Predatory Journals

The dark side, or one dark side, of open access publishing: predatory journals. Just like you shouldn't pay for graduate school, you shouldn't have to pay for publishing in a journal. Scholarly subventions are another thing entirely (I linked Villanova's program description because it included details not found on other sites nor on Wikipedia itself). And I mentioned Edward Tufte's risky publishing venture:

TCQ: How did you decide to self-publish your books on design?

Tufte: In 1975, when Dean Donald Stokes of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School asked me to teach statistics to a dozen journalists who were visiting that year to learn some economics, I annotated a collection of readings, with a long section on statistical graphics. The literature here was thin, too often grimly devoted to explaining use of the ruling pen and to promulgating “graphic standards” indifferent to the nature of visual evidence and quantitative reasoning. Soon I wrote up some ideas. Then John Tukey, the phenomenal Princeton statistician, suggested that we give a series of joint seminars. Since the mid-1960s, Tukey had opened up the field, as his brilliant technical contributions made it clear that the study of statistical graphics was intellectually respectable and not just about pie charts and ruling pens. 

After moving to Yale University, I finished the manuscript in 1982. A publisher was interested but planned to print only 2,000 copies and to charge a very high price, contrary to my hopes for a wide readership. I also sought to design the book so as to make it self-exemplifying—that is, the physical object itself would reflect the intellectual principles advanced in the book. Publishers seemed appalled at the prospect that an author might govern design. 

Consequently I investigated self-publishing. This required a first-rate book designer, a lot of money (at least for a young professor), and a large garage. I found Howard Gralla, who had designed many museum catalogs with great care and craft. He was willing to work closely with this difficult author who was filled with all sorts of opinions about design and typography. We spent the summer in his studio laying out the book, page by page. We were able to integrate graphics right into the text, sometimes into the middle of a sentence, eliminating the usual separation of text and image—one of the ideas that the book advocated. To finance the book I took out another mortgage on my home (back then at 18 percent). The bank officer said this was the second most unusual loan that she had ever made; first place belonged to a loan to a circus to buy an elephant! My view on self-publishing was to go all out, to make the best and most elegant and wonderful book possible, without compromise. Otherwise, why do it?