Re: OA as provision against salami and double publishing

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

The term "salami publishing" is too delightful to want to do away 
with the underlying phenomenon, but it does seem to me that Dr. 
Meier is likely to be mistaken:  open access will increase 
"double" publishing and salami publishing.  OA will thus enlarge 
the amount of redundant material to be reviewed and reduce the 
productivity of research professionals.  Only time will tell, of 
course, but in view of the march of OA, it is plausible to 
project a future situation where more dollars yield thinner 
results.  I am personally resigned to an emergent OA paradigm, 
just as I am to the aches and pains of growing older, but I can't 
say that makes me like it it any better; it's a bad idea whose 
time has come.  As Tom Stoppard memorably quipped, old age is a 
high price to pay for wisdom.

OA will increase salami, pepperoni, mortadella, and prosciutto 
publishing because it radically lowers the barriers to 
publishing, and it does this by eliminating one (only one) of the 
reasons that some articles in the benighted toll-access world 
never see the light of day, namely, there is no one asking, Is 
there a market for this?  This is not the same thing as peer 
review (which is, thank god, market-independent), nor is this a 
matter of the distinction between so-called Green and Gold OA. 
Even in a Gold model more materials will get approved because 
there is one reason fewer to say no.  Quality is a matter not of 
what you say yes to but of all the times you say no.

This error (the notion that OA somehow will improve quality and 
efficiency) derives from the mistaken view that things that are 
toll-access are somehow not findable.  As Google Scholar 
demonstrates, however, toll-access material is eminently 
findable.  "Readable" and "findable" are very different things. 
All the redundancies of the toll-access world can be found by 
Google and (more likely) Google's successors, but with OA, you 
now have a whole mozzarella of additional material to contend 
with.  Comparing findable OA to "invisible" toll-access 
publishing creates a false dichotomy since toll-access publishing 
can be online, indexed by search engines, tagged in a multitude 
of ways--and findable.

So how can we prove this proposition to be right or wrong?  We 
have to wait. As the amount of OA material grows, we will need to 
measure its utilization. One view (the Long Tail argument) is 
that all the new material that comes on board will attract a 
certain amount of attention.  Another view (the Short Head 
argument, to which I subscribe) is that the greater the amount of 
information to be sifted, the more attention is placed on fewer 
and fewer items of the total distribution.  The Short Head 
perspective explains why we have bestsellers, highly cited 
articles, and celebrities; the Long Tail perspective represents 
the wishful thinking of those seeeking 15 minutes of fame, 
immortalized in "Paperback Writer."  And that's not chopped 
liver.

Joe Esposito


----- Original Message -----
From: <Joachim.Meier@ptb.de>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Monday, January 28, 2008 4:28 PM
Subject: OA as provision against salami and double publishing

> This mail of Hamaker adresses a consistent problem of 
> scientific publishing: "double" (threefold, ...) publishing and 
> "salami" publishing. Salami publishing is the practice of 
> publishing almost the same content with minor changes / 
> extensions in different journals / proceedings.
>
> I remember from my own practice as scientist that one time I 
> found four articles from the same author group, where the 
> content of the articles (not the formulation of the text) was 
> almost the same. In comparision to the oldest of these four 
> articles the newest one revealed no new scientific evidence. As 
> I ordered two of them by ILL, I was not very pleased to 
> discover that this effort was in vain. To discover two very 
> similar articles from the same author / author group was an 
> often experience of mine.
>
> Imagine you are looking forward to new evidence from the second 
> article, but then you discover that it was too bad about the 
> time it took to get and to read it. Well organized OA could be 
> an efficient provision against salami publishing and double 
> publishing. The earlier the preprint is available for open 
> access the more efficient salami publishing and double 
> publishing can be detected and prevented by peer reviewers.
>
> The advantages are obvious:
> -) peer reviewers save time, which they could invest into a more rigorous
> review of unique articles
> -) readers save time and money (in case of ILL or document ordering)
> -) scientists save time to write articles of better quality
> -) publishers save time and resources, as the number of articles to
> publish will decrease or at least rise less than before OA
> -) libraries may save shelf space in the case of printed volumes
> -) libraries may save money if subscription fees will follow falling
> publication numbers
> -) database producers like CA, INSPEC, .. will save time for not to index
> redundant articles
> -) ...
>
> These are arguments for Green Road OA and in that way GR-OA 
> will never get superfluous. GR-OA has the potential to become 
> an indispensable assistant for peer reviewers.
>
> Greetings
> Joachim Meier
>
> P.S.: As my English is far from beeing perfect, I hope that my 
> text is not so faulty to be misunderstood. And to prevent some 
> criticism: We (PTB, the National Metrology Institute of 
> Germany) have signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access, we 
> run an institutional bibliography 
> (http://www.ptb.de/en/publikationen/_publica.html) and we are 
> working for an IR with OAI-PMH interface. 
> ____________________________________________________
>
> Dr.-Ing. Joachim E. Meier
> Head of Library
> Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) (http://www.ptb.de)
> PF 3345                 Tel. +49-531-592-8131
> 38023 Braunschweig    Fax. +49-531-592-8137
> GERMANY                 E-mail: Joachim.Meier@ptb.de
> ____________________________________________________
>
>
> "Hamaker, Charles" <cahamake@uncc.edu> wrote:
>
> Researchers Suggest Rising Number of "Duplicate" Articles in
> Medline Database
>
> http://www.libraryjournal.com/info/CA6525412.html?nid=2673#news3
>
> As if there isn't enough information to sift through on the web,
> the journal Nature this week reported that as many as 200,000 of
> the 17 million articles in the Medline database could be
> duplicates, "either plagiarized or republished by the same author
> in different journals."
>
> Using text-matching software, researchers Mounir Errami and
> Harold 'Skip' Garner at the University of Texas Southwestern
> Medical Center searched for "highly-similar abstracts" in a
> sample of 62,000 randomly-selected abstracts published since
> 1995, finding 421 possible duplicates. "In general, the
> duplication of scientific articles has largely been ignored by
> the gatekeepers of scientific information-the publishers and
> database curators," the authors note in their paper. "Very few
> journal editors attempt to systematically detect duplicates at
> the time of submission."
>
> Medline indexes over 5000 journals published in the United States
> and more than 80 other countries worldwide. The authors suggest
> that "rising duplicate publication rates" is a global phenomenon
> possibly driven by a number of factors including "the explosion
> in the number of journals with online content, increasing
> opportunities for unethical copying, and a body of literature
> growing so fast that the risk of being detected seems to
> diminish." Paraphrasing Dickens, the authors say that "in the
> world of biomedical publications, 'it is the best of times, it is
> the worst of times.' Scientific productivity, as measured by
> scholarly publication rates, is at an all-time high. However,
> high-profile cases of scientific misconduct remind us that not
> all those publications are to be trusted."
>
> ####