[GOAL] Re: Endorsement Is Not Peer Review

Fri May 1 15:07:34 BST 2015

Some comments/answers interleaved:

> On 1 May 2015, at 14:13, Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, May 1, 2015 at 8:25 AM, Jan Velterop <velterop at gmail.com <mailto: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)

My proposed method has all of that, except ‘editorial adjudication’, which mainly serves to keep the journals system as it is (“is this relevant for my journal and beneficial for it’s impact factor?”). When review in my proposed method results in open endorsement, by at least two named reviewers, it would result in publication.

> 
> 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).

It is my contention that openness and transparency are likely to be better for the quality of peer review than the current anonymity. Those who fear openness can submit to traditional journals. You seem to have a rather rosy view of what editors do (and can do) in practice to ‘control’ for the unwanted effects of anonymous peer review. If only.

>  
> 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.

At the very least it should be tested.

Jan Velterop

> 
> (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 <mailto:amsciforum at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> On Fri, May 1, 2015 at 5:39 AM, Jan Velterop <velterop at gmail.com <mailto: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/ <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/ <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/ <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 <mailto: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/ <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/ <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/ <http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/21348/>
>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On Thu, Apr 30, 2015 at 10:04 PM, Éric Archambault <eric.archambault at science-metrix.com <mailto: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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