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Re: Does More Mean More?
Joe,
Most people would agree that there has to be a filtering process,
and there is no reason to doubt that open access publishers can
operate as efficiently as subscription publishers as gatekeepers.
The UK JISC has been monitoring the rejection rate on the open
access journals it has been funding, and no deterioration in
quality has been observed. As to how this "expensive but
essential process" can be financed, income streams for OA
journals will no doubt be as varied as the income streams for
subscription journals, but for growing numbers of STM authors the
cost can be covered through their research grant.
The cost of the "gatekeeper" function will vary from journal to
journal, as we already witnessing, and the OA publication charge
will be one factor authors will take into account - alongside the
reputation of the journal - in deciding where to submit their
work. The future will be good for those OA journals that maintain
a good reputation for quality at a reasonable price to authors or
their funding agencies.
Fred Friend
JISC Scholarly Communication Consultant
Honorary Director Scholarly Communication UCL
----- Original Message -----
From: "Joseph Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Monday, February 06, 2006 12:53 AM
Subject: Re: Does More Mean More?
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