[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Re: Does More Mean More?

Joe,

Most people would agree that there has to be a filtering process, and there is no reason to doubt that open access publishers can operate as efficiently as subscription publishers as gatekeepers. The UK JISC has been monitoring the rejection rate on the open access journals it has been funding, and no deterioration in quality has been observed. As to how this "expensive but essential process" can be financed, income streams for OA journals will no doubt be as varied as the income streams for subscription journals, but for growing numbers of STM authors the cost can be covered through their research grant.

The cost of the "gatekeeper" function will vary from journal to journal, as we already witnessing, and the OA publication charge will be one factor authors will take into account - alongside the reputation of the journal - in deciding where to submit their work. The future will be good for those OA journals that maintain a good reputation for quality at a reasonable price to authors or their funding agencies.

Fred Friend
JISC Scholarly Communication Consultant
Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL


----- Original Message -----
From: "Joseph Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Monday, February 06, 2006 12:53 AM
Subject: Re: Does More Mean More?

While we are debating statistics, I want to share what has been my experience as an editor and (later) publisher and (later yet) consultant to publishers over the years concerning "quantity control," which is a misnomer, in my view. Every publishing person I know lives in dread of the unsolicited (note that word) manuscript. It takes all forms. You get approached at parties, at your kids' school fund-raisers, at trade shows, through unsolicited email (aka spam). I have had entire hardcopy manuscripts delivered to my door because someone knew someone who knew someone who had read something I had written.

These "submissions" (what a freighted word!) are so indiscriminate that they boggle the mind. The publisher of college texts receives a novel "because a student could learn from the historical setting." An STM publisher I chatted with complained that he gets submissions in veterinary science when his work is entirely in human medicine. This is before one gets to the even larger category of submissions that are indeed on point, but for any of many reasons (peer review is alive and well, though not perfect) do not meet the publisher's standards or current editorial focus. There are 6 billion people on the planet and even the illiterate ones appear to be authors.

To say that publishers are not gatekeepers is simply wrong. The point is not how much they do publish (always too much, a function of the competitive nature of the marketplace and the vanity of human wishes), but how much they don't. You can call this "quantity control" if you will; I call it exercising judgment. Publishers are not the only gatekeepers, formal and informal, nor are they perfect; some would say that they are not even good.

But if one were to eliminate all these gatekeepers or filters, from colleagues and readers to editors (as distinct from publishers) and peer review boards--before one even gets to the person who finances the whole game, the publisher--the number of publications would explode. I am being very careful not to say "good authors" and "good publications." Most of what is written is not good; much, perhaps most, of what is published is not good; but the filtering process is designed to eliminate the truly bad, not to identify the exceptional. As for those who can and do identify the exceptional, well, truly good editors are rare and worth their weight in citations. I wonder how they select the incoming freshman class at Princeton.

Of the umpteen virtues of Open Access publishing, no one has yet explained in a manner that my tiny brain can understand how the expensive but essential process described above can be financed in a free-to-the-reader environment. I wish it were otherwise, as there are many, many things I would like to read that I don't because I simply can't afford all of them. So I make choices, like everybody else, perhaps bad ones.

Joe Esposito