Re: Publishers and the doctrine of Good Works

["Joseph Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

Peter, I am sure you are accurately describing your own view, but 
I must say I do not believe your remarks are representative of 
publishers.  Or if they are, people have been lying to me.  OF 
COURSE, publishers are trying to restrain the growth of other 
journals.  That is their job, to outfox the competition.  To put 
this another way, if they were not doing this, they would be 
fired.  You can't have it both ways; you can't send Jeff Skilling 
and Ken Lay to jail (or worse) on one hand for abusing 
shareholders and then turn around and say that the management of 
a company should embrace a free, open, and diverse market, which 
is not in the interest of their shareholders.  As John D. 
Rockefeller noted, companies wish to avoid "ruinous competition." 
It is simply not true that "we all want more access to 
information."  An economic enterprise has narrow aims; if it 
changes the world for the better, it is because it profits from 
it.  I love capitalism, but let's not get sentimental about it. 
It is what it is:  a vibrant, creative force that has a limited 
view of the world.  To get a complete view we need a pluralistic 
environment.

And, yes, I agree that the less formal kinds of OA can not give 
us the equivalent of the New England Journal of Medicine, nor 
have I ever even hinted that I felt otherwise.  OA is mostly a 
distraction.

Joe Esposito

On 7/18/06, Peter Banks <pbanks@bankspub.com> wrote:
> 
> I have considered your argument for days now, and I really 
> don't know what publisher argument this is reacting to or what 
> high horse any publisher is supposed to have ridden in on.
> 
> No publisher, not even the staunchest defender of traditional 
> business models, is trying to restrain the growth of other 
> journals or of scientific communication. The DC Principles 
> explicitly welcome new models of publishing and new journals. 
> The more publishing models being tested in the laboratory of 
> the real world, the better. Whatever our perspective on OA, we 
> all want more access to information--which I hope is the goal, 
> rather than a lowering of quality, as you of phrased it. 
> (Heaven help us if we are collectively engaged in a crusade for 
> the further spread of mediocrity.)
> 
> What publishers object to is the idea that one can produce, 
> say, the New England Journal of Medicine, using some of the 
> less formal models of OA. Those models may be absolutely fine 
> for many fields. And there may be entirely new models--maybe 
> scientific communities based on MySpace or Blogger or text 
> messaging. I don't pretend to know, any more than I understand 
> my teenagers' media choices.
> 
> The argument is NOT that the New England Journal's model for 
> ensuring quality must be followed everywhere, even if it means 
> restricting access to information. The argument is that the 
> NEJM's systems and procedures have great value for medicine, 
> and one should not so condescendingly dismiss their value. If 
> anything, given the savage press NEJM has received recently in 
> the Wall Street Journal, it may need even more rigorous and 
> costly quality assurance procedures; the popular press seems to 
> feel that the journal editors are responsible for reviewing not 
> only the data that was submitted, but also the data that was 
> NOT submitted. I suppose telepathic systems for detecting an 
> author's integrity will be required.
> 
> Peter Banks
> Banks Publishing
> Publications Consulting and Services
> Fairfax, VA 22030
> pbanks@bankspub.com
> 
> 
> On 7/14/06 4:35 PM, "Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> We have had a number of interesting posts on this list over 
>> the last couple weeks concerning just what it is that a 
>> publisher does that adds value to scholarly communications. In 
>> my view, the comments supportive of publishers were by and 
>> large accurate and fairly framed.  One theme, however, caught 
>> my attention, namely, that publishers exercise a gateway 
>> function and thus ensure that the quality of published work is 
>> high. While this is true, the comment must be placed in 
>> context.
>> 
>> Let us imagine, then, a scheme by which publishers act in a 
>> coordinated manner to improve the quality of academic 
>> journals. They do this by instituting across-the-board price 
>> increases of 20%.  (The Department of Justice does not look 
>> into this because it is absorbed in the investigation of 
>> scholarships granted on the basis of need instead of merit.) 
>> Libraries, whose budgets are flat, therefore must cancel 
>> subscriptions. Approximately 20% of the journals must go. 
>> Since librarians wish to collect the finest work, it is 
>> journals of lower quality that get cut. Therefore, in one 
>> stroke the publishers have improved the quality of the 
>> subscribed journals by 20%.
>> 
>> I trust no one would find this to be a satisfactory outcome, 
>> except perhaps for those lucky publishers who somehow escape 
>> the cuts.  Yet it is an example of a gatekeeper function at 
>> work.
>> 
>> The fact is that we don't want to improve the average quality 
>> of journals; we want to lower it.  This is because "lower" 
>> does not mean "poor."  A graduate of the 60th ranked college 
>> or university may regret not having attended #1 or #3, but is 
>> likely to feel pleased to have done better than #100 or not to 
>> have attended college at all.  The problem with the 
>> publishers' gatekeeper perspective is that it is entirely 
>> self-serving. Raising quality is not the issue; expanding 
>> quantity is, providing that expansion is within a certain 
>> range of quality, a range that is substantially lower than the 
>> current subscription base.
>> 
>> Paradoxically, the Public Library of Science is one of the few 
>> organizations that operates on this principle, though 
>> inadvertently.  PLoS publishes the highest-quality material, 
>> all of which would have found a home in other publications. If 
>> PLoS did not have an Open Access model, librarians would have 
>> had to pay for that high-quality material.  As it is, however, 
>> the PLoS OA strategy makes room in the budget for material of 
>> lower quality--but lower is not poor.  It is intriguing to 
>> speculate whether the Moore Foundation would have funded PLoS 
>> under the banner, We Strive to Lower the Quality of Scientific 
>> Publishing!
>> 
>> My 20%-increase scenario has this unfortunate characteristic: 
>> it is precisely what is going on in the real world, though 
>> stretched over a few years.  There are many defenses of the 
>> publishing industry, but publishers should get off their high 
>> horse about being the guardians of quality.  It is possible 
>> for a college to be Too Selective.
>> 
>> Joe Esposito