Re: OA as provision against salami and double publishing

[David Goodman <dgoodman@princeton.edu>]

Strange economics. It should rationally be just the opposite. If 
I were paying out of my grant for publication, I certainly 
wouldn't want to pay for more articles than necessary--balancing 
the need for what would be on the CV with the available money. 
But of course the more grant money I had, the less I'd be likely 
need CV bloat.

Joe, do you buy more sausage if it's in little packages?

David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
dgoodman@princeton.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: "Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>
Date: Tuesday, January 29, 2008 7:00 pm
Subject: Re: OA as provision against salami and double publishing
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu

> The term "salami publishing" is too delightful to want to do away
> with the underlying phenomenon, but it does seem to me that Dr.
> Meier is likely to be mistaken:  open access will increase
> "double" publishing and salami publishing.  OA will thus enlarge
> the amount of redundant material to be reviewed and reduce the
> productivity of research professionals.  Only time will tell, of
> course, but in view of the march of OA, it is plausible to
> project a future situation where more dollars yield thinner
> results.  I am personally resigned to an emergent OA paradigm,
> just as I am to the aches and pains of growing older, but I can't
> say that makes me like it it any better; it's a bad idea whose
> time has come.  As Tom Stoppard memorably quipped, old age is a
> high price to pay for wisdom.
>
> OA will increase salami, pepperoni, mortadella, and prosciutto
> publishing because it radically lowers the barriers to
> publishing, and it does this by eliminating one (only one) of the
> reasons that some articles in the benighted toll-access world
> never see the light of day, namely, there is no one asking, Is
> there a market for this?  This is not the same thing as peer
> review (which is, thank god, market-independent), nor is this a
> matter of the distinction between so-called Green and Gold OA.
> Even in a Gold model more materials will get approved because
> there is one reason fewer to say no.  Quality is a matter not of
> what you say yes to but of all the times you say no.
>
> This error (the notion that OA somehow will improve quality and
> efficiency) derives from the mistaken view that things that are
> toll-access are somehow not findable.  As Google Scholar
> demonstrates, however, toll-access material is eminently
> findable.  "Readable" and "findable" are very different things.
> All the redundancies of the toll-access world can be found by
> Google and (more likely) Google's successors, but with OA, you
> now have a whole mozzarella of additional material to contend
> with.  Comparing findable OA to "invisible" toll-access
> publishing creates a false dichotomy since toll-access publishing
> can be online, indexed by search engines, tagged in a multitude
> of ways--and findable.
>
> So how can we prove this proposition to be right or wrong?  We
> have to wait. As the amount of OA material grows, we will need to
> measure its utilization. One view (the Long Tail argument) is
> that all the new material that comes on board will attract a
> certain amount of attention.  Another view (the Short Head
> argument, to which I subscribe) is that the greater the amount of
> information to be sifted, the more attention is placed on fewer
> and fewer items of the total distribution.  The Short Head
> perspective explains why we have bestsellers, highly cited
> articles, and celebrities; the Long Tail perspective represents
> the wishful thinking of those seeeking 15 minutes of fame,
> immortalized in "Paperback Writer."  And that's not chopped
> liver.
>
> Joe Esposito
>
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: <Joachim.Meier@ptb.de>
> To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
> Sent: Monday, January 28, 2008 4:28 PM
> Subject: OA as provision against salami and double publishing
>
>> This mail of Hamaker adresses a consistent problem of
>> scientific publishing: "double" (threefold, ...) publishing and
>> "salami" publishing. Salami publishing is the practice of
>> publishing almost the same content with minor changes /
>> extensions in different journals / proceedings.
>>
>> I remember from my own practice as scientist that one time I
>> found four articles from the same author group, where the
>> content of the articles (not the formulation of the text) was
>> almost the same. In comparision to the oldest of these four
>> articles the newest one revealed no new scientific evidence. As
>> I ordered two of them by ILL, I was not very pleased to
>> discover that this effort was in vain. To discover two very
>> similar articles from the same author / author group was an
>> often experience of mine.
>>
>> Imagine you are looking forward to new evidence from the second
>> article, but then you discover that it was too bad about the
>> time it took to get and to read it. Well organized OA could be
>> an efficient provision against salami publishing and double
>> publishing. The earlier the preprint is available for open
>> access the more efficient salami publishing and double
>> publishing can be detected and prevented by peer reviewers.
>>
>> The advantages are obvious:
>> -) peer reviewers save time, which they could invest into a more
> rigorous> review of unique articles
>> -) readers save time and money (in case of ILL or document ordering)
>> -) scientists save time to write articles of better quality
>> -) publishers save time and resources, as the number of articles to
>> publish will decrease or at least rise less than before OA
>> -) libraries may save shelf space in the case of printed volumes
>> -) libraries may save money if subscription fees will follow falling
>> publication numbers
>> -) database producers like CA, INSPEC, .. will save time for not
> to index
>> redundant articles
>> -) ...
>>
>> These are arguments for Green Road OA and in that way GR-OA
>> will never get superfluous. GR-OA has the potential to become
>> an indispensable assistant for peer reviewers.
>>
>> Greetings
>> Joachim Meier
>>
>> P.S.: As my English is far from beeing perfect, I hope that my
>> text is not so faulty to be misunderstood. And to prevent some
>> criticism: We (PTB, the National Metrology Institute of
>> Germany) have signed the Berlin Declaration on Open Access, we
>> run an institutional bibliography
>> (http://www.ptb.de/en/publikationen/_publica.html) and we are
>> working for an IR with OAI-PMH interface.
>> ____________________________________________________
>>
>> Dr.-Ing. Joachim E. Meier
>> Head of Library
>> Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) (http://www.ptb.de)
>> PF 3345                 Tel. +49-531-592-8131
>> 38023 Braunschweig    Fax. +49-531-592-8137
>> GERMANY                 E-mail: Joachim.Meier@ptb.de
>> ____________________________________________________