[GOAL] Re: [Open-access] Re: Hitler, Mother Teresa, and Coke

[Marcin Wojnarski]

Eric's distinction between publishing for communication or for prestige 
is quite thought-provoking, if not provocative. Does anyone have an idea 
how many authors fall to each group? What's more important for majority 
of academics: communication or prestige? ...

I think there's a misconception regarding prestige and its real 
significance. This issue has been raised many times recently in 
discussions about OA: the frequently repeated claim, expressed also by 
Eric in his blog post, is that _scholars publish for prestige_ (and for: 
high metrics, tenure, "exposition", benefits, rewards, incentives, ...) 
- that's why adoption of OA is slow and costs of traditional journals 
are high. Do you think this claim is true?

I don't.

The statement that "scholars publish for prestige" is an euphemism for 
"scholars are careerists who care more about tenure than quality and 
meaningfulness of their research". I don't believe this. I don't believe 
that majority of academics are careerists who don't care if their papers 
are read by anybody. Suggesting that entire academic communication is 
nothing else but a PR bubble (prestige! prestige!) driven by primitive 
rules of social darwinism - is not just totally wrong, but also 
offending to academia. Maybe 5% of academics are careerists, the other 
95% are extremely interested in whether their papers have _real_ impact 
or not ("real" in contrast to "measured by IF"). I mean: they have a 
deep _hope_ that their research will ultimately have an impact. I'm 
convinced that this hope accounts for at least 90% of motivation of 
those people for becoming a scientist and doing laborious research job 
that's compensated with a half or 1/3 of what's paid for similar skills 
outside academia.

The key problem is that prestige of the journal and size+quality of 
potential audience for the paper - are correlated. Every author who 
respects his own work seeks as large and reputable audience as possible 
- not for prestige (!) but for the ability to communicate own 
discoveries to people who are able to understand, appreciate and make 
use of them. That's why authors must rely on prestiguous journals even 
if prestige itself has no value for them! (BTW, looking at the society 
as a whole, I think scientists are the people with _least_ respect for 
prestige, compared to any other community).

The way to change the situation is by decoupling communication potential 
of journals from their perceived prestige; and by enhancing visibility 
of small, niche, low-prestige journals. The focus must be on 
communication, community and readers; not on prestige.

-Marcin

-- 
Marcin Wojnarski, Founder and CEO, TunedIT
http://tunedit.org
http://www.facebook.com/TunedIT
http://twitter.com/wojnarski
http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcinwojnarski

TunedIT - Online Laboratory for Intelligent Algorithms



On 11/06/2012 09:58 AM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
> Copied only to the OKFN open-access list.
>
> It may be useful to consider the question: "what can we do to change 
> the situation?" - the OKF has a strong tradition of building things to 
> change the world. The distinction between publishing for communication 
> and publishing for reputation is valuable. Maybe by changing and 
> improving the former (which I think OKFN is well placed to do) we can 
> separate them.
>
> On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 8:23 AM, Leslie Carr <lac at ecs.soton.ac.uk 
> <mailto:lac at ecs.soton.ac.uk>> wrote:
>
>     Publishers are capitalists - I don't think they'd argue the point.
>
>
> This is a generalization. Many learned societies and scientific unions 
> are not capitalists.
>
> -- 
> 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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