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RE: Deposit Mandates as part of Publisher Services

Well, yes, of course, if scholars could all organize themselves so well as to create a well-functioning system of scholarly communication, publishers would not be necessary. But where is the proof that scholars actually want to do this? It is hard work to keep track of everything, to solicit reviewers and to make sure they deliver reports on time, to keep after authors to do revisions as promised, to coordinate articles into issues, to get those issues properly formatted, to do the marketing necessary to make people aware that the journal exists, to archive the back issues, to create DOI links between articles, not to mention copyediting, which scholars are generally not good at doing.

Scholars have much else on their minds, and all this kind of work is a distraction from them doing their own research. Moreover, it is a wasteful expenditure of university resources to have scholars, who are not trained as publishing professionals, do this kind of work, which can be done better and at less cost (because publishing staff are less well compensated than faculty) by people who have the skills to do it efficiently. Disintermediation comes at a price or, as economists would say, an "opportunity cost."

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press

I congratulate Sandy for a honest, concise, and definitive
statement of the reason why the present publication system does
not serve the interests of scientific authors, and why academic
publishers, as they now exist, are harmful to the interests of
science:


 for [our authors], greater distribution,
 even illegal distribution, is a bonus.

The interest of an author of research journal articles is in
distribution. Whatever system does it most effectively is
preferable. The most efficient system in terms of both universal
distribution and low cost is an arXiv-like system with
superimposed peer-review; the best proposal remains that of
Varmus, ten years ago, for exacly that.
<http://www.nih.gov/about/director/pubmedcentral/ebiomedarch.htm>

It would of course reduce the industry of scientific journal
publishing to operating the computer systems that track peer
review and maintain the archives. The obvious commercial
interests of the journal publishers prevented its adoption then,
abetted by a government more interested in sponsoring corporate
enterprise than in promoting science and education.

Perhaps by now scientists realize that publisher interests are
not the same as ours; it has long been technically possible for
us to ignore journal publishers altogether, and we could do it of
our own accord. A journal cannot publish without manuscripts. We
can review by ourselves, as we have always done, and we can
certainly archive by ourselves, as we already do.

The money libraries spend would be much better used for the
production of monographs in the humanities. University presses do
that very well, their main problem being that not enough money is
available, for so few libraries have funds to buy them after
purchasing the scientific journals.

David Goodman, Ph.D., M.L.S.
dgoodman@princeton.edu

----- Original Message -----
From: Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>
Date: Thursday, March 27, 2008 8:59 pm
Subject: RE: Deposit Mandates as part of Publisher Services
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
...

. Our authors would generally not be motivated to sue
 to protect us against piracy; for them, greater distribution,

> even illegal distribution, is a bonus.
>
> Sandy Thatcher
> Penn State University Press