Caveat Lector

A few links landed in my email this week that are more than good enough to share:

• Peter Brantley beat me good and proper to the Google-journals story.

• This interview from Genentech contains a lovely rant from an ex-academic researcher who moved into industry (scroll down to “page” 31):

  It’s even worse than that. So you send the paper in; they often send it back rejected. You work for the journals for free as a reviewer. They send you papers. You work many hours studying them and writing critiques. You don’t get anything for that so you’re working as a slave for free. You pay to publish the paper–you pay page charges. If you have a lot of color figures sometimes it’s thousands of dollars. [voice crescendoing] And then you pay them to subscribe to the journal! [laughter] They walk all over you: you work for free; you pay to publish; and then you buy the journal back. What kind of a system is that? Man, they have got it made, I’ll tell you. Anyway, that also was part of [my decision to join Genentech].

Wow. It’s seriously bad news when your basic source of labor thinks you’re a scam. As much as we whinge and moan in libraries, nobody thinks that badly of us.