RE: The value of a journal article

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

I'm only going to answer a few specific points, because in most things Jan 
and I are in agreement:

1. Peer review is not the measure of journal quality. The level of the 
peer review is the measure. A case can be made for the need of low quality 
journals. Since the current academic system requires the teachers in even 
junior college to publish, there has to be some place to put their 
articles, requiring a sufficient quantity of journals that will accept 
them after the most cursory peer review.  It is ironic that such journals 
are purchased only by the most comprehensive libraries at the most 
prestigious of institutions.

1a. I hope Jan is not one of those who equate peer review to pre- 
publication peer review of journal articles, as managed by editors. That 
is one way to do it, but no one has shown it is the best. Historically, it 
is merely a carry-over from the paper era, when journals had limited 
space.

2. None of this discussion has been about intrinsic value. Intrinsic value 
is measured by the extent of the contribution to the progress of learning, 
and the contribution of the knowledge to the well being of mankind. There 
are ways of studying these historically, but not here and now.

3. Jan is correctly perceiving the true point to these discussions: The 
question for Springer and all other publishers is whether libraries will 
continue to value the green OA journals. There might be data with 
predictive value, but it should be obvious that we will not be able to 
identify which data that is until after the event.

4. The librarians are not the judges of scientific merit. They are 
responsible only for providing, organizing, and preserving the research 
articles and books, so that those qualified can judge them.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Jan Velterop
Sent: Thu 12/8/2005 6:29 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: The value of a journal article

I can understand David's view (see below) on the meaning of 'value' if I 
imagine his vantage point, which is a user viewpoint, or perhaps more 
accurately, a librarian one. I cannot however accept it as the definitive 
way to define the value of a peer reviewed journal article. We must 
distinguish between the value of the 'content' of an article, and the 
value of it being peer reviewed and published. In David's definition, all 
of a published article's value is locked up solely in its library usage. 
This would mean that in some disciplines, such as areas of physics, 
articles published in journals have no value: according to workers in 
those fields they are hardly ever read in their journal version. This is 
patently not true, for if it were, nobody would bother submitting those 
articles to journals since they are available in ArXiv anyway. Authors do 
want them to be published and that must be because they see value in the 
very act of having them officially published in a peer reviewed journal.

David may well be right, in his position, not to look at any other value 
than library usage value. From a publishing point of view, I recognise the 
'push' value of publishing and not only the 'pull' value of the actual 
content. If a reader overlooks an article it is rarely of major 
consequence. Given the sparsity of availability of scientific journal 
literature in any given institution, overlooking articles is the order of 
the day. An author failing to publish, however, even just failing to 
publish in a journal of sufficiently high esteem, faces potentially major 
career and funding consequences. That's why it is 'publish or perish' and 
not 'read or rot'. It is my personal opinion that publishing peer reviewed 
articles (particularly the stuff of 'publish or perish') has to be 
regarded as a service to authors and to the science community, and paid 
for in that way, rather than as just a trade in content. The open access 
publishing model fits that idea.

Jan Velterop