[GOAL] Re: Gold OA: Publication costs and journal impact factors

[Stevan Harnad]

On 2012-10-12, at 10:32 AM, Sally Morris wrote:

> high IF journals tend to reject a higher %
> of articles than low or no IF journals.  Accepted articles have to bear a
> share of the costs of processing these articles up to the point of
> rejection. 

This is exactly why post-Green Gold will be just a no-fault peer-review
service: Accepted papers will no longer be paying for rejected ones.

Gold OA costs will be per round of refereeing, regardless of outcome.
If/when a paper meets a journal's acceptance standards with no further
need for revision, "publication" will be cerified by the journal's imprimatur.

All the access-provision and archiving will be done by the distributed
global network of  Green OA institutional repositories.

And journals will only be motivated to create and maintain a track-record
for high quality, to attract submissions seeking certification of having met
those standards. But papers that meet the standards will no longer be
subsidizing the costs of refereeing papers that do not.

And of course there will continue to be a hierarchy of journals, and 
their corresponding peer-review quality standards, since human
endeavor is inevitably Gaussian, and selectivity percentiles are 
selectivity percentiles.

Authors will not pick journals by their price (which will be the same, per round)
but by their quality standards. And even if their paper fails to meet the standards
of a journal whose quality is higher than a given author can reach, authors will
still benefit from the recommendations made by the referees of that higher-standard
journal in revising their paper for a journal more appropriate for its quality level.

(And to minimize their costs, authors will make more effort to choose
journals commensurate with the quality of their articles, instead of all
trying for the top journals, and thereby increasing the cost of the accepted
articles, as now, in the acceptance-based subscription and Gold OA
system.)

But for all these good things, we first have to mandate Green globally…

Stevan Harnad
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