Jan,
I do not disagree with what you say, but I was disagreeing with what Eric was
saying. He suggested publishers should select editorial boards. Like you, I
believe that they should be organized by researchers themselves. The same
applies to the peer review comment.
As for searchability, I believe it goes beyond discoverability.
Etc. etc.
Jean-Claude
--
Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal
Le mardi 15 mai 2012 à 18:47 +0100, Jan Velterop a écrit :
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 Ã 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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