[GOAL] Re: [BOAI10] Re: Elsevier's query re: "positive things from publishers that should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized"

Tue May 15 17:12:51 BST 2012

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 knows...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Jean-Claude Guédon

-- 
Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal

Le lundi 14 mai 2012 à 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...  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.
>  
> --Eric.
> 
> 
> http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com
> 
> Google Voice: (626) 898-5415
> 
> Telephone:      (626) 376-5415
> Skype chat, voice, or web-video: efvandevelde
> E-mail: eric.f.vandevelde at gmail.com
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, May 14, 2012 at 9:56 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <pm286 at cam.ac.uk>
> 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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> 
> 
> 
> 
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