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<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>Jean-Claude said :"<FONT size=3
face="Times New Roman">I believe that they should be organized by researchers
themselves. The same applies to the peer review comment."</FONT><BR>It would be
interesting to know if such experiment has been tried, in some fields, somewhere
in the world.</FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>I remember that ten years ago, a French
mathematician (whose name I have forgotten) gave a talk about this
subject. He was trying to set up this kind of organization of the peer
review by researchers, in a very small field of mathematics. He said that it was
very difficult. </FONT><FONT size=2 face=Arial>I think that he has not
succeeded, because I never heard about it after. </FONT><FONT size=2
face=Arial></FONT></DIV>
<DIV>Hélène Bosc<BR></DIV>
<BLOCKQUOTE
style="BORDER-LEFT: #000000 2px solid; PADDING-LEFT: 5px; PADDING-RIGHT: 0px; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px">
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial">----- Original Message ----- </DIV>
<DIV
style="FONT: 10pt arial; BACKGROUND: #e4e4e4; font-color: black"><B>From:</B>
<A title=jean.claude.guedon@umontreal.ca
href="mailto:jean.claude.guedon@umontreal.ca">Jean-Claude Guédon</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>To:</B> <A title=velterop@gmail.com
href="mailto:velterop@gmail.com">Jan Velterop</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Cc:</B> <A title=goal@eprints.org
href="mailto:goal@eprints.org">Global Open Access List (Successor of
AmSci)</A> </DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Sent:</B> Wednesday, May 16, 2012 4:23
PM</DIV>
<DIV style="FONT: 10pt arial"><B>Subject:</B> [GOAL] Re: [BOAI10] Re:
Elsevier's query re: "positive things from publishers that should be
encouraged, celebrated, recognized"</DIV>
<DIV><BR></DIV>Jan,<BR><BR>I do not disagree with what you say, but I was
disagreeing with what Eric was saying. He suggested publishers should select
editorial boards. Like you, I believe that they should be organized by
researchers themselves. The same applies to the peer review comment.<BR><BR>As
for searchability, I believe it goes beyond discoverability.<BR><BR>Etc.
etc.<BR><BR>Jean-Claude<BR>
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%">
<TBODY>
<TR>
<TD><PRE>--
Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal
</PRE><BR><BR></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>Le mardi 15 mai 2012 à 18:47 +0100,
Jan Velterop a écrit :<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE"><BR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE">On 15 May 2012, at 17:12, Jean-Claude Guédon wrote:
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE"><BR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE">
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE">With due respect to Eric, I will disagree with at
least the devolution of the first two tasks<BR><BR>1. The selection of
editors should come from scientific communities themselves, not from
commercial publishers. This is a good instance where commercial concerns
(maximizing profits, etc.) can pollute research concerns. There is also
something weird in having commercial publishers holding the key to what
may amount to the ultimate academic promotion: being part of an editorial
board means power over colleagues; being editor-in-chief even more so. At
least, when journals were in the hands of scientific associations, the
editorial choice remained inside the community of researchers. What
criteria, beyond scientific competence and prestige, may enter into the
calculations of a commercial publisher while choosing an editor-in-chief,
God knows…<BR><BR></BLOCKQUOTE></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE"><BR><BR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE">With due respect, Jean-Claude, but there is
absolutely nothing that stops the scientific community from organising
itself, select editors and editorial boards and establish journals. In
principle, that is. In practice, well, they don't do it, at least not to a
sufficient degree. It is this academic inertia that gave publishers an
opportunity to fill the gap. </BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE"><BR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE">
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE"><BR>2. Effective peer review should be organized
by peers themselves, by scholars and scientists, not by publishers. Tools
to organize this process should ideally be based on free software and
available to all in a way that allows disciplinary or speciality tweaking.
The Open Journal System, for example, is a good, free, tool to organize
peer review and manuscript handling in the editorial phase. Such a tool
should be favoured over proprietary tools offered to editors as a way to
convince them to join a particular journal stable, and as a way to make
them dependent on that tool - yet another way to ensure growing stables of
journals.<BR><BR><BR></BLOCKQUOTE></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE">There is an element of nephelokokkygia going on
here, I'm afraid. There is nothing that stops academics from organising
effective peer review. In principle, that is. In practice, well, they
don't do it, at least not to a sufficient degree. It is this academic
inertia that gave publishers an opportunity to fill the gap. It feels like
I'm repeating myself here. It's not the availability of software that is the
limiting factor; it's the lack of initiative and of l'esprit d'entreprise
that is. When they are present in academics, for instance in Varmus, Brown
and Eisen, it can lead to great success indeed, as we have seen. </BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE"><BR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE">
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE"> Professional "looks" can indeed be given
away to commercial publishers. Layout, spelling, perhaps some syntaxic and
stylistic help would be nice. But I would stop there. <BR><BR>As for the
"archivable" historic record, I would have to see more details to give my
personal blessing to this. Remember how Elsevier pitted Yale against the
Royal Dutch Library when the issue of digital preservation began to emerge
a dozen or so years ago. I am not sure about the distinction between
archived and archivable.<BR><BR>For searchability, remember what Clifford
Lynch declared years ago in the OA book edited by Neil Jacobs: no real
open access without open computation. Elsevier and other publishers do
code their articles in XML, but provide only impoverished, eye-ball
limited, pdf or html files. When one uses Science Direct, all kinds of
links pop up to guide us toward other articles, presumably from Elsevier
journals. This is part of driving a competition based on impact factors.
That is not the kind of searchability we want, even though it is of some
value.<BR><BR></BLOCKQUOTE></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE"><BR><BR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE">I presume 'searchability' means discoverability
here, and I'm pretty sure all Elsevier articles and any articles published
by any serious publisher, for profit or NfP, are fully indexed by Google and
their ilk. Searching in general for literature on any publisher's journal
platform site other than for specific articles you know or suspect have been
published by that publisher, is naive. </BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE">
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE"><BR>The quest for "alternative comprehensive
systems" is exactly what Elsevier attempts to build with Scopus. In so
doing, Elsevier picks up on the vision of Robert Maxwell when the latter
did everything he could, from cajoling to suing, to get the Science
Citation Index away from Garfield's hands. Is this really what we want? If
it were open, and open access, Eric's idea would make sense; otherwise, it
becomes a formidable source of economic power that will do much harm to
scientific communication. In effect, with a universal indexing index and
more than 2,000 titles in its stable, Elsevier could become judge and
party of scientific value.<BR><BR></BLOCKQUOTE></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE"><BR><BR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE">Again, there is absolutely nothing, in principle,
that stops the scientific community from organising itself and establishing
a comprehensive reference and abstract database. In the life sciences it's
been done by PubMed (admittedly not quite academics themselves, but at least
an academic funding body, the NIH). Why don't they do it? </BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE"><BR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE">
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE">Finally, I am not blaming companies for trying to
make money, except when they pollute their environment. Most do so in the
physical environment, and they are regulated, or should be. The commercial
publishers do it in their virtual environment by driving research
competition through tools that also favour their commercial goals. The
intense competition around publishing in "prestigious journals" - prestige
being defined here as impact factors, although impact factors are a crazy
way to measure or compare almost anything - leads to all kinds of
practices that go against the grain of scientific research. The rise in
retracted papers in the most prestigious journals - prestige being again
measured here by IF - is a symptom of this
"pollution.<BR><BR></BLOCKQUOTE></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE"><BR><BR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE">I agree it is pollution. But it's not the publishers
who are in any position to keep the JIF going as proxy for quality. It's the
academic community itself that is doing that. And yes, if you present the
publishers with such a juicy bone, don't expect them not to grab it.
</BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE"><BR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE">
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE"><BR>The rise in journal prices was tentatively
explained in my old article, "In Oldenburg's Long Shadow" that came out
eleven years ago. It tries at least to account for the artificial creation
of an inelastic market around "core journals", the latter being the
consequence of the methods used to design the Science Citation Index.
Incidentally, the invention of the "core journal" myth - myth because it
arbitrarily transforms an operational truncation needed for the practical
handling of large numbers of citations into an elite-building club of
journals - has been one of the most grievous obstacle to the healthy
globalization of science publishing in the whole world. Speak to
Brazilians like Abel Packer about this, and he will tell you tons of
stories related to this situation. Scientific quality grows along a
continuous gradient, not according to a two-tier division between core
science, so-called, and the rest.<BR><BR></BLOCKQUOTE></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE"><BR><BR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE">The only credible myth-busters would be academics
themselves. Where are they? </BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE"><BR></BLOCKQUOTE>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE">
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE"><BR>Jean-Claude Guédon<BR><BR><BR>
<TABLE cellSpacing=0 cellPadding=0 width="100%">
<TBODY>
<TR>
<TD><PRE>--
Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal
</PRE><BR><BR><BR></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>Le lundi 14 mai 2012 à 11:38
-0700, Eric F. Van de Velde a écrit :<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE TYPE="CITE">To Alicia:<BR>Here are what I consider the
positive contributions by commercial publishers. For any of the positive
qualities I mention, it is easy find counterexamples. What matters is
that, on the average, the major publishers have done a good job on the
following:<BR><BR><BR>- Select good editorial boards of leading
scholars.<BR>- Develop effective systems for organizing peer
review.<BR>- Produce articles/journals that look professional
commensurate with the importance of the scholarship.<BR>- Produce an
archivable historical record of scholarship.<BR><BR><BR>Publishers only
receive a marginally passing grade for producing searchable databases of
the scholarly record and journals. In the age of iTunes, Netflix, etc.,
it is inexcusable that to search through scholarship one must buy
separate products like the Web of Knowledge in addition to the journal
subscriptions. Publishers need to work together to produce alternative
comprehensive systems.<BR><BR><BR>Most commercial publishers and some
society publishers (like ACS) receive failing grades on cost
containment. Because of their importance to academia, scholarly
publishers have been blessed with the opportunity to reinvent themselves
for the future without the devastating disruption other kinds of
publishers faced (newspapers, magazines, etc.). However, instead of
taking advantage of this opportunity, scholarly publishers are
squandering it for temporary financial gain. Every price increase brings
severe disruption closer. On the current path, your CEOs are betting the
existence of the company every year.<BR><BR><BR>About the only company
who understands the current information market is Amazon, and everything
they do is geared towards driving down costs of the infrastructure. Your
competition will not come from Amazon directly, but from every single
academic who will be able to produce a high-quality electronic journal
from his/her office. There may be only one success for every hundred
failed journals in this system, but suppose it is so easy 100,000 try...
Your brand/prestige/etc. will carry you only so far. (Amazon is
focusing on e-books production now, but it is only a matter of time when
they come out with a journal system.)<BR><BR><BR>To
Jean-Claude:<BR>Blaming commercial enterprises for making too much money
is like blaming scholars for having too many good ideas. Making money is
their purpose. They will stop raising prices if doing so is in their
self-interest.<BR><BR><BR>The real question is why the scholarly
information market is so screwed up that publishers are in a position to
keep raising prices. I am blaming site licenses (<A
href="http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com/2011/07/what-if-libraries-were-problem.html">http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com/2011/07/what-if-libraries-were-problem.html</A>
and <A
href="http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com/2011/09/publishers-dilemma.html">http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com/2011/09/publishers-dilemma.html</A>),
but I am open to alternative
explanations.<BR> <BR>--Eric.<BR><BR><A
href="http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com/">http://scitechsociety.blogspot.com</A><BR><BR>Google
Voice: (626) 898-5415<BR>Telephone: (626)
376-5415<BR>Skype chat, voice, or web-video: efvandevelde<BR>E-mail: <A
href="mailto:eric.f.vandevelde@gmail.com">eric.f.vandevelde@gmail.com</A><BR><BR><BR><BR>On
Mon, May 14, 2012 at 9:56 AM, Peter Murray-Rust <<A
href="mailto:pm286@cam.ac.uk">pm286@cam.ac.uk</A>> wrote:<BR>
<BLOCKQUOTE>Jean-Claude,<BR>This is a great analysis and says almost
exactly some of what I was planning to say.<BR><BR>We cannot de facto
trust the publishers to work in our interests. There was a time when
this was posssible - but no longer. <BR><BR><BR><BR><BR><BR>--
<BR>Peter Murray-Rust<BR>Reader in Molecular Informatics<BR>Unilever
Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry<BR>University of Cambridge<BR>CB2 1EW,
UK<BR><A
href="tel:%2B44-1223-763069">+44-1223-763069</A><BR><BR><BR>_______________________________________________<BR>GOAL
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