Re: local/distributed vs global/unified archives

[Jan Szczepanski <jan.szczepanski@ub.gu.se>]

I don't agree with the first sentence. The most important factors 
for "universities" is power and influence over scientists that 
don't care about the "university", which means control and 
bureucracy and meetings, meetings and more meetings.

They care about their scientific field, about collegues about 
books and journals. Now they have to learn the hard way who pays 
their salaries and who controls their thinking. I don't think 
"universities care about open access or additional prestige. They 
are the kings and they are not interested in promoting 
"intellectual stars". Power and control over these thinkers is 
the goal. First the archive, then the mandate and thirdly they 
hire an expert in bibliometrics. Guess why.

Morst frightening is that they want to take control again over 
the university presses and see to it that the right people are 
publishing the right academic things. Open access is a threat 
against free thinking.

Jan

Sandy Thatcher wrote:
> Presumably, universities that set up their own IRs think they are
> going to gain some kind of additional prestige or score additional
> credit with the public by posting their faculty's work as soon as it
> is written, or at least as soon as it is peer reviewed. But consider
> what it is that is actually being posted: work that has not been
> copyedited.
>
> No one seems to place much importance on copyediting these days, but
> in my experience as a copyeditor early in my publishing career and as
> witness to plenty of poor writing as an acquiring editor over a nearly
> forty-year period, I am baffled by the eagerness of universities, like
> Harvard most recently, to show off such poor writing.
>
> Let me refer this list to an article titled "Sinners Well Edited" in
> the latest issue of the Journal of Scholarly Publishing, vol. 39, no.
> 2 (January 2008), pp. 168-173. The author, Adam A.J. Deville, is an
> academic himself, but has spent much of his career editing "monograph,
> anthologies of articles, and thousands of pages of articles" for a
> journal in the humanities. Here is his verdict based on this
> experience: "Too much academic prose is...barbaric."
>
> He elaborates: "Senior academics, long tenured at major universities,
> regularly submit papers that I would never have dared to submit in an
> undergraduate course, much less a graduate course, and still less to a
> juried journal of my peers. Too many papers--including, most
> egregiously those from authors educated or teaching at Oxbridge or Ivy
> League schools--are rambling, repetitive, insufficiently researched,
> and badly argued. They ignore basic stylistic guidelines with an
> impunity that can only be regarded as arrogant. Basic punctuation can
> be used or withheld at will and whim.  Footnotes can be subject to
> gross abuses--left insouciantly incomplete, used ostentatiously to
> demonstrate how much reading one has done on irrelevant topics,
> rendered according to no known style sheet (or a mishmash of several),
> or containing sources conjured out of thin air. Vast swaths of
> blatantly relevant literature...are regularly overlooked. Precious
> jargon and abstruse theory are preferred to clear and straightforward
> exposition....Sentences of Germanic length give rise to conglomerate
> paragraphs spasmodically swallowing several topics and running
> breathlessly on for two or more entire pages. Extraneous tangents
> destroy any sense of a paper's direction. Scholarly passion can be
> abruptly set aside for vengeful bouts of puerile point scoring and
> polemics, then just as abruptly resumed again."
>
> I can vouch for the accuracy of this description from my own
> copyediting experience, which included massively correcting the
> footnotes of at least one Harvard senior scholar. I can also testify
> that a Pulitzer Prize was won by one book through the heroic efforts
> of another copyeditor on the staff, who did so much as to deserve
> credit as co-author.
>
> So, why does a Harvard, or any university for that matter, want to
> expose such poor prose to the world at large, including the public?
> Among the latter might be, for example, state legislators asked to
> provide funding for the university, potential donors to capital
> campaigns, and high school seniors thinking about where to apply to
> college. Surely, revealing this dirty laundry is not going to help
> raise the university's esteem in anyone's eyes. Is the imperative to
> spread knowledge quickly so overwhelming, especially in the
> humanities, as to outweigh the potential damage--nay, even
> ridicule--that such exposure could bring? I could see Congress
> awarding a new "Golden Fleece" prize to the worst of such writing
> posted in IRs, and it would be subject to endless jibes from our late
> night show hosts and other satirists like Jon Stewart.
>
> To avoid this consequence, universities like Harvard will need to
> consider investing substantial money to have the work of its faculty
> edited before posting. Are they prepared to step up to the plate in
> that way? Have they even thought about this? I doubt it.
>
> Sandy Thatcher
> Penn Stte University Press