Jean-Claude said :"I believe that they should be organized by researchers
themselves. The same applies to the peer review comment."
It would be interesting to know if such experiment has been tried, in some
fields, somewhere in the world.
I remember that ten years ago, a French mathematician (whose name I have
forgotten) gave a talk about this subject. He was trying to set up this kind
of
organization of the peer review by researchers, in a very small field of
mathematics. He said that it was very difficult. I think that he has not
succeeded, because I never heard about it after.
Hélène Bosc
----- Original Message -----
From: Jean-Claude Guédon
To: Jan Velterop
Cc: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Sent: Wednesday, May 16, 2012 4:23 PM
Subject: [GOAL] Re: [BOAI10] Re: Elsevier's query re: "positive things
from publishers that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized"
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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