The debate on self-archiving continues to be, at the very least, 'interesting' and the question of what value, if any, publishers 'add' to the scholarly literature is one of the more interesting topics. As Don King suggests (hello Don, if you are receiving this) "no one has, as yet, quantified exactly how much they have done so" Steven Harnad's (perhaps politically correct) notion is that they add value by controlling quality through the service of refereeing. But, in fact, it is not the publishers who provide that but the rest of the scholarly community acting as unpaid referees - as well as contributing their own publications free of charge to be exploited for profit by the publisher.
Journal publishing of the scholarly literature has the most absurd economic structure of any business in existence. Who else gets their raw material at zero cost? Who else has quality control performed at virtually zero cost, organized not by the publisher but by the ill- paid editor who knows who to call? Who else has had their archiving carried out not by themselves but by libraries? Does Elsevier or anyone else who has taken over smaller publishers over the years have a complete print archive of their output - of course not. I would be very surprised indeed to find any economically valid justification for the notion that publishers add value. Even the question of refereeing as a desirable quality control mechanism is subject to doubt - the ultimate test of quality is whether or not the text is used in forwarding the development of the discipline. Only a small percentage of the total output performs in this way and yet all is quality controlled. At least it ought to be debated whether a more economically efficient quality control process is to publish openly and freely without refereeing and rely upon the reader and user of the information to make his or her own quality judgements when using or deciding not to use a text. The vast amount of uncosted refereeing activity would then be saved and perhaps the scholar could get on with pursuing his or her own work Publishers have been necessary for the past 200 years because of the communication gap between presenter and reader - that gap is now bridged through electronic systems and anything that gets in the way of it is going to fail. I would not be at all surprised to find that some of the major scholarly publishers are quietly going about the business of buying into other interests, for example, in the entertainment world or the real-time information businesses, knowing that their future is a limited one. %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Professor Tom Wilson, Ph.D. Department of Information Studies University of Sheffield Sheffield S10 2TN Tel: (+44)(0)114-222-2631 Fax: (+44)(0)114-278-0300 Web address: http://www.shef.ac.uk/~is/lecturer/tom1.html %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Professors must have a theory as dogs must have fleas. H.L. Mencken %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
