I'd like to ask a follow up question: Has anyone attempted to negotiate provisions allowing the authors to post articles to their websites or institutional repositories? I've seen certain authors who do have their articles in PDF format, but I always wonder about the legality of that, and whether they got special permission. I'd love to hear experiences from within the Management discipline and with our top (so-called A or A-) journals.

Best,

Marc

Marc H. Anderson

Associate Professor

Department of Management

College of Business

Iowa State University

2350 Gerdin Business Building

Ames, IA 50011-1350

Ph: 515-520-2217

Fax: 515-294-7112

email: mha@iastate.edu

Dear colleagues,

Below pls. see the new development at OBHDP. Hope you like it.  cheers,

Xiao-Ping

open online version

Colleagues,

I wish someone can collate the current debate so we have a summary and agreement on the debate. This is because it appears we are now ready to ask our profession the real questions that have been denied for too long. The research from other professions solve real life problems in their profession and in this way advance the practice of their profession. What really is the purpose of research in business? The answer to this question will really move us to properly price the journals and change the orientation of researchers in business. We can learn from business consultants. They solve real life problems faced by organisations. This is why the organisations keep on going to them for future issues. The business practitioner cannot read our research and implement same without going through the consultant. The practitioner thus pays double-one for journal subscription and then to the consultant. This should direct us to the second question-how ethical is our current research publication and usage? May be the change advocated recently is to move us to being more ethical in handling results of research.

Dr Okechukwu Amah

Chevron

Colleagues,

This is a great conversation and I hope it leads to changes of significance in how we do business! Rob asked great questions: What is research for? Who is it for? But the answers I would probably give may not be as popular. Research is basically for faculty to get tenured! For the great majority of faculty members, once tenured the urge to do research and get published diminishes. I would ask how many people on the average read the published research? (I mean beyond the two or three reviewers)! What is its impact on practice? The answers to these question may not be too impressive! Rob also talks about the high cost of research in students fees and taxpayers money. I don't think we would want to perform a cost-benefit analysis on this! We are all great thinkers in business, then we should try something else instead on hanging on to a system that may become obsolete long ago!

I believe that a more valuable intellectual activity for business faculty would probably be not to get published, but to get "used"! I believe it is time for us to do something of value for our fields. And nothing I see as more valuable than working with business. The best contributions we can make is to use our intellect to resolve business problems and challenges on real time and with real applications. I believe that business schools should put more effort on faculty consulting or interventions in business. Faculty members should then should be evaluated by their intellectual contributions in the solution of real organizational problems! This way the business community can make a productive "use" of the intellectual abilities of the business faculty! In fact business organizations themselves might even help with cost of these efforts, and the universities can save research money for some other activity!

Thanks,

Ivan  

HI Neal

I don't think this is so much about attacking publishing companies or making a rational economic calculation about who can provide a service more cheaply.

I do think this is about asking fundamental questions about the purposes of publishing research:  What is it for?  Who is it for?  From an evidence-based practice perspective there is an important ethical issue in that the individuals and organizations who might benefit from reading and using research findings cannot get access to them (unless they are prepared to pay per article or are attached to a University in some way).  In medical research the ethical issues are clearer but if we believe management research has any practical value then the same or similar ethical problems arise.

A related ethical issue (or perhaps paradox) arises when you consider who pays for the research in the first place.  It's usually students (through fees) and taxpayers (through Government subsidies and grants to universities) and charities.  There's something questionable about taking the outputs of research that have already been paid for by students, taxpayers and charities and then charging people for them again by locking them up behind a pay wall.

So I don't think this I about attacking publishing companies as such but about considering these basic issues and asking who gains and who loses from the current way of doing things.

Cheers

Rob

Dear all

I am not sure why some of our colleagues so set on attaching our publishing companies.  These companies have been our partners for many, many years, and have traditionally done a fantastic job of making sure our research is published in an orderly fashion.  They are for-profit commercial enterprises, however, and therefore try to stay in business and aim to make profits for owners and shareholders.  Nothing new here.  It's what for-profit companies do.  These companies also exist in a very competitive environment where other companies will attempt to undercut their prices in order to gain market share.  We are already seeing this, with the cost of open access coming down from over $3000 to the amounts quoted in Marc's letter.  If you want your work to be freely available, clearly someone has to pay for this access.  It has traditionally been our libraries that have paid for this service, but there is now an option for us to pay the costs up front.  I don't see there's much of a big deal here.  What I do know is that, if we tried to do it ourselves at an equivalent level of quality (including marketing and hard copy production), it would cost a whole lot more!

Cheers

Neal Ashkanasy

Hi everyone,

I just checked this out, and the fee for making an article open source at OBHDP is $1800. Here's some material from posts I sent to the RMNET listserv (and a few responses) when I discovered that the Sage Choice program (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/sagechoice/faq.sp) also announced an open access policy. At the risk of ranting, I'd like to ask if others are as bothered as I am by the fact that we – the producers and evaluators of our research articles – are being told we need to pay $1500 to Sage or $1800 for OBHDP to make our work open access (or $3000 for Science, Technology, and Medical articles at Sage)? In this electronic day and age, how can such a ridiculously high sum be justified? Are publishers really making that much money from every article we publish?

Here's the justification Sage offers for that high price: "The fee, to be paid by the author(s) prior to publication, will offset publishing costs inherent in article submission and peer review, typesetting, tagging and indexing, hosting on dedicated servers, supporting sales and marketing costs, permanently archiving the final article, and posting to the requisite repositories that will house the article for public view." That seems excessive to me, and I'm curious about other's feelings and opinions. Is it that much to ask that we be allowed to freely make our work public domain, post our own research on our university or personal websites, and be allowed to have our institutions post PDF copies of our work on institutional repositories? I'm somewhat aware of the open access movement (see the beautiful video here on it: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1533), though – like most academics - I probably don't know nearly as much as I should.

It just seems unjust to me because when we review manuscripts for the publishers of our discipline's journals for free, WE – scholars – ARE giving away something for nothing. And that high credibility certain journals have is entirely provided by us (for free). I guess we get the "honor" of doing those reviews (lucky us)... Also, we do typically give away the right to share our work with others in the form of posting our research on our personal or institutional websites, and sometimes even the right to freely distribute our work to our own students (without needing to wonder if we're violating copyright agreements that often only lawyers can truly understand).

I asked the RMNET to imagine this thought experiment: The entire editorial board of Journal X decides to quit and start a new open-source journal. Any expenses of that new journal could be funded by a university. Overnight, the new journal would BE, for all practical purposes, the exact same journal (with a new name) – at least in terms of what we should primarily care about, which is the quality of the research. Would it be that expensive to get such a new journal listed so that it appears on Google Scholar? Where are all these valuable marketing costs that supposedly exist? Seth Spain pointed out that this thought experiment actually happened in mathematics. The board of the journal Topology resigned and founded the Journal of Topology:

http://www.ams.org/notices/200705/comm-toped-web.pdf

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Topology

I also commented that if ASQ publishes about 20 articles a year, then at $1500 per article, we're talking about $30,000 per year to make that an open-source journal. Couldn't Cornell just absorb that expense for having the honor of housing ASQ? Other journals would cost more (since they have more articles), but I think we as Academy of Management members should demand this, at least for the AOM journals, or demand for a much more transparent explanation for what value we're getting by signing away our rights.

One more point: Rohny Saylors made the great point about how "it seems PeerJ can do for $100 for what Sage charges $1500 for" (and OBHDP wants $1800 for) and he then asked "what's Sage offering for its 1400% surcharge?" Actually, Sage can do it for $99 too via SAGE Open. That RMNET thread (and an offshoot) was quite interesting, and I hope this post kicks off a similar one on the OB listserv. Personally, I look forward to collectively enacting change so that we better protect and retain our intellectual property rights in the near future.

Finally, I'd like to ask a follow up question: Has anyone attempted to negotiate provisions allowing the authors to post articles to their websites or institutional repositories? I've seen certain authors who do have their articles in PDF format, but I always wonder about the legality of that, and whether they got special permission. I'd love to hear experiences from within the Management discipline and with our top (so-called A or A-) journals.

Best,

Marc

Marc H. Anderson

Associate Professor

Department of Management

College of Business

Iowa State University

2350 Gerdin Business Building

Ames, IA 50011-1350

Ph: 515-520-2217

Fax: 515-294-7112

email: mha@iastate.edu

Dear colleagues,

Below pls. see the new development at OBHDP. Hope you like it.  cheers,

Xiao-Ping

open online version

Interesting conversation! I think something critical to note is that the relative value of our research depends on whom you believe the intended beneficiary to be.

Personally, I'm not terribly worried about furthering the specific interests of businesses. I would like to believe that the role of academic research (in our field and others) is to serve the public trust by providing dispassionate and objective knowledge in a reasonably public forum (although the journals do charge subscription fees, the reality is that the core findings are disseminated through textbooks, the media, and other forums).

At the risk of sounding cynical, I'm sure that  many businesses would find research and theory on employee well-being, gender/racial bias, justice, unethical behavior or work-family balance tangential and irrelevant to their interests...and this is exactly why we should pursue this work. As an analogy, just imagine if medical researchers at Universities decided that their end client was the pharmaceutical industry, and derogated any research that didn't forward that set of interests.

If a market emerges for consultants to translate these findings for the interests of specific customers, that's a nice ancillary benefit. I'm a capitalist and don't have any problem with businesses doing what they do, but what constitutes valuable research  to a practitioner is necessarily myopic and short-term oriented, compared to what benefits the broader public trust.

Just my $.02.

Best,

Keith

Keith Leavitt, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor, Oregon State University College of Business

338 Bexell Hall, Corvallis, Oregon, 97331-2603

PHONE: (541) 737-8631

CELL: (206) 245-5798

Keith.leavitt@oregonstate.edu

Colleagues,

 

This is a great conversation and I hope it leads to changes of significance in how we do business! Rob asked great questions: What is research for? Who is it for? But the answers I would probably give may not be as popular. Research is basically for faculty to get tenured! For the great majority of faculty members, once tenured the urge to do research and get published diminishes. I would ask how many people on the average read the published research? (I mean beyond the two or three reviewers)! What is its impact on practice? The answers to these question may not be too impressive! Rob also talks about the high cost of research in students fees and taxpayers money. I don't think we would want to perform a cost-benefit analysis on this! We are all great thinkers in business, then we should try something else instead on hanging on to a system that may become obsolete long ago!

 

I believe that a more valuable intellectual activity for business faculty would probably be not to get published, but to get "used"! I believe it is time for us to do something of value for our fields. And nothing I see as more valuable than working with business. The best contributions we can make is to use our intellect to resolve business problems and challenges on real time and with real applications. I believe that business schools should put more effort on faculty consulting or interventions in business. Faculty members should then should be evaluated by their intellectual contributions in the solution of real organizational problems! This way the business community can make a productive "use" of the intellectual abilities of the business faculty! In fact business organizations themselves might even help with cost of these efforts, and the universities can save research money for some other activity!

 

Thanks,

 

Ivan  

 

<image002.png>

 

From: Organizational Behavior Division Listserv [mailto:OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Rob Briner
Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2013 2:28 AM
To: OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: Re: [OB-LIST] FW: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes offers Open Access

 

HI Neal

 

I don't think this is so much about attacking publishing companies or making a rational economic calculation about who can provide a service more cheaply.

 

I do think this is about asking fundamental questions about the purposes of publishing research:  What is it for?  Who is it for?  From an evidence-based practice perspective there is an important ethical issue in that the individuals and organizations who might benefit from reading and using research findings cannot get access to them (unless they are prepared to pay per article or are attached to a University in some way).  In medical research the ethical issues are clearer but if we believe management research has any practical value then the same or similar ethical problems arise.

 

A related ethical issue (or perhaps paradox) arises when you consider who pays for the research in the first place.  It's usually students (through fees) and taxpayers (through Government subsidies and grants to universities) and charities.  There's something questionable about taking the outputs of research that have already been paid for by students, taxpayers and charities and then charging people for them again by locking them up behind a pay wall.

 

So I don't think this I about attacking publishing companies as such but about considering these basic issues and asking who gains and who loses from the current way of doing things.

 

Cheers

 

Rob

 

Rob B Briner | Professor of Organizational Psychology | School of Management | University of Bath

 

From: Organizational Behavior Division Listserv [mailto:OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Neal Ashkanasy
Sent: 04 April 2013 00:44
To: OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: Re: [OB-LIST] FW: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes offers Open Access

 

Dear all

 

I am not sure why some of our colleagues so set on attaching our publishing companies.  These companies have been our partners for many, many years, and have traditionally done a fantastic job of making sure our research is published in an orderly fashion.  They are for-profit commercial enterprises, however, and therefore try to stay in business and aim to make profits for owners and shareholders.  Nothing new here.  It's what for-profit companies do.  These companies also exist in a very competitive environment where other companies will attempt to undercut their prices in order to gain market share.  We are already seeing this, with the cost of open access coming down from over $3000 to the amounts quoted in Marc's letter.  If you want your work to be freely available, clearly someone has to pay for this access.  It has traditionally been our libraries that have paid for this service, but there is now an option for us to pay the costs up front.  I don't see there's much of a big deal here.  What I do know is that, if we tried to do it ourselves at an equivalent level of quality (including marketing and hard copy production), it would cost a whole lot more!

 

Cheers

Neal Ashkanasy

Professor of Management,   Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Organizational Behavior Associate Editor, Academy of Management Review Series Co-Editor, Research on Emotion in Organizations Associate Editor, Emotion Review   UQ Business School The University of Queensland Brisbane, Qld 4072, Australia CRICOS No.: 00025B Phone: +617 3346-8006 Fax: +617 3346-8188 e-mail: n.ashkanasy@uq.edu.au http://www.business.uq.edu.au/display/teach/Neal+Ashkanasy

<image006.png>

 

 

 

 

 

From: Organizational Behavior Division Listserv [mailto:OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Anderson, Marc [MGMT]
Sent: Thursday, 4 April 2013 4:17 AM
To: OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: Re: [OB-LIST] FW: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes offers Open Access

 

Hi everyone,

I just checked this out, and the fee for making an article open source at OBHDP is $1800. Here's some material from posts I sent to the RMNET listserv (and a few responses) when I discovered that the Sage Choice program (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/sagechoice/faq.sp) also announced an open access policy. At the risk of ranting, I'd like to ask if others are as bothered as I am by the fact that we – the producers and evaluators of our research articles – are being told we need to pay $1500 to Sage or $1800 for OBHDP to make our work open access (or $3000 for Science, Technology, and Medical articles at Sage)? In this electronic day and age, how can such a ridiculously high sum be justified? Are publishers really making that much money from every article we publish?

 

Here's the justification Sage offers for that high price: "The fee, to be paid by the author(s) prior to publication, will offset publishing costs inherent in article submission and peer review, typesetting, tagging and indexing, hosting on dedicated servers, supporting sales and marketing costs, permanently archiving the final article, and posting to the requisite repositories that will house the article for public view." That seems excessive to me, and I'm curious about other's feelings and opinions. Is it that much to ask that we be allowed to freely make our work public domain, post our own research on our university or personal websites, and be allowed to have our institutions post PDF copies of our work on institutional repositories? I'm somewhat aware of the open access movement (see the beautiful video here on it: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1533), though – like most academics - I probably don't know nearly as much as I should.

 

It just seems unjust to me because when we review manuscripts for the publishers of our discipline's journals for free, WE – scholars – ARE giving away something for nothing. And that high credibility certain journals have is entirely provided by us (for free). I guess we get the "honor" of doing those reviews (lucky us)... Also, we do typically give away the right to share our work with others in the form of posting our research on our personal or institutional websites, and sometimes even the right to freely distribute our work to our own students (without needing to wonder if we're violating copyright agreements that often only lawyers can truly understand).

 

I asked the RMNET to imagine this thought experiment: The entire editorial board of Journal X decides to quit and start a new open-source journal. Any expenses of that new journal could be funded by a university. Overnight, the new journal would BE, for all practical purposes, the exact same journal (with a new name) – at least in terms of what we should primarily care about, which is the quality of the research. Would it be that expensive to get such a new journal listed so that it appears on Google Scholar? Where are all these valuable marketing costs that supposedly exist? Seth Spain pointed out that this thought experiment actually happened in mathematics. The board of the journal Topology resigned and founded the Journal of Topology:

 

http://www.ams.org/notices/200705/comm-toped-web.pdf

 

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Topology

 

I also commented that if ASQ publishes about 20 articles a year, then at $1500 per article, we're talking about $30,000 per year to make that an open-source journal. Couldn't Cornell just absorb that expense for having the honor of housing ASQ? Other journals would cost more (since they have more articles), but I think we as Academy of Management members should demand this, at least for the AOM journals, or demand for a much more transparent explanation for what value we're getting by signing away our rights.

 

One more point: Rohny Saylors made the great point about how "it seems PeerJ can do for $100 for what Sage charges $1500 for" (and OBHDP wants $1800 for) and he then asked "what's Sage offering for its 1400% surcharge?" Actually, Sage can do it for $99 too via SAGE Open. That RMNET thread (and an offshoot) was quite interesting, and I hope this post kicks off a similar one on the OB listserv. Personally, I look forward to collectively enacting change so that we better protect and retain our intellectual property rights in the near future.

 

Finally, I'd like to ask a follow up question: Has anyone attempted to negotiate provisions allowing the authors to post articles to their websites or institutional repositories? I've seen certain authors who do have their articles in PDF format, but I always wonder about the legality of that, and whether they got special permission. I'd love to hear experiences from within the Management discipline and with our top (so-called A or A-) journals.

 

Best,

Marc

 

Marc H. Anderson

Associate Professor

Department of Management

College of Business

Iowa State University

2350 Gerdin Business Building

Ames, IA 50011-1350

Ph: 515-520-2217

Fax: 515-294-7112

email: mha@iastate.edu

 

 

From: Organizational Behavior Division Listserv [mailto:OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Xiao-Ping Chen
Sent: Wednesday, April 03, 2013 10:15 AM
To: OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: [OB-LIST] FW: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes offers Open Access

 

Dear colleagues,

 

Below pls. see the new development at OBHDP. Hope you like it.  cheers,

 

Xiao-Ping

 

open online version

<image007.png> For authors | About us Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes offers Open Access Dear Dr. Chen, <image008.jpg> Is it possible to publish an article Open Access in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes? Yes it is. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes offers authors a choice in how they wish to disseminate their research - either by publishing it as a subscription article or as an Open Access article. All articles published Open Access will be immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download from ScienceDirect. Permitted reuse is defined by the author's choice of Creative Commons user licenses.   <image009.jpg> <image008.jpg> How do I find out more? For full information on publishing your paper Open Access in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, including publication fees, licenses, and more, please visit the Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes Open Access page and guide for authors. Funding Body Compliance To help authors comply with new Open Access policies and mandates, Elsevier has established agreements with many funding bodies, including the Wellcome Trust, RCUK and the Austrian Science Fund. Some funding bodies will also reimburse you for Open Access publication fees, making it even easier to publish Open Access. For more information on specific funding body agreements see our funding bodies agreements page. <image008.jpg>   © Elsevier is a member of AGORA, HINARI, OARE, INASP, ORCID, CrossRef and COUNTER DATA PROTECTION NOTICE Data Protection Notice: This News for Authors e-mail has been sent to xpchen@u.washington.edu from Elsevier Science & Technology Journals, Elsevier Limited, The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, registered in England with registered number 1982084. To ensure delivery to your inbox (not bulk or junk folders), please click here to add our address to your safe senders list. You are receiving this e-mail because you are a published author in an Elsevier journal in the belief it is of interest to you. If you no longer wish to receive communications of this type from us, you can visit this page to unsubscribe. For all enquiries, problems or suggestions regarding this service, please contact: stjnlsemarketing@elsevier.com. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Limited. All rights reserved. | Elsevier Website Privacy Policy

<image008.jpg>

Colleagues,

 

I wish someone can collate the current debate so we have a summary and agreement on the debate. This is because it appears we are now ready to ask our profession the real questions that have been denied for too long. The research from other professions solve real life problems in their profession and in this way advance the practice of their profession. What really is the purpose of research in business? The answer to this question will really move us to properly price the journals and change the orientation of researchers in business. We can learn from business consultants. They solve real life problems faced by organisations. This is why the organisations keep on going to them for future issues. The business practitioner cannot read our research and implement same without going through the consultant. The practitioner thus pays double-one for journal subscription and then to the consultant. This should direct us to the second question-how ethical is our current research publication and usage? May be the change advocated recently is to move us to being more ethical in handling results of research.

 

Dr Okechukwu Amah

Chevron

 

From: Organizational Behavior Division Listserv [mailto:OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Blanco, R Ivan
Sent: Friday, April 05, 2013 7:54 PM
To: OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: Re: [OB-LIST] FW: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes offers Open Access

 

Colleagues,

 

This is a great conversation and I hope it leads to changes of significance in how we do business! Rob asked great questions: What is research for? Who is it for? But the answers I would probably give may not be as popular. Research is basically for faculty to get tenured! For the great majority of faculty members, once tenured the urge to do research and get published diminishes. I would ask how many people on the average read the published research? (I mean beyond the two or three reviewers)! What is its impact on practice? The answers to these question may not be too impressive! Rob also talks about the high cost of research in students fees and taxpayers money. I don't think we would want to perform a cost-benefit analysis on this! We are all great thinkers in business, then we should try something else instead on hanging on to a system that may become obsolete long ago!

 

I believe that a more valuable intellectual activity for business faculty would probably be not to get published, but to get "used"! I believe it is time for us to do something of value for our fields. And nothing I see as more valuable than working with business. The best contributions we can make is to use our intellect to resolve business problems and challenges on real time and with real applications. I believe that business schools should put more effort on faculty consulting or interventions in business. Faculty members should then should be evaluated by their intellectual contributions in the solution of real organizational problems! This way the business community can make a productive "use" of the intellectual abilities of the business faculty! In fact business organizations themselves might even help with cost of these efforts, and the universities can save research money for some other activity!

 

Thanks,

 

Ivan  

 

 

From: Organizational Behavior Division Listserv [mailto:OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Rob Briner
Sent: Thursday, April 04, 2013 2:28 AM
To: OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: Re: [OB-LIST] FW: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes offers Open Access

 

HI Neal

 

I don't think this is so much about attacking publishing companies or making a rational economic calculation about who can provide a service more cheaply.

 

I do think this is about asking fundamental questions about the purposes of publishing research:  What is it for?  Who is it for?  From an evidence-based practice perspective there is an important ethical issue in that the individuals and organizations who might benefit from reading and using research findings cannot get access to them (unless they are prepared to pay per article or are attached to a University in some way).  In medical research the ethical issues are clearer but if we believe management research has any practical value then the same or similar ethical problems arise.

 

A related ethical issue (or perhaps paradox) arises when you consider who pays for the research in the first place.  It's usually students (through fees) and taxpayers (through Government subsidies and grants to universities) and charities.  There's something questionable about taking the outputs of research that have already been paid for by students, taxpayers and charities and then charging people for them again by locking them up behind a pay wall.

 

So I don't think this I about attacking publishing companies as such but about considering these basic issues and asking who gains and who loses from the current way of doing things.

 

Cheers

 

Rob

 

Rob B Briner | Professor of Organizational Psychology | School of Management | University of Bath

 

From: Organizational Behavior Division Listserv [mailto:OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Neal Ashkanasy
Sent: 04 April 2013 00:44
To: OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: Re: [OB-LIST] FW: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes offers Open Access

 

Dear all

 

I am not sure why some of our colleagues so set on attaching our publishing companies.  These companies have been our partners for many, many years, and have traditionally done a fantastic job of making sure our research is published in an orderly fashion.  They are for-profit commercial enterprises, however, and therefore try to stay in business and aim to make profits for owners and shareholders.  Nothing new here.  It's what for-profit companies do.  These companies also exist in a very competitive environment where other companies will attempt to undercut their prices in order to gain market share.  We are already seeing this, with the cost of open access coming down from over $3000 to the amounts quoted in Marc's letter.  If you want your work to be freely available, clearly someone has to pay for this access.  It has traditionally been our libraries that have paid for this service, but there is now an option for us to pay the costs up front.  I don't see there's much of a big deal here.  What I do know is that, if we tried to do it ourselves at an equivalent level of quality (including marketing and hard copy production), it would cost a whole lot more!

 

Cheers

Neal Ashkanasy

Professor of Management,   Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Organizational Behavior Associate Editor, Academy of Management Review Series Co-Editor, Research on Emotion in Organizations Associate Editor, Emotion Review   UQ Business School The University of Queensland Brisbane, Qld 4072, Australia CRICOS No.: 00025B Phone: +617 3346-8006 Fax: +617 3346-8188 e-mail: n.ashkanasy@uq.edu.au http://www.business.uq.edu.au/display/teach/Neal+Ashkanasy

 

 

 

 

 

From: Organizational Behavior Division Listserv [mailto:OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Anderson, Marc [MGMT]
Sent: Thursday, 4 April 2013 4:17 AM
To: OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: Re: [OB-LIST] FW: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes offers Open Access

 

Hi everyone,

I just checked this out, and the fee for making an article open source at OBHDP is $1800. Here's some material from posts I sent to the RMNET listserv (and a few responses) when I discovered that the Sage Choice program (http://www.uk.sagepub.com/sagechoice/faq.sp) also announced an open access policy. At the risk of ranting, I'd like to ask if others are as bothered as I am by the fact that we – the producers and evaluators of our research articles – are being told we need to pay $1500 to Sage or $1800 for OBHDP to make our work open access (or $3000 for Science, Technology, and Medical articles at Sage)? In this electronic day and age, how can such a ridiculously high sum be justified? Are publishers really making that much money from every article we publish?

 

Here's the justification Sage offers for that high price: "The fee, to be paid by the author(s) prior to publication, will offset publishing costs inherent in article submission and peer review, typesetting, tagging and indexing, hosting on dedicated servers, supporting sales and marketing costs, permanently archiving the final article, and posting to the requisite repositories that will house the article for public view." That seems excessive to me, and I'm curious about other's feelings and opinions. Is it that much to ask that we be allowed to freely make our work public domain, post our own research on our university or personal websites, and be allowed to have our institutions post PDF copies of our work on institutional repositories? I'm somewhat aware of the open access movement (see the beautiful video here on it: http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1533), though – like most academics - I probably don't know nearly as much as I should.

 

It just seems unjust to me because when we review manuscripts for the publishers of our discipline's journals for free, WE – scholars – ARE giving away something for nothing. And that high credibility certain journals have is entirely provided by us (for free). I guess we get the "honor" of doing those reviews (lucky us)... Also, we do typically give away the right to share our work with others in the form of posting our research on our personal or institutional websites, and sometimes even the right to freely distribute our work to our own students (without needing to wonder if we're violating copyright agreements that often only lawyers can truly understand).

 

I asked the RMNET to imagine this thought experiment: The entire editorial board of Journal X decides to quit and start a new open-source journal. Any expenses of that new journal could be funded by a university. Overnight, the new journal would BE, for all practical purposes, the exact same journal (with a new name) – at least in terms of what we should primarily care about, which is the quality of the research. Would it be that expensive to get such a new journal listed so that it appears on Google Scholar? Where are all these valuable marketing costs that supposedly exist? Seth Spain pointed out that this thought experiment actually happened in mathematics. The board of the journal Topology resigned and founded the Journal of Topology:

 

http://www.ams.org/notices/200705/comm-toped-web.pdf

 

See also:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Topology

 

I also commented that if ASQ publishes about 20 articles a year, then at $1500 per article, we're talking about $30,000 per year to make that an open-source journal. Couldn't Cornell just absorb that expense for having the honor of housing ASQ? Other journals would cost more (since they have more articles), but I think we as Academy of Management members should demand this, at least for the AOM journals, or demand for a much more transparent explanation for what value we're getting by signing away our rights.

 

One more point: Rohny Saylors made the great point about how "it seems PeerJ can do for $100 for what Sage charges $1500 for" (and OBHDP wants $1800 for) and he then asked "what's Sage offering for its 1400% surcharge?" Actually, Sage can do it for $99 too via SAGE Open. That RMNET thread (and an offshoot) was quite interesting, and I hope this post kicks off a similar one on the OB listserv. Personally, I look forward to collectively enacting change so that we better protect and retain our intellectual property rights in the near future.

 

Finally, I'd like to ask a follow up question: Has anyone attempted to negotiate provisions allowing the authors to post articles to their websites or institutional repositories? I've seen certain authors who do have their articles in PDF format, but I always wonder about the legality of that, and whether they got special permission. I'd love to hear experiences from within the Management discipline and with our top (so-called A or A-) journals.

 

Best,

Marc

 

Marc H. Anderson

Associate Professor

Department of Management

College of Business

Iowa State University

2350 Gerdin Business Building

Ames, IA 50011-1350

Ph: 515-520-2217

Fax: 515-294-7112

email: mha@iastate.edu

 

 

From: Organizational Behavior Division Listserv [mailto:OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU] On Behalf Of Xiao-Ping Chen
Sent: Wednesday, April 03, 2013 10:15 AM
To: OB@AOMLISTS.PACE.EDU
Subject: [OB-LIST] FW: Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes offers Open Access

 

Dear colleagues,

 

Below pls. see the new development at OBHDP. Hope you like it.  cheers,

 

Xiao-Ping

 

open online version

For authors | About us Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes offers Open Access Dear Dr. Chen, Is it possible to publish an article Open Access in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes? Yes it is. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes offers authors a choice in how they wish to disseminate their research - either by publishing it as a subscription article or as an Open Access article. All articles published Open Access will be immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download from ScienceDirect. Permitted reuse is defined by the author's choice of Creative Commons user licenses.   How do I find out more? For full information on publishing your paper Open Access in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, including publication fees, licenses, and more, please visit the Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes Open Access page and guide for authors. Funding Body Compliance To help authors comply with new Open Access policies and mandates, Elsevier has established agreements with many funding bodies, including the Wellcome Trust, RCUK and the Austrian Science Fund. Some funding bodies will also reimburse you for Open Access publication fees, making it even easier to publish Open Access. For more information on specific funding body agreements see our funding bodies agreements page.   © Elsevier is a member of AGORA, HINARI, OARE, INASP, ORCID, CrossRef and COUNTER DATA PROTECTION NOTICE Data Protection Notice: This News for Authors e-mail has been sent to xpchen@u.washington.edu from Elsevier Science & Technology Journals, Elsevier Limited, The Boulevard, Langford Lane, Kidlington, Oxford OX5 1GB, registered in England with registered number 1982084. To ensure delivery to your inbox (not bulk or junk folders), please click here to add our address to your safe senders list. You are receiving this e-mail because you are a published author in an Elsevier journal in the belief it is of interest to you. If you no longer wish to receive communications of this type from us, you can visit this page to unsubscribe. For all enquiries, problems or suggestions regarding this service, please contact: stjnlsemarketing@elsevier.com. Copyright © 2013 Elsevier Limited. All rights reserved. | Elsevier Website Privacy Policy

Dear Colleagues,

I believe that this discussion is worth millions and millions! So here you have some follow up:

It is not that schools of business faculty shouldn't do any research at all! But it is crucial to identify the fields within management that are subject to research in its traditional form. For instance research might be more appropriate in operations management than in organizational behavior. As an analogy, I would say that one thing is to study the biology of the human being and other is to study human behavior. The former is a science the latter is more like an art! Yes, I said an art!

We in the academic world have developed highly sophisticated research tools and models that make the whole research effort more rigorous. The problem is that as the research model rigor increases the less realistic the whole thing is and the results are less relevant to anyone outside the academy. One of the major difficulties social science theories have is that they involve human thought and action. In organizations "We are talking about an activity that is an elusive blend of thought and action, of individual and group behavior, of abstract and concrete focus, of problem solving and problem finding, of creativity and routine, of economics and humanities, of societal contribution and self-advancement" (Peter Vaill, 1998). And then the passage of time also renders rigorous studies useless!

Faced with all this complexity, management scholars opt for reductionism! They select just a few variables to be studied, out of the very broad range of factors involved, and assume everything else constant. Then they apply a very rigorous research model and sophisticated statistical analysis tools to the relationship and publish their findings! No wonder why so many practitioners and academicians pay so little attention to these studies.

When asked about the importance of the research university Peter Drucker (2001) replied: "As far as management education goes, it is totally unimportant. First, the management school is a professional school, not a Ph.D. mill, and in a professional school the emphasis is on teaching." He continued by saying "you look at a law school, and you don't ask how many papers are usually published. Your first question is what percentage of students passes the bar exam the first time." Later he also said "I think basing tenure decisions on peer-reviewed publications is nonsense."

He was asked whether the focus on research was the greatest weakness of today's management education, and he responded "it is a part of the larger problem, which is that there is not enough practical experience on the part of the faculty." He also indicated that the number of management schools mushroomed during the second half of the 1900's, and "the model on which they formed themselves was that of the college of arts and sciences. The business schools saw themselves as being looked down upon by arts and sciences and, and therefore, tried to become academically respectable." . . . "But arts and sciences at the research university are the wrong models for management education. Management is a practice, like medicine; and the model should have been the medical school . . ."

He also emphasized the important role consulting should play in business school. He noted that since you cannot bring an organization into the classroom the way medical schools bring sick patients into their classroom then "you could bring experience through your faculty." He added "business educators should be out as practitioners where the problems and results are. . . . one of my most effective colleagues, a wonderful teacher. His own field of expertise is quite narrow. But he works with a number of organizations, and he keeps on growing and keeps on learning. You have to work with an organization to be an effective educator. Doing so stimulates you and forces you to learn."

He also affirmed that his "emphasis has been on my consulting work, because that is where I learn. Only in the last few years, with Philip Kotler at Northwestern and Michael Porter at Harvard, have new things of importance come out of the business schools. Otherwise, in the 50 years since World War II most of the so-called research of the business schools has added nothing to the effective practice of management. All the innovation has come from people like Alfred Sloan or Jack Welch." I wonder if this lack of contribution has had something to do with the decline of the American worker's productivity. 

Peter Vaill (1998) also adds to these views. He said that "history has seen legions of managers and leaders who were unaware of our facts and indifferent to our methods [research results and models proposed], who nonetheless have been outstanding both in getting the job done and in attending the needs of organization members." He also indicated that "one does not read Peter Drucker or Warren Bennis for the facts, but rather for the song of possibility that sounds through their writings."

My colleague David Fearon and I wrote a paper in 1992 titled From Schools of Business to Schools in Business, where one of the points we made was the need for faculty to acquire some practical experience. But the paper was probably too much for the many "people in the box" who could not see it!

I was very lucky because my undergraduate program has been around for only a couple of years (this was way back then!), it was an evening program, and all of my business professors were practitioners in various fields. Later in graduate school I had some faculty members who could not talk business. The public trust had been mentioned to support the dedication to research. I would like to see what would happen with the "public trust" only if it became known that some believe that our research should not contribute to improve business performance and the wellbeing of organizational members. What would the public trust do if they knew that way too many faculty members in business do not have any business experience?

_ _ _ _

Peter Drucker's interview appeared in BizEd, November/December, 2001; Peter Vaill's book is "Spirited Leading and Learning: Process Wisdom for a New Age." Jossey-Bass, 1998

Thanks,

Ivan