[GOAL] Endorsement Is Not Peer Review

Fri May 1 11:32:08 BST 2015

On Fri, May 1, 2015 at 5:39 AM, Jan Velterop <velterop at gmail.com> wrote:

> The cost of properly and robustly preparing articles for preservation,
> archiving, machine-reading (TDM) etc. is more essential in my view, given
> the mess many authors (and, it has to be said, many publishers) make of
> that. That cost is but a fraction of the cost of arranging peer review by
> publishers. Prepublication peer review can perfectly well be arranged by
> academics themselves. See this:
> http://blog.scienceopen.com/2015/04/welcome-jan-velterop-peer-review-by-endorsement/
>
>

Endorsement is not peer review.

Harnad, S. (1998/2000/2004) The invisible hand of peer review
<http://www.nature.com/nature/webmatters/invisible/invisible.html>.
*Nature* [online]
(5 Nov. 1998), *Exploit Interactive*
<http://www.exploit-lib.org/issue5/peer-review/> 5 (2000): and in Shatz, B.
(2004) (ed.) *Peer Review: A Critical Inquiry*. Rowland & Littlefield. Pp.
235-242. http://cogprints.org/1646/

Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition
<http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13309/>. In: Anna Gacs. The Culture of
Periodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age. L'Harmattan.
99-106. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13309/

Please also see the reference below, on crowd-sourcing.

Stevan Harnad

Sent from Jan Velterop's iPhone. Please excuse for brevity and typos.
>
> On 1 May 2015, at 10:10, Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The only essential cost in peer-reviewed research publication in the
> online (PostGutenberg) era is the cost of managing peer review.
>
> Harnad, S (2014) The only way to make inflated journal subscriptions
> unsustainable: Mandate Green Open Access
> <http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/28/inflated-subscriptions-unsustainable-harnad/>
> . *LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog **4/28 *
> http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/04/28/inflated-subscriptions-unsustainable-harnad/
>
> Harnad, S. (2014) Crowd-Sourced Peer Review: Substitute or supplement for
> the current outdated system?
> <http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/08/21/crowd-sourced-peer-review-substitute-or-supplement/>
>  *LSE Impact Blog* 8/21 August 21 2014
> http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2014/08/21/crowd-sourced-peer-review-substitute-or-supplement/
> Harnad, S. (2010) No-Fault Peer Review Charges: The Price of Selectivity
> Need Not Be Access Denied or Delayed
> <http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/>. D-Lib Magazine 16 (7/8)
> <http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july10/harnad/07harnad.html>.
> http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 10:04 PM, Éric Archambault <
> eric.archambault at science-metrix.com> wrote:
>
>> Heather
>>
>> I think using the term "toll" when what we mean is "subscription" is
>> quite limiting. There is always a toll charged or taken whatever the model
>> used to diffuse scientific knowledge. The important question is not about
>> toll or profit, it is about seeking an effective knowledge delivery system
>> that is as close as possible to universal access to academic and scientific
>> knowledge, while doing this relatively efficiently at the system level.
>> Like anything else in our money-mediated society, there is a cost
>> associated with achieving this objective. Several models are available, all
>> with their own tolls.
>>
>> PLoS charges tolls at the entry point in the form of Article Processing
>> Charge while Elsevier charges tolls in the form of subscription. Both limit
>> access at one end of the communication pipeline (to publish, or to read),
>> both charge money. Hence, Elsevier and PLoS both are toll access publishers.
>>
>> Everything being equal, between the two, the APC model is inherently more
>> efficient as it more largely unleashes the $450 billion spent annually by
>> governments the world over to support public research. However, it presents
>> its own problems of equal access (that is, equal access to the capacity to
>> publish equal quality papers) and is likely to perpetuate the North-South
>> divide if no steps are taken.
>>
>> Gold with no APC is certainly also associated with large tolls, including
>> resource allocation inefficiencies, and lack of sustainability which
>> reduces the value of the published output (it takes a long time to build a
>> reputation for a publication venue and papers in abandoned journals are
>> less likely to be read over time). Individuals in the top 5% income bracket
>> (e.g. university professors) producing journals is not a model of efficient
>> allocation of public money. Finding long term sustainable income to pay for
>> the rest of the personnel involved in APC-less gold also present some
>> definitive challenges, sustainability being the toughest.
>>
>> Hybrid, à la pièce, gold probably present the worse of all worlds as it
>> is expensive, paid twice for, and very difficult to discover considering
>> that publishers are packaging these papers among the restricted access
>> material. These should be duplicated on separate parts of the publishers'
>> website and their metadata freely harvestable by anyone, and the papers
>> themselves mass downloadable. This would increase their value, and
>> facilitate oversight.
>>
>> Green alas does not seem to save it all. On the Southampton repository,
>> there are only some 7000-8000 peer-reviewed published papers which are
>> available for download out of about 57,000 claimed peer-reviewed papers in
>> the repository. For most of these 57,000 items, there is only fairly
>> unequal quality and often incomplete metadata (what is the purpose of
>> putting varying quality metadata in a repo if no associated paper is
>> available is something I still have to understand), and frequently, when
>> there is a paper, access is restricted to Southampton. Postscript files
>> (.ps) are nice for technically inclined users but most ordinary users do
>> not what to do with them and having PDF presenting only a cover page is
>> only a loss of time. Sifting through this is time consuming, presents a
>> huge toll in time, as the signal to noise ratio really is poor. This model
>> takes its toll on the those who depose, and on those who are audacious
>> enough to search in there. In my opinion, for what it's worth, Green in
>> institutional repositories needs to be re-loaded with clean, curated, and
>> useful documents, as currently it is mostly a mess that hides too few gems.
>>
>> If we had proper economic models, we would probably find that the social
>> optimum at the moment for green is in the form of central "repositories"
>> such as arXiv, CiteSeerX, PubMedCentral and Scielo. If we had hard data, we
>> would certainly find that they cost very little to operate per available
>> paper. These are smart models as they present considerable economies of
>> scale, reasonable user friendliness and good discoverability, in addition
>> to making their metadata available and making papers fairly convenient to
>> retrieve. This model of access is great.
>>
>> Getting closer to universal access to public knowledge is not a simple
>> question of tolls - it comprises subscription costs, publications costs,
>> production costs, distribution cost, opportunity costs.
>>
>> Eric Archambault
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: goal-bounces at eprints.org [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On
>> Behalf Of Heather Morrison
>> Sent: April-29-15 8:42 PM
>> To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
>> Subject: [GOAL] Elsevier (and other traditional publishers) and PLOS
>>
>> Elsevier has much in common with Public Library of Science: both are
>> scholarly publishing organizations, focused on science, and in my opinion
>> both aggressively advocate sometimes for the best interests of scholarship,
>> but often primarily for their own business interests.
>>
>> If policy-makers are aiming to help traditional publishers like Elsevier
>> survive in an open access environment (a goal I am not sure we all agree
>> on), then in formulating policies it is important to keep in mind some very
>> basic differences.
>>
>> PLOS was born digital and open access and with a full commitment to open
>> access. Traditional publishers like Elsevier have a legacy of works under
>> copyright and a business model that involves selling rights to these works
>> and integrated search services (rather a lot of money at that). In the case
>> of Elsevier, this involves millions of works over a long period of time.
>> Even if every single article Elsevier publishes from today on were open
>> access, this would not impact previously published works. Unless I am
>> missing something there is no business model for Elsevier to provide access
>> to these previously published works free-of-charge. This means that
>> traditional publishers like Elsevier are very likely to have to continue
>> with a toll access business model even if they move forward with open
>> access publishing. This is an essentially different environment from that
>> of a full open access publisher like PLOS. It is not realistic to assume
>> that a traditional publisher that must maintain a toll access environment
>> will behave in the same way that born open access publishers do. PLOS was
>> started from a commitment to providing works free-of-charge. Elsevier and
>> publishers like Elsevier have thrived in a toll access environment, and
>> will have to maintain a toll access environment. There will be far more
>> pressure and incentive to revert to toll access for traditional publishers
>> than for PLOS. This is why arguments along the lines that PLOS has been
>> around for a while, therefore there are no problems with CC-BY, don't
>> necessarily apply to a publisher like Elsevier.
>>
>> Elsevier, unlike PLOS, does have its own suite of value-added services
>> such as Science Direct and Scopus. When friends of PLOS say there is no
>> reason not to grant blanket commercial rights to anyone downstream, I think
>> it is important to remember that this represents the perspective of one
>> type of publisher. Other journals and publishers either provide value added
>> services themselves, or receive revenue from providers of such services,
>> e.g. payments from journal aggregators.
>>
>> Note that while Elsevier has no incentive to provide access to previously
>> published works free-of-charge, they are a green publisher and so authors
>> from recent years can make their works published with Elsevier freely
>> available through institutional archives. This is one thing green open
>> access can achieve right now that gold OA cannot. I'd like to acknowledge
>> that Stevan Harnad has been right on this point for many, many years.
>>
>> I'm still signed on for the Elsevier boycott, in case anyone is wondering:
>> http://thecostofknowledge.com/
>>
>> best,
>>
>> --
>> Dr. Heather Morrison
>> Assistant Professor
>> École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
>> University of Ottawa
>> http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
>> Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
>> Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca
>>
>>
>>
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