Re: Does More Mean More?

[Steve Hitchcock <sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

The idea that "readers want the journal to do the filtering for 
them" is really quite quaint, it seems to me. Perhaps not 
surprisingly, as Sally mentions the term 'paper'. We need to be 
careful about terminology here. In the electronic environment 
journals do *peer review* rather than filter. If you want to see 
what electronic filters are, see e.g. Citeseer, Google Scholar. 
In these services peer review and associated journal titles are 
labels (tags), more or less important depending on the user, that 
go into the filter mix.

The changing role of journals in the overall scheme of filtering 
and selection is a fascinating and critical point of enquiry, but 
the old points of reference in this discussion are completely 
inadequate.

Steve Hitchcock
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256    Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865

At 00:50 06/02/2006, Sally Morris \(ALPSP\) wrote:
> Publishers control quantity in individual journals - they do not allow
> them to grow as fast as the literature overall (otherwise there would be
> no new journals).
>
> By publishers I mean those entities - commercial or 
> not-for-profit - who work with specialist editors to produce 
> journals.  In my experience of many years as a journal 
> publisher, increases in extent are worried over very carefully, 
> since both publishers and editors know that steep price 
> increases will damage subscriptions.  Thus there is a tendency 
> to moderate any growth in influx of suitable papers, by raising 
> the acceptance bar. It's sometimes put forward as a benefit of 
> e-journals that they are not subject to extent limitations;  I 
> think that's wrong on two counts.  First, the real rate limiting 
> factor for a journal is people's time, not paper.  And second, a 
> journal which grows out of control is not performing a very 
> helpful service to the time-poor reader.
>
> Thus, by quantity control, I mean not publishing everything that 
> comes a journal's way, and if necessary (see above) raising 
> acceptance standards in order for the journal not to grow too 
> much, if at all.  Publishers and their editors are very well 
> aware that the reader doesn't magically have more time to read 
> just because there are more papers - readers want the journal to 
> do the filtering for them
>
> Sally Morris, Chief Executive
> Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers
> Email:  sally.morris@alpsp.org