I recently spoke to someone who was part of Robert Maxwell‘s original gang at Pergamon Press.
Spent ~50 years in the publishing business — a journal mafia veteran, so to speak.
I thought he might have been reformed, and even if not, maybe I could learn something from him. Because after all, we have to do a lot of things that Maxwell had to do in his heyday.
Turns out, he believes that the science publishing industry is great, that Nature and Elsevier and all these magazines are doing good for the world, and that there’s no reason to disrupt what he thinks is a beautiful system.
“Charging so much money isn’t a big deal because universities had the budgets anyway.”
When I mentioned that less-endowed universities in “developing” regions like India don’t have that money and therefore can’t access the science, here’s what he had to say:
“Indian universities would have more money left over if they weren’t lining up the pockets of politicians.”
Say what you want to that (even if it were true).
Another notable opinion:
“Do you know how much Elsevier spent on building the ScienceDirect website in 1997? $150 MILLION. It might be bonkers today, but any judgments about them should be made while keeping that in perspective.”
(meaning: the market should pay a premium because Elsevier didn’t know that a basic pdf-sharing website shouldn’t cost hundreds of millions.)
Many other such moments of brilliance later — which culminated in him telling me that if I want to do something useful, I should be building software for Elsevier as my customer and make their business stronger, and that I should “recognise that I won’t be a disrupter”) — I’m done with the guy.
In fact, I’m done with the whole pack of people who work for or support the big science publishers.
I’m really done trying to give them some benefit of doubt, to be reasonable, to keep an open mind.
Fuck them.
The monarchs of the Joseon dynasty (Korea) are believed to have had a certain very simple and effective policy for centuries, which went something like this:
“Rule your subjects with forgiveness. Rule barbarians with the sword.”
Time to unsheath the sword.
