Re: The religion of peer review

[Karl Bridges <Karl.Bridges@uvm.edu>]

You're missing the point.  What we have is the Wild West.  We 
have a monopoly system where a very few vendors charge whatever 
they think they can get from an individual institution -- a price 
that has no relationship to what the actual production costs are. 
If there was some relationship between costs and price don't you 
think we would have seen it -- perhaps when they moved production 
of scientific journals to India where they can pay people $1.00 a 
day.  Prices went up. We don't have (and I would argue never have 
had) a collegial approach -- that assumes a common interest which 
doesn't exist. Journal vendors exist for one purpose -- to make a 
maximum profit for their stockholders -- which is totally at odds 
with the goals of libraries. Why don;t we grasp that and have a 
strategy that would address that -- like a class action suit 
against vendors on the part of libraries for defrauding the 
taxpayers by excessive pricing.

Quoting Heather Morrison <heatherm@eln.bc.ca>:

> Those who opposed open access have been known to say that there is no
> scientific proof that an open access business model will work.  I
> agree!
>
> However - is there scientific proof that current methods will work?
>
> Pricing and terms of service is, at best, determined by a collegial
> approach to negotiations by librarians and vendors - exactly the kind
> of work that many a liblicenser is engaged in. This is a very fine
> thing; but it is a business model relying on scientific evidence.
>
> The current approach has also led to the serials crisis.  If this was
> developed through scientific methodology - someone must have
> forgotten a variable or two.  Such as the fact that raising prices
> every year higher than library budgets could conceivably rise would
> lead to a crisis, for example.
>
> I also hear much about the sanctity of peer review.  Here is an
> interesting view on the matter:
>
> "THE RELIGION OF PEER REVIEW
>
> Despite a lack of evidence that peer review works, most scientists
> (by nature a skeptical lot) appear to believe in peer review. It's
> something that's held "absolutely sacred" in a field where people
> rarely accept anything with "blind faith," says Richard Smith, former
> editor of the BMJ and now CEO of UnitedHealth Europe and board member
> of PLoS. "It's very unscientific, really." This from a very
> interesting article - worth reading through:
>
> Alison McCook.  Is Peer Review Broken?  The Scientist:  Magazine of
> the Life Sciences 20:2, page 26.  at:
>
> http://www.the-scientist.com/2006/2/1/26/1/
>
> thoughts?
>
> Heather Morrison
> http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com