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Re: Does More Mean More?

It is ironic that publishers are now claiming to be the guardians of quantity. Since World War 2 the number of journals published by subscription publishers has increased dramatically. Anyway the main driver for quantity of publication is not the business model but the quantity of research undertaken by the academic community.

Fred Friend
JISC Scholarly Communication Consultant
Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL

----- Original Message -----
From: "Sally Morris (ALPSP)" <sally.morris@alpsp.org>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Friday, January 27, 2006 9:48 PM
Subject: Re: Does More Mean More?


I heartily support what Joe says. One of the key values publishers add, as well as 'quality control', is 'quantity control'

Sally Morris, Chief Executive
Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
Email: sally.morris@alpsp.org

----- Original Message -----
From: "Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Monday, January 23, 2006 1:47 AM
Subject: Does More Mean More?

I clipped the following from David Goodman's recent post:

"One would expect that publishing more universally available
journals will result in increasing readings,"

JE: Well, no. This is exactly the core of the dispute. More journals means less readings. Or, for the grammarians among us, more means fewer. If one journal and only one became Open Access, then that journal is likely to get more "readings" (not a great term, since we can measure page views and downloads, but not readings, and certainly not "understandings"). But I am aware of no OA advocate who proposes to make only one journal OA. The goal is to change everything. So now we have a researcher, whose time is already bedevilled by such annoyances as teaching, family, research, meetings, and personal hygiene, who suddenly finds that the thicket of materials to review is growing, growing, growing. This researcher will look for filters of various kinds; the imprimatur of an established journal is but one kind of filter. It is easy to underestimate in this regard the growing role of the blogosphere even within the research community, as bloggers cite articles, which in turn get preferred ranking in search engines, making articles more findable and thus more likely to get read. Today's bloggers may be tomorrow's publishers. Or perhaps a publisher will string together a network of blogs, serving as a New Media form of review.

It should be clear that one of the traditional values of publishers is addressing the "more is less" phenomenon. Contrary to the widespread belief among authors and academics, the role of a publisher is to suppress the dissemination of information. This is the filtering process at work. Bets are placed on certain authors and certain topics, and all the rest are swept off the board. People don't pay publishers because they are nice guys or monopolists or because they have corrupted the purchasing agent, but because they say no to many authors. That "no" lends credibility to the authors who get a "yes." And this also serves to explain why so many authors dislike publishers, as publishers routinely refuse to give authors the keys to the car. In the value chain of scholarly communications, somebody has to be the grown-up.

What OA will inevitably lead to is a huge surge in the quantity of materials made available. Here again OA advocates have it wrong when they say that the peer-review process and other forms of filtering will remain just as they are today. Standards will drop or become more diffuse because one of the limiting agents--the amount of money to be spent on access--has been removed from the value chain; and on top of this is the proliferation of unmediated forms of publication, of which blogs are the most notorious but hardly the only ones.

If there is a crisis in scholarly communications today it is not one of access but of plenitude.

Joe Esposito