[GOAL] Re: Unnecessary Services

[Stevan Harnad]

On Sat, 30 May 2015, Michael Eisen <mbeisen at gmail.com> wrote:

There is no evidence that post publication review can assure quality, I
> agree. But there is a wealth of evidence that pre-publication review DOES
> NOT assure quality, and it is absurd to spend $10b a year and delay the
> open availability of typical papers by 10 months to achieve it.


1. The relevant question is not whether ("pre-publication") peer review
"assures quality" (compared to what?) but whether "crowd-sourcing after
'publication' can ensure quality *at least as well as well as* classical
[i.e., "pre-publication"] peer review."

2. For years now there has been absolutely nothing preventing every author
on the planet from publicly posting their pre-refereeing preprints for
feedback on the web. (Virtually all journals have by now dropped the
"Ingelfinger
Rule
<https://www.google.ca/search?num=20&site=&source=hp&q=harnad+ingelfinger&oq=harnad+ingelfinger&gs_l=hp.3...1146.5236.0.5397.19.19.0.0.0.0.112.1640.16j3.19.0.ckpsrh...0...1.1.64.hp..11.8.678.0.V5O4Q6DjjK0>"
forbidding that.)

3. But public posting on the web is not "publication" (in the academic
sense, which means refereed publication), and feedback on the web is not
"peer review."

(For good reasons, in some fields researchers don't want to post their
unrefereed work publicly. Sometimes this is to protect their reputations,
sometimes it is to protect public health.)

*Stevan Harnad*


On Friday, May 29, 2015, Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at gmail.com> wrote:


> Mike Eisen
> <https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=wm#inbox/14da0a74f200e99b> writes:
>
> *“I believe we should get rid of publishers… the services they provide are
> either easy to replicate (formatting articles to look pretty) or they
> currently do extremely poorly (peer review)… these services are
> unnecessary… [we should] move to a system where you post things when you
> want to post them, and that people comment/rate/annotate articles as they
> read them post publication.”*1. PLOS
> <http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1580> (like other publishers) seems
> to be charging a hefty price for “services that are unnecessary.” ;>)
>
> 2. I agree completely that we should get rid of publishers' unnecessary
> services <http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.2> and
> their costs. But how to do that, while they are still controlled by
> publishers and bundled into subscriptions in exchange for access?
>
> My answer
> <http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1154-The-Inevitable-Success-of-Transitional-Green-Open-Access.html> is
> the one Mike calls “parasitic <http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1710>”:
> Institutions and funders worldwide mandate Green OA (with the
> “copy-request” Button to circumvent publisher OA embargoes). The
> cancellations that that will make possible will force publishers to drop
> the unnecessary services and their costs and downsize to Fair-Gold for peer
> review alone..
>
> 3. But I disagree with Mike about peer-review
> <http://www.nature.com/nature/webmatters/invisible/invisible.html>: it
> will remain the sole essential service. And the (oft-voiced) notion that
> peer-review can be replaced by crowd-sourcing, after “publication” is pure
> speculation, supported by no evidence that it can ensure quality at least
> as well as classical peer review, nor that is it scalable and sustainable
>
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