The value of a journal article

[Jan Velterop <velteropvonleyden@btinternet.com>]

I can understand David's view (see below) on the meaning of 'value' if I 
imagine his vantage point, which is a user viewpoint, or perhaps more 
accurately, a librarian one. I cannot however accept it as the definitive 
way to define the value of a peer reviewed journal article. We must 
distinguish between the value of the 'content' of an article, and the 
value of it being peer reviewed and published. In David's definition, all 
of a published article's value is locked up solely in its library usage. 
This would mean that in some disciplines, such as areas of physics, 
articles published in journals have no value: according to workers in 
those fields they are hardly ever read in their journal version. This is 
patently not true, for if it were, nobody would bother submitting those 
articles to journals since they are available in ArXiv anyway. Authors do 
want them to be published and that must be because they see value in the 
very act of having them officially published in a peer reviewed journal.

David may well be right, in his position, not to look at any other value 
than library usage value. From a publishing point of view, I recognise the 
'push' value of publishing and not only the 'pull' value of the actual 
content. If a reader overlooks an article it is rarely of major 
consequence. Given the sparsity of availability of scientific journal 
literature in any given institution, overlooking articles is the order of 
the day. An author failing to publish, however, even just failing to 
publish in a journal of sufficiently high esteem, faces potentially major 
career and funding consequences. That's why it is 'publish or perish' and 
not 'read or rot'. It is my personal opinion that publishing peer reviewed 
articles (particularly the stuff of 'publish or perish') has to be 
regarded as a service to authors and to the science community, and paid 
for in that way, rather than as just a trade in content. The open access 
publishing model fits that idea.

Jan Velterop

On 7 Dec 2005, at 23:23, David Goodman wrote:

> [snip]
>
> Returning to a local university level, "Value" has a clear functional 
> meaning: it is a summary of the likelihood that a library will continue 
> or add a subscription.  It is in fact this understood but not-mentioned 
> meaning which explains the virulence of some recent postings. It is 
> measured by such of the above parameters as apply.  In addition, here is 
> where the variation in literature use between disciplines becomes a 
> practical question, but libraries take account of both this variation, 
> as it applies to their local priorities.
>
> (Princeton or MIT are not going to buy Diabetes, no matter how good it 
> is in any or all factors. I suppose Cornell Medical or Yale would buy it 
> even if it were a poor value in financial terms.)
>
> It is also at this level that the possibility of substituting 
> copyright-paid document delivery, fair use interlibrary loan, or Open 
> Access becomes relevant.
>
> Dr. David Goodman
> Associate Professor
> Palmer School of Library and Information Science
> Long Island University
> dgoodman@liu.edu