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Re: The religion of peer review




You're missing the point. What we have is the Wild West. We have a monopoly system where a very few vendors charge whatever they think they can get from an individual institution -- a price that has no relationship to what the actual production costs are. If there was some relationship between costs and price don't you think we would have seen it -- perhaps when they moved production of scientific journals to India where they can pay people $1.00 a day. Prices went up. We don't have (and I would argue never have had) a collegial approach -- that assumes a common interest which doesn't exist. Journal vendors exist for one purpose -- to make a maximum profit for their stockholders -- which is totally at odds with the goals of libraries. Why don;t we grasp that and have a strategy that would address that -- like a class action suit against vendors on the part of libraries for defrauding the taxpayers by excessive pricing.

Quoting Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca>:

Those who opposed open access have been known to say that there is no
scientific proof that an open access business model will work.  I
agree!

However - is there scientific proof that current methods will work?

Pricing and terms of service is, at best, determined by a collegial
approach to negotiations by librarians and vendors - exactly the kind
of work that many a liblicenser is engaged in. This is a very fine
thing; but it is a business model relying on scientific evidence.

The current approach has also led to the serials crisis.  If this was
developed through scientific methodology - someone must have
forgotten a variable or two.  Such as the fact that raising prices
every year higher than library budgets could conceivably rise would
lead to a crisis, for example.

I also hear much about the sanctity of peer review.  Here is an
interesting view on the matter:

"THE RELIGION OF PEER REVIEW

Despite a lack of evidence that peer review works, most scientists
(by nature a skeptical lot) appear to believe in peer review. It's
something that's held "absolutely sacred" in a field where people
rarely accept anything with "blind faith," says Richard Smith, former
editor of the BMJ and now CEO of UnitedHealth Europe and board member
of PLoS. "It's very unscientific, really." This from a very
interesting article - worth reading through:

Alison McCook.  Is Peer Review Broken?  The Scientist:  Magazine of
the Life Sciences 20:2, page 26.  at:

http://www.the-scientist.com/2006/2/1/26/1/

thoughts?

Heather Morrison
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com