Dear William Silvert and others, >A couple of posters have interpreted "publish elsewhere" as leading to > publishing anarchy. This misstates the situation. There is still scope for > review and evaluation of self-published papers (samizdat), Your own terms are contradictory here. When reviewing and evaluating, you need an unbiased opinion (as much as it goes, given people have their faults), so you can evaluate your papers yourself. And there would be no point in evaluation, if there would not be the right to reject. If you have agreed up to this point, you lost the "self-published" bit of your sentence. There must be someone to receive your submission, find knowledgeable people to review, coalesce sometimes conflicting evaluations, and summarize recommendations for manuscript improvement. I have seen many papers to be much improved thanks to the reviewing process.
... > and a framework > could easily develop to simplify finding work of quality. Sure it could. But I wonder how different would be the result from the current publishers, at least those labelled in "Bergstrom & Bergstrom" as non-profit ones (in fact, this might be mis-nomer, because at least some of them have their profit just streamlined into budget of scientific societies - ESA or BES)? > The underlying > issue is whether some papers should be suppressed because of the present > system, whether it is because of poor peer review practices or other > publishing factors. I still get angry when I think of all the good papers > that don't get published because of lack of space, Each journal I follow increases the number of published papers every year. With that goes usually an increase in its subscription rates, so I doubt the limitation is an evil intent of commercial publishing houses. Finding enough good reviewers might be one important barrier. If you feel that in your field are way too many rejected good papers, perhaps you shall start a new journal, along the lines you suggest (free to everyone). But before seeing sufficiently long track record of its credibility (with its papers being frequently cited elsewhere), no reasonable employer would take into account his employees' publications in such journal. ... > Of course if you only want to read peer reviewed journals, you can always > get a subscription to the Journal of Creation Research! Is that a typical peer-reviewed journal you read or is it just the lack of good arguments against peer-review that makes you say this? You sound sour grapes here, by all marks ... > the age of the internet? Why do we even need bound hard copies? The Again, I do not think that it is the private bussinesses that make printed journals to survive. Why they would? Cost cutting is so vital to them ... > Bergstrom x 2 article recently referenced here points out that the high > prices of many journals are a result of business decisions that do not > benefit those of us in the field. I think it is time to fight back, and > there is no reason why cheap peer-reviewed journals cannot be produced. Right. In fact, they are already produced, as in the case of PLoS journals. And wonder - they ask the authors for publication fee (around 1500 USD). As I said earlier, the peer-review process cannot get for free. And from my point of view, samizdat has no place in scientific communication. But after all, you can publish as many manuscript as you like at your web pages :-) > After all, the reviewers are not paid, and for the journals I have been > involved with, only the editor-in-chief gets paid for his work (the rest get > free subscriptions, and one journal even tried to avoid that!). This is too gross generalization. I believe that the major ecological journals have more than their editor-in-chief at the payroll, and all these assistants, copy editors and secretaries are extremely useful contributors to the resulting quality. Petr Smilauer Ceske Budejovice
