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

Wed May 16 20:11:16 BST 2012

Just to close the issue in every tense, including the subjunctive:

I agree with Jean-Claude that, ideally, editorial boards should be chosen
by scholars themselves.

Scholars should have taken charge of this responsibility, but they didn't.

Scholars should not have let publishers take charge of choosing editorial
boards, but they did.

Given that they did, publishers did an effective job.

By and large, there are only few complaints about the quality of the
content of journals from major publishers. The issue is cost and access.
--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 Wed, May 16, 2012 at 8:18 AM, Jean-Claude Guédon <
jean.claude.guedon at umontreal.ca> wrote:

> **
> The "should" here is the subjunctive "should", without the obligatory
> connotation.
>
> My objection to Eric's statement is that it agrees with the idea of
> publisher selecting editorial boards. I totally disagree with this.
>
>
> Jean-Claude
>
>
>   --
> Jean-Claude Guédon
> Professeur titulaire
> Littérature comparée
> Université de Montréal
>
>
>
>   Le mercredi 16 mai 2012 à 16:08 +0100, Jan Velterop a écrit :
>
>
>  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.
>
>
>
> 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 knows…
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
> 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?
>
>  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?
>
>
> 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.htmland
> 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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