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

Wed Nov 7 21:32:34 GMT 2012

Thanks for the stats. In this kind of surveys much depends on how the 
question is formulated and what naming is used. I think "communication" 
is a very abstract term and not really the root motivation for 
publishing. If they asked about "impact" (like "having impact on your 
discipline of research") instead of "communication", the fraction of 
people to vote for this option would be much higher that 33%.

-Marcin

On 11/07/2012 11:17 AM, Sally Morris wrote:
> 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 
>> <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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>
>
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> -- 
> 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
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