Re: Quality and mandated open access

[Steve Hitchcock <sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

At 23:12 09/10/2006, Peter Banks wrote:
> I did not, in fact, question "whether quality can be sustained
> with mandated open access." I asked how it could be maintained
> were nonprofit and for-profit publishers to cease providing
> traditional peer review services.
Peter, I'm not aware of any publisher that provides 'peer review 
services'. Most I know provide peer reviewed publication, which 
is quite different and what the author seeks. So who is peer 
review for? Not the author, but the publisher. It's the 
publisher's means of selecting material to maintain and enhance 
the quality of the journals. So why would publishers cease to 
provide peer review? Seems rather an empty threat if it's 
intended to frighten people from open access and OA mandates.

At 01:08 07/10/2006, Peter Banks wrote:
> For now, however, one can probe further how quality would be
> sustained in an OA model, because much of what has been written
> is I think based on a false premise: that, in the face of
> mandated OA, nonprofit and for-profit publishers would continue
> the work of traditional peer review, the products of which must
> then be then made freely available.
>
> In short: Ain't going to happen. No rational organization is
> going to invest the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year
> needed to operate, sustain, and upgrade traditional peer review
> systems for a major journal, when sales of the products that
> sustain those operations are undermined by free distribution.
They already have invested. Look at Elsevier's response to the EC 
consultation 
http://ec.europa.eu/research/science-society/document_library/pdf_06/elsevier.pdf 
It looks like a business in robust good health, that has 
accommodated the move to digital and, although you won't learn of 
it here, increasingly is reaching accommodation on most aspects 
of open access - Romeo green for repository self-archiving, 
hybrid OA, Wellcome compliance.

So I don't recognise Peter's view that there is reluctance to 
invest and develop, nor his suggestion that publishers will 
disown peer review to spite open access mandates.

Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256    Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865