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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Â
--Eric.
http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com
Google Voice: (626) 898-5415
Telephone: Â Â Â (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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[ Part 2: "Attached Text" ]
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