Does More Mean More?

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

I clipped the following from David Goodman's recent post:

"One would expect that publishing more universally available 
journals will result in increasing readings,"

JE:  Well, no.  This is exactly the core of the dispute.  More 
journals means less readings.  Or, for the grammarians among us, 
more means fewer.  If one journal and only one became Open 
Access, then that journal is likely to get more "readings" (not a 
great term, since we can measure page views and downloads, but 
not readings, and certainly not "understandings").  But I am 
aware of no OA advocate who proposes to make only one journal OA. 
The goal is to change everything.  So now we have a researcher, 
whose time is already bedevilled by such annoyances as teaching, 
family, research, meetings, and personal hygiene, who suddenly 
finds that the thicket of materials to review is growing, 
growing, growing.  This researcher will look for filters of 
various kinds; the imprimatur of an established journal is but 
one kind of filter.  It is easy to underestimate in this regard 
the growing role of the blogosphere even within the research 
community, as bloggers cite articles, which in turn get preferred 
ranking in search engines, making articles more findable and thus 
more likely to get read.  Today's bloggers may be tomorrow's 
publishers.  Or perhaps a publisher will string together a 
network of blogs, serving as a New Media form of review.

It should be clear that one of the traditional values of 
publishers is addressing the "more is less" phenomenon. 
Contrary to the widespread belief among authors and academics, 
the role of a publisher is to suppress the dissemination of 
information.  This is the filtering process at work.  Bets are 
placed on certain authors and certain topics, and all the rest 
are swept off the board.  People don't pay publishers because 
they are nice guys or monopolists or because they have corrupted 
the purchasing agent, but because they say no to many authors. 
That "no" lends credibility to the authors who get a "yes."  And 
this also serves to explain why so many authors dislike 
publishers, as publishers routinely refuse to give authors the 
keys to the car.  In the value chain of scholarly communications, 
somebody has to be the grown-up.

What OA will inevitably lead to is a huge surge in the quantity 
of materials made available.  Here again OA advocates have it 
wrong when they say that the peer-review process and other forms 
of filtering will remain just as they are today.  Standards will 
drop or become more diffuse because one of the limiting 
agents--the amount of money to be spent on access--has been 
removed from the value chain; and on top of this is the 
proliferation of unmediated forms of publication, of which blogs 
are the most notorious but hardly the only ones.

If there is a crisis in scholarly communications today it is not one of 
access but of plenitude.

Joe Esposito