On 16 May 2012, at 15:23, Jean-Claude Guédon wrote:
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.
Jean-Claude, I don't think Eric said that. He said the publishers *did*, not
that they *should*. And I don't believe he meant *should*.
As for searchability, I believe it goes beyond discoverability.
You're right. But with the right tools, literature, even in PDF, doesn't have to
be 'eyeball-limited' any longer. See http://utopiadocs.com, for instance.
Or http://pdfx.cs.man.ac.uk/ These tools are freely available to individuals as
well as repositories. If it weren't for rights barriers, most of the material in
repositories could all be 'libre' OA.Â
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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