[GOAL] Re: Fool's Gold vs. Fair Gold

[Stevan Harnad]

On Tue, Oct 8, 2013 at 10:44 AM, Jan Velterop <velterop at gmail.com> wrote:

Instead of taking responsibility for the technical aspects of publishing,
> the academic community should take responsibility for the whole process of
> peer review – an academic competency, after all – including its
> organisation, and leave the technical aspects of publishing to specialist
> outfits with the requisite expertise and wherewithal.
>

The scientific community already does the peer reviewing. It just needs
competent editors to choose the referees and adjudicate the reviews and
revisions.

That's what an OA-era peer-reviewed journal does. And that's all: It's a
peer-review service-provider (with a title and track-record to certify the
outcome).

The "technical aspects| of making peer-reviewed papers accessible to all in
the OA-era do not require publishers (nor their -- newfound -- online
"expertise": every graduate student in computer or information science
already has all the expertise required).

Publishers being in charge of the peer review process is an anachronism and
> a relic from the days in which publishers needed to be selective in what
> they chose to publish (i.e. print and distribute) due to the inherent
> scarcity of resources for printing and distribution.
>

The management of peer review by publishers may be an anachronism, but
someone has to do it, and whoever does it is the journal, and the
publisher, in the OA-era.

(And publishers certainly didn't invent peer review, which simply means
quality evaluation and control by qualified specialists.)

Nor is peer review just about controlling the quantity of the limited
number of articles that can be published. It is about quality control, and
making sure that the article is tagged by the peer-review
service-provider's track-record for quality control (the journal title).

There is (and always has been) a hierarchy of quality standards among
journals. Everything gets published. The only question is: how far down in
the hierarchy?

OA does not change this. It just eliminates all the other obsolete products
and services, and their costs, that were co-bundled with it (generating the
print edition, the online edition, access-provision, archiving).


> Nowadays, peer review is a mess...What is needed is to spruce it up, get
> rid of anonymity and to place responsibility for the peer review process
> entirely back into the academic community. Possibly in the form of open and
> signed 'peer-endorsements' before being presented to a publisher.
>

Peer review is quality control by qualified experts. Not to put too shrill
a complexion on it: You'd better quality-control your medication
*before*you put it on the market, rather than waiting for
crowd-sourcing to signal
whether it's fine or fatal, after the fact.

Post-publication peer commentary is a valuable supplement for peer review,
but no substitute for it.

(Jan is quick to recommend untested alternatives, such as non-anonymity and
"endorsements" without waiting to see whether they can deliver quality of
at least the level peer review delivers today: j.mp/PRtesting)


> Authors' technical sloppiness is legendary... Even the professional
> publishers need to up their game. The technical quality of what is being
> published is often appalling.
>

Fine. Let the market decide. *Let publishers stop trying to embargo Green
OA, with all its "technical sloppiness," so that all institutions and
funders can mandate immediate-OA* (instead of just immediate-deposit, as
now).

Then, if Jan is right, post-Green subscriptions will remain sustainable and
publishers can focus on "upping their game" while the research community at
last has its Green OA.

if anything should be outsourced and paid for it is the process of
> technical preparation for open access, with all its technical integrity,
> unique identity (version of record), portability, interoperability,
> machine-readability, preservation-robustness, findability, semantically
> linked to data and other resources, and the like.
>

Let there be 100% Green OA, unembargoed and unobstructed by publishers, and
Jan's hypothesis that publishers have value to add apart from managing peer
review can be tested empirically, by the market.

(But what is more likely is that if journal publishers offloaded
peer-review management on other service-providers, they will have
relinquished their involvement in peer-reviewed journal publication
altogether, and those other "service-providers" will simply become the
journals. That's all there is to a post-OA peer-reviewed journal: The
peer-review service, and the title that certifies it with its track-record
for quality-standards.)


> I know Stevan thinks that 'ocular access', just human readability, is
> enough... (though I doubt it).
>

Fine. That hypothesis will be tested by the market too, if publishers drop
their attempts to embargo or obstruct Gratis Green OA...

Stevan Harnad
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20131008/e3c56c84/attachment.html