Today I have a new post on BrowBeat, thanks to my indefatigable friend and expert curator of the Internet, the Academic Avenger, who alerted me to what has got to be one of the funniest side effects of the pay-to-play “publishing” racket I have ever seen. A taste:
To [Vamplew’s] mild surprise, not only was this groundbreaking study [“Get Me Off Your Fucking Mailing List”] accepted—with fraudulent peer reviews and everything!—it was put into layout, and a PDF was generated for his “perusal,” along with, of course, a humble request for $150, to be submitted by wire transfer, as all legitimate scholarly transactions are.
You cannot, cannot, cannot make this shit up. Love it. LOVE. IT.
I love this, but I’m curious about an unrelated question: how did the job market turn out for German this year? It must be basically over at this point, right? It’s looking pretty ugly in my field, even relative to other post-crash years.
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Looks like about 24 TT jobs, mostly the same as last year, so, shitty?
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For TT jobs, 2014 is currently tied for the second-worst year ever. On the other hand, we have the second-highest number of NTT job ads for this point in the year. That pretty much sums up the state of German Studies.
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Your post/article timed perfectly with an email I just received on a list-serv. It seems that I can submit my abstract to an open access International Journal, get it (the abstract) peer reviewed and, for $200, have final article published. What made it worse was that another academic, well known in the discipline, was saying how good this journal was. Is it normal to have to pay for publishing in open access journals?
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If you want your publication in a Wiley journal to be open access, it will cost you $3000.
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Thanks, Rebecca. One wonders if anyone would take advantage of such a *fantastic* opportunity, but I guess there must be some wealthy scholars who can.
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This is a bit off topic, but it shows how nuts academic publishing can be from a different side. There was a nearly surreal plagiarism case reported in the French journal Fabula this summer – alas I am not aware of translations but this blog posted an English summary: http://retractionwatch.com/2014/11/20/tracking-down-lit-crit-plagiarism-leads-to-discourses-of-madness/. (Their translations come from Google so take with a grain of salt!)
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