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 knowsâ¦
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.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.
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?Â
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?Â
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... 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
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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