Re: Does More Mean More?

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

While we are debating statistics, I want to share what has been 
my experience as an editor and (later) publisher and (later yet) 
consultant to publishers over the years concerning "quantity 
control," which is a misnomer, in my view.  Every publishing 
person I know lives in dread of the unsolicited (note that word) 
manuscript.  It takes all forms.  You get approached at parties, 
at your kids' school fund-raisers, at trade shows, through 
unsolicited email (aka spam).  I have had entire hardcopy 
manuscripts delivered to my door because someone knew someone who 
knew someone who had read something I had written.

These "submissions" (what a freighted word!) are so 
indiscriminate that they boggle the mind.  The publisher of 
college texts receives a novel "because a student could learn 
from the historical setting."  An STM publisher I chatted with 
complained that he gets submissions in veterinary science when 
his work is entirely in human medicine.  This is before one gets 
to the even larger category of submissions that are indeed on 
point, but for any of many reasons (peer review is alive and 
well, though not perfect) do not meet the publisher's standards 
or current editorial focus.  There are 6 billion people on the 
planet and even the illiterate ones appear to be authors.

To say that publishers are not gatekeepers is simply wrong.  The 
point is not how much they do publish (always too much, a 
function of the competitive nature of the marketplace and the 
vanity of human wishes), but how much they don't.  You can call 
this "quantity control" if you will; I call it exercising 
judgment.  Publishers are not the only gatekeepers, formal and 
informal, nor are they perfect; some would say that they are not 
even good.

But if one were to eliminate all these gatekeepers or filters, 
from colleagues and readers to editors (as distinct from 
publishers) and peer review boards--before one even gets to the 
person who finances the whole game, the publisher--the number of 
publications would explode.  I am being very careful not to say 
"good authors" and "good publications."  Most of what is written 
is not good; much, perhaps most, of what is published is not 
good; but the filtering process is designed to eliminate the 
truly bad, not to identify the exceptional.  As for those who can 
and do identify the exceptional, well, truly good editors are 
rare and worth their weight in citations.  I wonder how they 
select the incoming freshman class at Princeton.

Of the umpteen virtues of Open Access publishing, no one has yet 
explained in a manner that my tiny brain can understand how the 
expensive but essential process described above can be financed 
in a free-to-the-reader environment.  I wish it were otherwise, 
as there are many, many things I would like to read that I don't 
because I simply can't afford all of them. So I make choices, 
like everybody else, perhaps bad ones.

Joe Esposito