[GOAL] Journal Titles Are Not "Brands": They Are Earned Track Records For Peer-Review Quality Standards

[Stevan Harnad]

Journal titles are not designer "brands": They are earned track-records for
peer-review quality standards.

Track records for peer review have to be established across years of
maintaining a peer review quality standard; they are not established
overnight by creating a new journal title and publishing a few good
articles.

There may sometimes be a correlation between journal impact factor and
journal peer-review quality standards, but neither the small magnitude of
that correlation nor its misuse has anything to do with the need for time
and evidence to establish a journal's track-record for quality before the
title itself earns its correlation with quality.

Stevan Harnad

On Thu, Nov 8, 2012 at 7:28 AM, Ross Mounce <ross.mounce at gmail.com> wrote:

> What's wrong with a high quality, peer-reviewed RCUK-funded article
> appearing in a 'faceless' journal with the word 'Open' in it?
>
> If the traditional publishers won't allow CC BY for a reasonable price
> then of course new 'faceless' entrants will offer more value for money gold
> OA venues of equivalent technical quality.
>
> I for one would quite like this change. Articles would have to be judged
> on their own merits for once, rather than the journal impact factor of the
> journal they appear in.
>
> As long as its good content, peer-reviewed and available as CC BY with a
> DOI, article landing page and a few other technical things - I think this
> would be good. Articles don't need 'face' branded journals to have
> intellectual merit.
>
> My .02
>
> Ross
>
> PS who or what are the 'gold oa pack'? Do supporters of OA really have to
> be so divisive?
> On Nov 8, 2012 12:12 PM, "Steve Hitchcock" <sh94r at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
>
>> Having feasted on Kent Anderson's anti-OA, anti-eLife and anti-PMC views,
>> thanks to Richard Poynder's interview, the gold OA pack are now descending
>> on Nature for having the temerity to charge a higher price for CC-BY OA
>> than for, say, CC-BY-NC-ND
>> http://www.nature.com/press_releases/cc-licenses.html
>>
>> "what’s really outrageous about this: they’re explicitly charging MORE
>> for applying/allowing a CC BY license relative to the more restrictive
>> licenses. Applying a license to a digital work costs nothing. By charging
>> £100-400 more for CC BY they’re really taking the piss – charging more for
>> ABSOLUTELY NO ADDITIONAL EFFORT on their part. Horrid. Other than greed
>> what is the justification for this?"
>> http://rossmounce.co.uk/2012/11/07/gold-oa-pricewatch/
>>
>> Apparently Nature has a brand value it is ready to exploit, and we
>> haven't yet learned that it's rights we are paying for with gold OA, not OA
>> itself.
>>
>> Or perhaps we have learned that lesson, and the new game is to squash
>> brand value. A PLOS representative apparently says at #berlin10sa "it's not
>> about where you publish it's about who you reach". In other words, make the
>> venue irrelevant?
>>
>> @PLOSBiology The @wellcometrust values the merits of the article over the
>> journal it is published in - Chris Bird at #berlin10sa
>>
>> Another anti-OA cook had already spotted, and applauded, this strategy
>> (see penultimate paragraph)
>>
>> http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/11/06/why-did-publishers-get-so-big/
>>
>> Meanwhile, the #altmetrics movement gathers steam with the idea that we
>> can measure some new things even if we don't yet know what those things
>> might mean. But one goal is clear: disconnect the impact calculation from
>> the venue and reconnect it to the paper. Actually, it is about time that we
>> moved on from the journal impact factor, but is that the simple agenda here?
>>
>> I suspect this is not where Finch and its publishers, and RCUK, think
>> they are heading with their vision of hybrid gold OA. That approach is
>> going to price some authors out of their familiar, favourite journals; the
>> emerging alternative is those journals may not be there for them at all, to
>> be replaced with faceless collections like (name your publisher) OPEN.
>>
>> Straws in the wind, or connected?
>>
>> Steve Hitchcock
>> WAIS Group, Building 32
>> School of Electronics and Computer Science
>> University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
>> Email: sh94r at ecs.soton.ac.uk
>> Twitter: @stevehit
>> Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/user/stevehit
>> Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 9379    Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 9379
>>
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>
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