[GOAL] Re: Squashing the brand? Re: Interview with the Scholarly Kitchen's Kent Anderson

[Steve Hitchcock]

Ross,    In your view, but in this case what would be the point of any journal?

The following video may be of interest here. I just found time to watch it yesterday.

Adam Eyre-Walker "Can we assess the quality and impact of science?" (May 2012) http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=ECHqKfLrfRk#t=5126s

His main point is that journal impact factor has an effect in assessment of papers: "(F1000) assessors are highly influenced by the impact factor of the journal and less by the actual intrinsic quality of the paper"

It will provide support both for and against your view, but ends with:

"The only alternative is we level the playing field and get rid of journals completely and just publish on Web servers and people read whatever they want. But that's never going to happen"

Maybe he's wrong on that last point if certain current initiatives prevail.

Steve

On 8 Nov 2012, at 12:28, Ross Mounce 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
> 
> _______________________________________________
> GOAL mailing list
> GOAL at eprints.org
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
> _______________________________________________
> GOAL mailing list
> GOAL at eprints.org
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal