RE: Another Poynder Eye-Opener on Open Access

["Armbruster, Chris" <Chris.Armbruster@EUI.eu>]

Richard Poynder's interviews and analyses are usually interesting 
to read, but with this one something seems not quite right.

What is perhaps most disturbing is that the analysis attributes 
to PLoS One an impact on scholarly communication, which no matter 
whether you think it causal or unintended, it cannot possibly 
have.  PLoS One is a large journal, but it is only one journal. 
As such it may be responding to changes in scholarly 
communication and/or in demand from authors, but surely one 
cannot attribute to a journal (or publisher) the force to change 
a system. If other publishers are now imitating PLoS One, and 
these new journals are similarly successful (...I have doubts 
that they correctly understand what makes PLoS One successful, 
hence I am skeptical), then this would call for a deeper analysis 
of shifts in the scholarly communication system - which is not 
made by publishers but overwhelmingly shaped by the academic 
system.

A second point of irritation is the criticism of peer review at 
PLoS One. The examples that Richard Poynder analyzes may show 
that peer reviewers at PLoS One do make errors. But, as we all 
know, a) there is some evidence that the correlation between peer 
review judgements and later article impact is very low (or 
non-existent); b) that peer reviewers have difficulties with 
papers that are not clear-cut cases of accept or reject; c) hype, 
fraud and other issues have hit many journals, including very 
prestigious ones.

The best indicator we have that the peer review system is working 
is the impact factor of a journal. It was widely believed that 
PLoS one would not get one. Then it did, and the IF was much 
higher than expected. We may surmise that this persuaded other 
publishers to think of similar projects. We can debate whether 
the type of peer review that PLoS One does is desirable. But we 
should note that the authors submitting to PLoS One seem 
comfortable enough - and these authors are also readers. And the 
IF will reassure them that - on the whole - peer review at PLoS 
One is working.

A third point are the comments on post-publication peer review 
and 'hyping'. PLoS One clearly overestimated the appetite of 
scholars to comment online (and, it may be noted, reviewers are 
not keen to have reviews attributed to them publicly). However, 
the most important post-publication review has always been 
whether an article gets taken up by colleagues (or is bashed). If 
scholars hype their articles, they are likely to get more 
attention, but also more scrutiny, public criticism, 
counter-studies and so on - particularly if colleagues are not 
persuaded. More generally, tougher competition for funding and 
tenure induces authors to advertise. OA publishing supports this 
because the version of record is available to all immediately. 
But this also means that all can immediately scrutinize the HTML 
version of the article. Authors and peer reviewers may misjudge 
the validity and/or significance of results (and authors hype 
them) but open access publishing also means that this is more 
likely to be noticed and made public for all to see. In this 
sense, PLoS One is more transparent and under greater pressure 
that a (second-tier) subscription journal.

Chris Armbruster


On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 5:07 PM, Stevan Harnad
<amsciforum@gmail.com> wrote:

> Poynder, Richard (2011) PLoS ONE, Open Access, and the Future of
> Scholarly Publishing. Open and Shut. 7 March 2011.
> http://poynder.blogspot.com/2011/03/plos-one-open-access-and-future-of.html
> ABSTRACT: Open Access (OA) advocates argue that PLoS ONE is now
> the largest scholarly journal in the world. Its parent
> organisation 'Public Library of Science (PLoS)' was co-founded in
> 2001 by Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus. What does the history of
> PLoS tell us about the development of PLoS ONE? What does the
> success of PLoS ONE tell us about OA? And what does the current
> rush by other publishers to clone PLoS ONE tell us about the
> future of scholarly communication?