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

Re: Quality and mandated open access

Yes, it is academics who provide peer review - but publishers provide the management of that process (and, incidentally, usually pay the journal editors - at least nominally, and often more) at a cost which has been estimated by many - the figure seems to come out between $1000 and $2000, which may depend what you count (these figures don't necessarily include overheads).

And why do publishers do this? Not for the good of their health (or their bank balance). They do it because it's one of the most significant parts of the value of the journals process as we currently know it - many surveys, including a couple of our own, have made it very clear that, despite its imperfections, authors, readers and librarians all want to retain peer review.

In one way I think Steve is right - PR does serve to raise the quality of a given journal, and thus its attractiveness to all the above customers. But that's an over-simplification. PR is not a yes/no quality decision. Reviewers recommend, and editors select, on a variety of criteria of which interest, importance, relevance to a particular readership community are absolutely key - this is what makes a given journal the place for a reader to look (either directly, or by using its 'brand' as a marker in search results lists) given that (s)he cannot possibly read everything out there. In addition, in my experience a paper is rarely, if ever, accepted as it stands - there may be much to-ing and fro-ing to improve it before it is finally accepted.

If readers find their papers from repositories in future, and the function of adding a journal brand through these processes becomes unviable (at least, for those who can't afford to move to an OA publication model - and I doubt it will work for all) then I think something of great utility to readers will have been lost. Sure, we might be able to recreate it in some other way - but somebody still has to pay...

Sally Morris, Chief Executive
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
Email: sally.morris@alpsp.org
Website: www.alpsp.org

----- Original Message -----
From: "Steve Hitchcock" <sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 11, 2006 12:33 AM
Subject: Re: Quality and mandated open access

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