On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 5:12 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon
<[email protected]> wrote:
Excellent points - and I will simply amplify some.
With due respect to Eric, I will disagree with at least the
devolution of the first two tasks
This is critical. If 100% of the scholarly record were archived in 1500 Inst.
Repos it would be largely undiscoverable and of relatively small value. I know
others disagree with me on this, but I cite the example of chemistry theses in
the UK. It is impossible to find them systematically. Yes if I know that X has
written a thesis and what university they were at I have a chance. But there are
>> 100,000 theses a year (I have no idea of the real figure and I doubt anyone
has). The same is true of self-archived material - without a search engine it's
undisoverable in bulk - and bulk is essential to many of us, if only to filter
it for others.
Â
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.
It is almost trivial to build an Open index of the current electronic scholarly
literature. We have developed a tool - PubCrawler - which has crawled the web
for crystallography. It scales to any article in any journal of any known
publisher. The ONLY barrier are publishers who might report that publishing it
violated the sui generis database. Is #scholpub the only thing on the web we are
not allowed to index?
P.
--
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... Â 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
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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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--
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
[ Part 2: "Attached Text" ]
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