Stevan's responses help me sharpen my line of argument (see below). Please see also my original posting. What do others think about the role of incentives in freeing the literature?
------------------------------------------ PAS>> [T]hree clear instantiations of the [current] incentive system are PAS>> university promotion committees, granting agency review committees, and PAS>> award committees... These groups... are supposed to judge "quality"... > SH >They judge quality, in part, with the help of prior peer review, as SH>implemented by the established refereed journals. (This is one of the SH>functions of the essential Quality-Control/Certification [QC/C] service SH>that refereed journals provide, and will continue to be paid for SH>providing.) If each paper had to be peer-reviewed afresh by each review SH>committee, the work of quality-control would be increased by an order SH>of magnitude -- rather like asking employers to re-mark the school SH>essays of all their candidates instead of relying on the marks they SH>were assigned by their universities. I agree with the comment about QC/C. The argument about re-marking papers afresh is specious for reasons I present below. ------------------------------------------------------------------ > SH>Peer review is imperfect, whether exercised by journal editors/referees SH>or by review committees; it could stand improvement, as well as SH>supplementation by other new forms of evaluation, including online SH>informetrics. But that is not the focus of this Forum. This Forum is SH>about freeing the peer-reviewed literature, such as it is, now. There SH>is no reason to delay or side-track this immediate, face-valid SH>objective by coupling it in any way with untested hypotheses about SH>ways of improving or modifying or replacing peer review. There is a reason. You can create self-archives but their use by researchers will be impeded by the fact that self-archiving will be seen by researchers to limit future publication options (see below), and therefore opportunities for promotion and other incentives. I know the Los Alamos physics archive enjoyed tremendous growth, but i am not aware the physics community faced a critical mass of prestigious journals that would not publish papers that had been self-archived. Am i wrong about this? This is of course an empirical question. We can find some empirical evidence in BMJ netprints -- the growth there has not to date paralleled the situation with the Los Alamos server. Why not? --------------------------------------------------------- > PAS>> Now the question becomes how does the decision of an author to submit PAS>> her work to traditional journals versus new forms of e-"publishing" PAS>> such as self-archiving or Biomedcentral relate to these incentives? > SH>This is a false opposition: There IS an either/or decision for authors SH>contemplating "new forms of e-publishing [e.g., BiomedCentral]," but NO SH>such either/or decision for authors contemplating self-archiving (of SH>their refereed papers, published in traditional journals). They are SH>contemplating a both/and decision that can only increase, not decrease SH>the impact of their papers. Self-archiving is not a both/and decision because many prestigious journals will not accept papers that have been posted to the web. Although some journals do accept previously posted articles, the author limits her options by self-archiving. We may agree that such restrictions are not a good thing, but they exist. On the matter of self-archiving vs. Biomedcentral, after attending the interesting conferenece in New York, I am not sure the distinction between self-archiving and Biomedcentral with respect to subsequent publication is as striking as Stevan implies. In both cases the author retains copyright. Why would another journal -- say a specialty journal serving a particular audience -- publish [a modified or customized version of] only self- archived papers but not papers from Biomedcentral if they feel the material is of interest to their readers? --------------------------------------------------------------- PAS>> Now the question becomes how to change the incentive system so authors PAS>> can be rewarded for "publishing" in the new ways? SH>On the self-archiving model, there is no need to change the incentive SH>system for publishing; an incentive has to be provided for SH>self-archiving IN ADDITION TO publishing. Part of that incentive is the SH>increased impact made possible by free access; the other part would SH>come from Universities' mounting Open Archives, rewarding their SH>researchers for self-archiving in them, and even providing proxies SH>(students or digitial library staff) to do the first wave of SH>self-archiving for them: http://eprints.org If you build it, they might not come. The reason is self-archiving might limit publication options (see above). When you write Unviersities should reward researchers for self-archiving, you are agreeing with my argument that incentives matter. What sort of incentives did you have in mind here? > ------------------------------------------------------------------ PAS>> The... university, granting agency, or award-giving body simply needs PAS>> to state that the work itself, and not where it was published, should PAS>> be the focus of attention of review committees > SH>And unfortunately the proponent of this expedient needs to state where SH>these review committees are to find the time, money, and peers to SH>peer-review all these already peer-reviewed papers afresh each time. The focus of review in the incentive system is not the paper but usually the person (university promotion committee or career award or prize). So it is a false proposition to say all the articles will need to be re- reviewed. Rather, we need valid and efficient assessments of the body of a person's work that treats fairly work published, for example, in Biomedcentral rather than the brand name journals that will not accept self- archived papers. ------------------------------------------------------------- > PAS>> The current tools of number of articles, journal brand, journal impact PAS>> factor, peer reviews can be improved. If we produce better tools, we PAS>> will decrease reliance on the ones we have now -- especially journal PAS>> brand -- and authors can be recognized appropriately for their work PAS>> submitted to the new venues for e-"publishing". > SH>By all means produce better tools; test them; and once they have been SH>chosen to do the job, they will no doubt be adopted. Meanwhile, we have Sh>a job to do: freeing the current refereed literature online, now. -- SH>Once this is done, there will be a much bigger database for developing SH>those new kinds of tools: http://opcit.eprints.org I am not arguing that self-archives should not be established in medicine and science. I also agree that the freed literature will provide a much better database for citation analysis etc. The difference in our views is that Stevan sees the proper alignement of incentives as a detour on the way to freeing the literature and I see them as a necessary precondition. The problem is, to use Stevan's metaphor, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. We can create self- archives but researchers won't use them in large numbers if the incentive system is not aligned with such use.
