RE: Provostial Publishing: a return to circa 1920

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

> Stevan Harnad wrote:
> > OA IRs provide free supplemental copies of published, refereed 
> > journal articles. The best and most likely way to find and 
> > access them is via a harvester/indexer that links to the item, 
> > not by directly searching the IR itself. (Direct searching of 
> > the IR is more relevant for (1) institution-internal 
> > record-keeping, (2) performance assessment, (3) CV-generation, 
> > (4) grant application/fulfillment, and perhaps also some 
> > window-shopping by prospective (5) faculty, (6) researchers or 
> > (7) students.)
> >
> > The main purpose of depositing refereed journal articles is (8) 
> > to maximize their accessibility, so they are accessible to all 
> > would-be users, not just those whose institutions happen to 
> > have a subscription to the journal in which they were 
> > published. That way (9) the usage and impact of the 
> > institutional research output is maximized (and so is (10) 
> > overall research progress).
> >
> > >  But I do continue to question what the institution gains 
> > > from its
> > >  IR.
> > It seems to me that (1) to (10) above is quite a list of 
> > institutional gains from their IRs.
I question whether many, or even most, of these alleged benefits 
of IRs really are such. Why is an IR needed for any individual 
performance assessment? A faculty member simply submits relevant 
publications for the P&T committee to review; having them on an 
IR doesn't seem much of a benefit here. And why would anyone need 
to go to an IR to generate a CV? And window shopping? I submit 
that faculty, grad students, and researchers will go look for the 
work of the specialists in the areas they are most interested in, 
not canvass a wide swathe of an institution's publications, and 
then rely on more or less "objective" indicators of prestige 
ranking of departments by various bodies that conduct regular 
assessments. Who is going to try using an IR to measure "the 
usage and impact of the institutional research output" overall? 
As we all know, usage statistics are only one small part of an 
assessment exercise, and they do not even exist for large parts 
of a university's output outside the sciences. How does an IR 
help measure the success of an arts and architecture school, for 
instance? Given the widely disparate nature of materials that 
would be contained in any university-wide IR, I can't see how 
anyone could readily come up with an overall measure of a 
university's contribution to research and scholarship. This is 
pie-in-the-sky thinking, in my opinion.

> > > Harvard authors, on
> > > the whole, are no better writers than scholars elsewhere, I would
> > >  suggest, and their unedited prose will not do any good for the
> > >  institution.
> > That may or may not be a good argument against depositing 
> > unrefereed preprints, but it has nothing to do with OA, OA 
> > mandates, or the primary purpose of OA IRs.
To the contrary, Stevan, the peer-reviewed versions of articles 
you are talking about being deposited have not undergone any 
copyediting, and my guess is that most of what gets posted will 
be versions that have not had copyediting done on them. I keep 
beating this drum, but I need to remind people that unedited 
faculty prose is often not something they would want to have 
exposed to the wider world. You mentioned that high energy 
physics hasn't seem to have suffered any from its exposure on 
arXiv, but then how many people beyond specialists actually read 
anything on this site?

Harvard, on the other hand, is mandating deposit of the writings 
of its faculty in the humanities and social sciences, which at 
least in principle could be of interest and accessible to a 
nonspecialist public. My contention is that Harvard will more 
likely be embarrassed by the unedited writing of some of its 
faculty than gain anything in prestige from it.

Indeed, I can see some bloggers starting to award annual prizes 
to the worst writing on Harvard's site, along the lines of the 
Congressional "golden fleece" awards or the "razzies" that are 
given out each year to the worst movies. Really, believe me when 
I say, Stevan, that excellent scholars are not always, or even 
often, the best writers; many a reputation has been saved by the 
good work of unheralded copyeditors working behind the scenes. To 
protect its reputation, Harvard might find itself having to hire 
copyeditors itself to spruce up the articles before they get 
posted, or at least proofreaders who could remove the most 
egregious errors and typos.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press