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Re: Quality and mandated open access



At 23:12 09/10/2006, Peter Banks wrote:
I did not, in fact, question "whether quality can be sustained
with mandated open access." I asked how it could be maintained
were nonprofit and for-profit publishers to cease providing
traditional peer review services.
Peter, I'm not aware of any publisher that provides 'peer review services'. Most I know provide peer reviewed publication, which is quite different and what the author seeks. So who is peer review for? Not the author, but the publisher. It's the publisher's means of selecting material to maintain and enhance the quality of the journals. So why would publishers cease to provide peer review? Seems rather an empty threat if it's intended to frighten people from open access and OA mandates.

At 01:08 07/10/2006, Peter Banks wrote:
For now, however, one can probe further how quality would be
sustained in an OA model, because much of what has been written
is I think based on a false premise: that, in the face of
mandated OA, nonprofit and for-profit publishers would continue
the work of traditional peer review, the products of which must
then be then made freely available.

In short: Ain't going to happen. No rational organization is
going to invest the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year
needed to operate, sustain, and upgrade traditional peer review
systems for a major journal, when sales of the products that
sustain those operations are undermined by free distribution.
They already have invested. Look at Elsevier's response to the EC consultation http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/elsevier.pdf It looks like a business in robust good health, that has accommodated the move to digital and, although you won't learn of it here, increasingly is reaching accommodation on most aspects of open access - Romeo green for repository self-archiving, hybrid OA, Wellcome compliance.

So I don't recognise Peter's view that there is reluctance to invest and develop, nor his suggestion that publishers will disown peer review to spite open access mandates.

Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865