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

Wed Nov 7 12:00:33 GMT 2012

Isn't that a little bit like sending out a survey asking individuals to rate their personal vanity on a scale of 1-10, though? Can you really take such results at face value?

Better to measure revealed preferences based on behaviour, where possible. 

Matt

From: Sally Morris [mailto:sally at morris-assocs.demon.co.uk] 
Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2012 11:17 AM
To: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)' <goal at eprints.org> 
Subject: [GOAL] Re: [Open-access] Re: Hitler, Mother Teresa, and Coke 

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
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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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