Thank you for this, Hélène.
I may not have expressed my thought clearly enough. While doing what Hélène's
mathematician was trying to do is probably difficult, organizing peer review
around a journal has been going on for a long time. In the nineteenth century,
the dominant model was that f scientific associations creating their journals
and organizing the peer review out of their members. This is my implicit model
for a peer review system that emerges out of scientific communities without the
need for a publisher. The presence or existence of the journal is enough to form
a viable editorial committee, and then each member of the editorial board can
begin to farm out articles to relevant peer reviewers.
In more conceptual terms, peer review succeeds when it produces some form of
symbolic value that is widely recognized as such.
What worries me is when publishers invest in a journal, then open positions for
editorial members and proceed to fill them through a variety of informal
contacts. That already shows encroachment on the scientific territory. Providing
tools to manage the back-and-forth flow of manuscripts make the editors further
dependent upon the publishing house and will make withdrawal all that more
painful. Organizing the workflow to help produce desired formats 9e.g.
specific
forms of XML DTD's) feeds directly into the commercial need of a publisher that
desires to transform its publishing site into some kind of attractor where
people keep on discovering papers that may be relevant to their research, but
that are certainly relevant to increasing the impact of these articles (and
hence the impact factor of the publisher's journals). At that point, the mix of
the research and economic imperatives reaches maximum intensity while creating,
thanks to the limits on attention time, a warped landscape of the available
literature.
In short, one must think of a publisher's site as of a lens that remaps the
reality of the scientific landscape into some transform that also favours
commercial and profit-seeking goals. If the latter could be achieved without
interfering with the former, the problem would be minimal, but this is not the
case.
Best regards,
Jean-Claude
--
Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal
Le mercredi 16 mai 2012 à 18:32 +0200, Hélène.Bosc a écrit :
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 Ã 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
 (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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