Jean-Claude said :"I believe that they should be organized by researchers
themselves. The same applies to the peer review comment."
It would be interesting to know if such experiment has been tried, in some
fields, somewhere in the world.
I remember that ten years ago, a French mathematician (whose name I have
forgotten) gave a talk about this subject. He was trying to set up this kind of
organization of the peer review by researchers, in a very small field of
mathematics. He said that it was very difficult. I think that he has not
succeeded, because I never heard about it after.
Hélène Bosc
----- Original Message -----
From: Jean-Claude Guédon
To: Jan Velterop
Cc: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2012 4:23 PM
Subject: [GOAL] Re: [BOAI10] Re: Elsevier's query re: "positive things from
publishers that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized"
Jan,
I do not disagree with what you say, but I was disagreeing with what Eric was
saying. He suggested publishers should select editorial boards. Like you, I
believe that they should be organized by researchers themselves. The same
applies to the peer review comment.
As for searchability, I believe it goes beyond discoverability.
Etc. etc.
Jean-Claude
--
Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal
Le mardi 15 mai 2012 à 18:47 +0100, Jan Velterop a écrit :
On 15 May 2012, at 17:12, Jean-Claude Guédon wrote:
With due respect to Eric, I will disagree with at least the devolution of
the first two tasks
1. The selection of editors should come from scientific communities
themselves, not from commercial publishers. This is a good instance where
commercial concerns (maximizing profits, etc.) can pollute research concerns.
There is also something weird in having commercial publishers holding the key
to what may amount to the ultimate academic promotion: being part of an
editorial board means power over colleagues; being editor-in-chief even more
so. At least, when journals were in the hands of scientific associations, the
editorial choice remained inside the community of researchers. What criteria,
beyond scientific competence and prestige, may enter into the calculations of a
commercial publisher while choosing an editor-in-chief, God knows…
With due respect, Jean-Claude, but there is absolutely nothing that stops
the scientific community from organising itself, select editors and editorial
boards and establish journals. In principle, that is. In practice, well, they
don't do it, at least not to a sufficient degree. It is this academic inertia
that gave publishers an opportunity to fill the gap.
2. Effective peer review should be organized by peers themselves, by
scholars and scientists, not by publishers. Tools to organize this process
should ideally be based on free software and available to all in a way that
allows disciplinary or speciality tweaking. The Open Journal System, for
example, is a good, free, tool to organize peer review and manuscript handling
in the editorial phase. Such a tool should be favoured over proprietary tools
offered to editors as a way to convince them to join a particular journal
stable, and as a way to make them dependent on that tool - yet another way to
ensure growing stables of journals.
There is an element of nephelokokkygia going on here, I'm afraid. There is
nothing that stops academics from organising effective peer review. In
principle, that is. In practice, well, they don't do it, at least not to a
sufficient degree. It is this academic inertia that gave publishers an
opportunity to fill the gap. It feels like I'm repeating myself here. It's not
the availability of software that is the limiting factor; it's the lack of
initiative and of l'esprit d'entreprise that is. When they are present in
academics, for instance in Varmus, Brown and Eisen, it can lead to great
success indeed, as we have seen.
Professional "looks" can indeed be given away to commercial publishers.
Layout, spelling, perhaps some syntaxic and stylistic help would be nice. But I
would stop there.
As for the "archivable" historic record, I would have to see more details
to give my personal blessing to this. Remember how Elsevier pitted Yale against
the Royal Dutch Library when the issue of digital preservation began to emerge
a dozen or so years ago. I am not sure about the distinction between archived
and archivable.
For searchability, remember what Clifford Lynch declared years ago in the
OA book edited by Neil Jacobs: no real open access without open computation.
Elsevier and other publishers do code their articles in XML, but provide only
impoverished, eye-ball limited, pdf or html files. When one uses Science
Direct, all kinds of links pop up to guide us toward other articles, presumably
from Elsevier journals. This is part of driving a competition based on impact
factors. That is not the kind of searchability we want, even though it is of
some value.
I presume 'searchability' means discoverability here, and I'm pretty sure
all Elsevier articles and any articles published by any serious publisher, for
profit or NfP, are fully indexed by Google and their ilk. Searching in general
for literature on any publisher's journal platform site other than for specific
articles you know or suspect have been published by that publisher, is naive.
The quest for "alternative comprehensive systems" is exactly what
Elsevier attempts to build with Scopus. In so doing, Elsevier picks up on the
vision of Robert Maxwell when the latter did everything he could, from cajoling
to suing, to get the Science Citation Index away from Garfield's hands. Is this
really what we want? If it were open, and open access, Eric's idea would make
sense; otherwise, it becomes a formidable source of economic power that will do
much harm to scientific communication. In effect, with a universal indexing
index and more than 2,000 titles in its stable, Elsevier could become judge and
party of scientific value.
Again, there is absolutely nothing, in principle, that stops the scientific
community from organising itself and establishing a comprehensive reference and
abstract database. In the life sciences it's been done by PubMed (admittedly
not quite academics themselves, but at least an academic funding body, the
NIH). Why don't they do it?
Finally, I am not blaming companies for trying to make money, except when
they pollute their environment. Most do so in the physical environment, and
they are regulated, or should be. The commercial publishers do it in their
virtual environment by driving research competition through tools that also
favour their commercial goals. The intense competition around publishing in
"prestigious journals" - prestige being defined here as impact factors,
although impact factors are a crazy way to measure or compare almost anything -
leads to all kinds of practices that go against the grain of scientific
research. The rise in retracted papers in the most prestigious journals -
prestige being again measured here by IF - is a symptom of this "pollution.
I agree it is pollution. But it's not the publishers who are in any
position to keep the JIF going as proxy for quality. It's the academic
community itself that is doing that. And yes, if you present the publishers
with such a juicy bone, don't expect them not to grab it.
The rise in journal prices was tentatively explained in my old article,
"In Oldenburg's Long Shadow" that came out eleven years ago. It tries at least
to account for the artificial creation of an inelastic market around "core
journals", the latter being the consequence of the methods used to design the
Science Citation Index. Incidentally, the invention of the "core journal" myth
- myth because it arbitrarily transforms an operational truncation needed for
the practical handling of large numbers of citations into an elite-building
club of journals - has been one of the most grievous obstacle to the healthy
globalization of science publishing in the whole world. Speak to Brazilians
like Abel Packer about this, and he will tell you tons of stories related to
this situation. Scientific quality grows along a continuous gradient, not
according to a two-tier division between core science, so-called, and the rest.
The only credible myth-busters would be academics themselves. Where are
they?
Jean-Claude Guédon
--
Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal
Le lundi 14 mai 2012 à 11:38 -0700, Eric F. Van de Velde a écrit :
To Alicia:
Here are what I consider the positive contributions by commercial
publishers. For any of the positive qualities I mention, it is easy find
counterexamples. What matters is that, on the average, the major publishers
have done a good job on the following:
- Select good editorial boards of leading scholars.
- Develop effective systems for organizing peer review.
- Produce articles/journals that look professional commensurate with
the importance of the scholarship.
- Produce an archivable historical record of scholarship.
Publishers only receive a marginally passing grade for producing
searchable databases of the scholarly record and journals. In the age of
iTunes, Netflix, etc., it is inexcusable that to search through scholarship one
must buy separate products like the Web of Knowledge in addition to the journal
subscriptions. Publishers need to work together to produce alternative
comprehensive systems.
Most commercial publishers and some society publishers (like ACS)
receive failing grades on cost containment. Because of their importance to
academia, scholarly publishers have been blessed with the opportunity to
reinvent themselves for the future without the devastating disruption other
kinds of publishers faced (newspapers, magazines, etc.). However, instead of
taking advantage of this opportunity, scholarly publishers are squandering it
for temporary financial gain. Every price increase brings severe disruption
closer. On the current path, your CEOs are betting the existence of the company
every year.
About the only company who understands the current information market
is Amazon, and everything they do is geared towards driving down costs of the
infrastructure. Your competition will not come from Amazon directly, but from
every single academic who will be able to produce a high-quality electronic
journal from his/her office. There may be only one success for every hundred
failed journals in this system, but suppose it is so easy 100,000 try... Your
brand/prestige/etc. will carry you only so far. (Amazon is focusing on e-books
production now, but it is only a matter of time when they come out with a
journal system.)
To Jean-Claude:
Blaming commercial enterprises for making too much money is like
blaming scholars for having too many good ideas. Making money is their purpose.
They will stop raising prices if doing so is in their self-interest.
The real question is why the scholarly information market is so screwed
up that publishers are in a position to keep raising prices. I am blaming site
licenses
(http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com/2011/07/what-if-libraries-were-problem.html
and http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com/2011/09/publishers-dilemma.html), but I
am open to alternative explanations.
--Eric.
http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com
Google Voice: (626) 898-5415
Telephone: (626) 376-5415
Skype chat, voice, or web-video: efvandevelde
E-mail: [email protected]
On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 9:56 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <[email protected]>
wrote:
Jean-Claude,
This is a great analysis and says almost exactly some of what I was
planning to say.
We cannot de facto trust the publishers to work in our interests.
There was a time when this was posssible - but no longer.
--
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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