[GOAL] Re: Unnecessary Services

[Michael Eisen]

On Sat, May 30, 2015 at 9:06 AM, Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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."
>
>
In what way is the current system in which two or three reviewers are
recruited more or less at random from a pool of people deemed to be
qualified to review a particular article, often something they would not
have read otherwise, do so under intense time press, and then reduce the
decision to a fairly arbitrary up-down vote for a particular journal, with
details of the decision generally hidden from public scrutiny, with no
ability for anyone, ever to revisit that decision as additional evidence or
perspectives build up constitute 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.)
>

Nothing except the complete absence of incentives to do so.


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

Public posting on the web IS publication unless you choose to define it
narrowly otherwise as you have done. And feedback on the web from
identified scientists in a relevant field or anyone with a valid
perspective IS 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
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> GOAL mailing list
> GOAL at eprints.org
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>
>


-- 
Michael Eisen, Ph.D.
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Professor of Genetics, Genomics and Development
Department of Molecular and Cell Biology
University of California, Berkeley
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20150530/9dab7c59/attachment-0001.html