Re: Peter and Jan, re: NYT on Cornyn-Lieberman

[David Goodman <dgoodman@Princeton.EDU>]

> 'formalising' the literature, through peer review, editing, and 
> other services,

Peter, that is almost all of what publishers do now, except for 
assembling and disseminating the formalized information. In 
print, dissemination was perhaps the critical part, and 
publishers and iibrarians jointly developed complicated and 
expensive systems to facilitate this--for distributing the new 
material, for continuing access, for secure archiving, for 
connecting to what we now call the metadata.

With all this, llibrarians never solved the problem of access 
outside of research institutions; the only alternative they 
provided was the expensive and slow interlibrary loan. systems. 
Publishers never facilitated this part-- they fought against ILL 
via photocopies just as they now fight OA.

Nor are publishers needed for electronic dissemination--almost 
all contract it out to specialists now. We will continue to need 
such specialists, and also specialists for the design and 
upkeeping of Print on Demand machines.

Thus, users and authors of scientific articles no longer need 
publishers for dissemination. Lisa may not have meant this 
literally, but I do. We do need them for the functions included 
by Jan, and also the function of assembling the material; a 
journal brand applied via peer review seems the most obvious and 
the most familiar, at least as a starting point. Similarly, We do 
need A&I services, probably including human input. This remains 
an expensive part of the system, as does the editing. There will 
still be high-paying jobs to be done.

We have the knowledge, we have the infrastrucuture.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
and formerly
Princeton University Library

dgoodman@liu.edu
dgoodman@princeton.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: Peter Banks <pbanks@diabetes.org>
Date: Friday, May 12, 2006 10:08 pm
Subject: RE: NYT on Cornyn-Lieberman
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu

> Though you may not have seriously meant that publishers should
> simply be paid for their services to do the work of 'formalising'
> the literature, through peer review, editing, and other services,
> that is pretty much what many OA advocates are assuming
> for-profit and non-profit publishers should do.
>
> For nonprofit publisher, the argument seems to be (as Richard
> Feinman as argued) that nonprofts should peer review and edit
> manuscripts pretty much at cost, then allow the final manuscripts
> to me made freely available to anyone, eliminating the chance to
> generate any income to offset the substantial investment the
> society has made, to reinvest in publishing operations, or to
> fund any other research or educational program. No sane nonprofit
> or forproft executive would ever accept such a business plan.
>
> Of course, the peer-review only option might create a new
> publishing system. Eliminate journals as we know them, and just
> set up peer review institutes that would subject manuscripts to
> peer review and editing, but not publish or distribute them.
> Authors, or funding agencies, would simply pay the institutes to
> formalize their papers, then deposit them in PMC or other OA
> repositories. To have credibility, the peer-review institutes
> would have to be run by credible organizations, like major
> research universities, who would of course have to charge high
> prices for faculty time and other services, which would lead to
> complaints by librarians that peer review costs too much, which
> would lead to another ten years of debate on liblicense. The more
> thngs change.....
>
> Peter Banks