[GOAL] Re: Interview with Harvard's Stuart Shieber

[Richard Poynder]

For sure, there is no easy solution. But should the research community give
up because the task seems difficult? 

Moreover, this need not be about forming commissions of eminent researchers.
There has been some discussion of the issues and challenges here:
http://svpow.com/2012/12/06/crowdsourcing-a-database-of-predatory-oa-journal
s/. Note that the proposal is to use a crowd-sourced solution, not a
top-down organisation. In this scenario the role of any organisation would
perhaps simply be to provide whatever funding was needed to create and
manage the necessary platform, and to give the initiative some legitimacy. 

You will see that a number of people have proposed that the task should come
under the aegis of DOAJ. 

And bear in mind that doing nothing leaves the status quo in place, which is
a situation in which a lone librarian decides for the entire research
community what journals are good, and what journals are bad. Is that really
satisfactory?

Richard


-----Original Message-----
From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf
Of Hans Pfeiffenberger
Sent: 14 December 2012 09:25
To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
Subject: [GOAL] Re: Interview with Harvard's Stuart Shieber


Am 13.12.12 14:09, schrieb Richard Poynder:
> "Another way would be for DOAJ to start excluding journals but that 
> could become very complicated and resource demanding."
>
> This is no doubt true, but isn't it time that some organisation took 
> responsibility for doing this difficult work?

at first sight, one is certainly tempted to say: Yes!

But which organization? There have been (understandable) advances of funders
trying to nail down which journals' APCs are worth funding.
However, to me it is a horrible thought of commissions being instituted to
decide which journal is a worthy addition to the publishing landscape -
considering, as it was proposed, aims&scope, composition of editorial board,
method(s) of peer review (open, post publication, ...), ..., business model.

Clearly, such commissions would be formed of eminent, well established etc.
researchers. Who would most probably be more sceptical of innovation than,
say, a publisher. Instead of an abstract argument in support of this
conjecture I wish to express thanks to Arne Richter of Copernicus
Publications for believing in the future of a journal for data publication
in Earth System Science and now Martin Rasmussen for continued support! I
would never had gotten as much support as fast with zero overhead of
bureaucracy from any funder (or other organization)!

The main policy arguments against *organizations* is that they would
conglomerate or even monopolize influence as compared to a (pre-big deal,
pre-Internet) situation where the success of a journal was determined by
independent subscription decisions of thousands of departments and library
commissions at universities etc.

We simply have to find a better solution than an(!) "organization". In this
context, I am also frightened by PMR's advocacy of "regulation". 
Peter, do you really think that expanded (and ever-expanding) regulation is
to the advantage of *research*? Even if we agree on predators being around -
OA as well as non-OA publishers! - we should not endanger the freedom and
innovative power of science just for the sake of battling those.

Hans
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