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

[Sally Morris]

It's along time ago now, but Alma Swan and Sheridan Brown surveyed nearly
11,000 scholarly authors for ALPSP in 1998/9 and received 3 218 replies.
 
33% put communication with peers as their primary reason for publishing;
career advancement was next (22%). Personal prestige (8%), funding (7%) and
financial reward (1%) were way behind.
 
Sally
 
Sally Morris
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK  BN13 3UU
Tel:  +44 (0)1903 871286
Email:  sally at morris-assocs.demon.co.uk
 

  _____  

From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf
Of Marcin Wojnarski
Sent: 06 November 2012 21:57
To: open-access at lists.okfn.org; Global Open Access List (Successor of
AmSci); Peter Murray-Rust
Subject: [GOAL] Re: [Open-access] Re: Hitler, Mother Teresa, and Coke


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> 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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