[GOAL] Re: Endorsement Is Not Peer Review

[Stevan Harnad]

On Fri, May 1, 2015 at 8:25 AM, Jan Velterop <velterop at gmail.com> wrote:

> So a peer reviewer who recommends accepting an article for publication is
> not endorsing its publication?
>

Endorsement is part of peer review, but endorsement is not peer review.

(Peer review in interactive:  errors to correct, revisions to make,
editorial adjudication, sometimes re-refereeing)

The only difference with what I propose is that currently, most peer
> reviewers are anonymous.
>

The *option* of anonymity has its rationale (potential reprisals,
especially by senior researchers on junior ones, rivals, etc.; a competent
editor has to be aware of these, and to control for them).


> I am not proposing crowd sourcing.
>

I understand. You are proposing author-selection and open review instead of
editor selection and (optionally) closed review.

It is an empirical question whether there is more bias and incompetence
with referee-selection by and answerability to an editor or with author
selection.

(I'm not saying peer review could not use improvement.)


> Jan Velterop
>
> On 1 May 2015, at 11:32, Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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
>>>
>>>
>
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