RE: Provostial Publishing: a return to circa 1920

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

There is much that I would like to debate with you, Stevan, in 
your reply to my post, e.g., the role that usage statistics and 
quantified metrics in general should play in assessing the 
importance and value of scholarship (much overrated, in my 
opinion), but I'll just focus here on this one assertion you made 
(and, by the way, I was not talking mainly about books in my 
post, as you seem to assume):

At 5:56 PM -0400 6/3/08, Stevan Harnad wrote:

>(2) Refereed journal articles undergo minimal copy-editing in 
>any case (unlike [some] books).

On what basis do you make this claim? Have you surveyed journals 
to find out how much copyediting they do? Are you basing this on 
your own personal experience with copyediting done by the 
journals to which you have submitted your own work primarily?

I, of course, cannot claim sufficiently wide knowledge to make 
sweeping generalizations about the degree and level of 
copyediting done for journals compared with books at all 
publishing houses. But as director of a press that publishes 11 
journals in the humanities, and a past employee of another press 
that published three (including one in mathematics), I can attest 
that the copyediting done for these journals is at the same level 
as done for books, which in university presses is pretty high. I 
suspect that other university presses operate in this respect the 
same way we do--which would mean that at least 1,000 scholarly 
journals get far more than "minimal copy-editing."

I can also attest, from my own years of experience as a 
copyeditor, that the job does not just involve polishing prose 
and improving grammar. Not uncommonly, copyeditors will find and 
correct egregious factual and other errors, thus sparing the 
authors from considerable embarrassment. Without their "value 
added" services, much will get published in Green OA form that 
will NOT serve either the authors' peers or the general public 
well.

Hence, I conclude, Harvard and others that follow its example and 
are content to publish less than the final archival version will 
be opening themselves to the exposure of all the flaws of 
scholarly writing that now get hidden from public view by the 
repair work done by copyeditors. Caveat lector!

-- 
Sanford G. Thatcher, Director
Penn State University Press
University Park, PA 16802-1003
e-mail: sgt3@psu.edu