Re: [xmca] Open Access journals

[Larry Purss <lpscholar2@gmail.com>]

This topic on open source operates within a particular context.
I'm sending a link to a paper that is a short 7 pages but seems relevant to
this topic by discussing the general topic of "academic writing" within an
historical context.
http://education.ucsb.edu/bazerman/chapters/documents/Bazerman2006ChptrRefinedSelves.pdf

The article is by Charles Bazerman, titled "Distanced and Refined Selves:
Educational Tensions in Writing with the Power of Knowledge."

Larry




On Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 3:23 PM, Jay Lemke <jaylemke@umich.edu> wrote:

>
> I think a lot of people have been re-thinking the academic publication
> system. The impetus has come from university libraries which in hard
> economic times are finding it impossible to pay the exorbitant subscription
> rates charged by publishers, especially for journals in fields like
> biomedicine. Elsevier Publishing has been particularly condemned, but it's
> widespread.
>
> The response has come from people in biology and other areas of science
> and mathematics who on principle feel that their work, especially when it
> is being paid for by the public through government funding, ought to be
> available more widely. This is not just so they can get more citations
> (evidence for that being uncertain anyway). Hence the OA movement.
>
> But most of those originators were just looking to have their grants pay
> for OA publication fees. They were not thinking about having to pay it
> themselves. There was also a hope that if enough researchers published in
> OA journals (and many signed petitions saying they would do so), then
> academic libraries could cut subscriptions to non-OA journals and
> universities could re-direct the money towards paying people's publication
> charges.
>
> The alternative model has the universities funding online repositories of
> articles published the usual way, but in journals that accept a partial
> assignment of copyright that allows authors to make free access available
> via such repositories. Many such repositories already exist, and in some
> fields funders require copies be filed with a designated one.
>
> I think a major obstacle to change, other than opposition from traditional
> publishers (who see journals as cash cows, which is why there have been so
> many new ones created in the last 10 years), is the establishment in
> academia itself. The best alternative is simply to by-pass publishers and
> create new journals with high profile editorial boards and reviewing
> standards, publishing only online, and minimizing all unnecessary costs, in
> a non-profit system. But that means a major shake-up in who the editors are
> going to be, who holds the power, etc. It also of course means that
> everybody from researchers to librarians to promotions committees has to
> evaluate which new journals are of the highest quality. A whole new
> reputation system has to emerge.
>
> I suppose it's also possible that we don't actually need journals anymore
> at all. All we need is peer review panels, who can award "badges" to papers
> that we simply put online ourselves and let google do the rest. The idea
> that a journal is really a forum for a community may be one who's time has
> passed, despite the fact that xmca and MCA do represent a community much
> more than most journals do. But we could also just have an xlchc.orgwebsite with a page where people could announce their own new papers and
> recommend papers to others.
>
> Or ??
>
> JAY.
>
>
> Jay Lemke
> Senior Research Scientist
> Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition
> Adjunct Professor, Department of Communication
> University of California - San Diego
> 9500 Gilman Drive
> La Jolla, California 92093-0506
>
> New Website: www.jaylemke.com
>
> Professor (Adjunct status 2011-2012)
> School of Education
> University of Michigan
> Ann Arbor, MI 48109
>
> Professor Emeritus
> City University of New York
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>  On Mar 4, 2012, at 12:30 PM, Michael Glassman wrote:
>
> > MIT press, along with I believe some other university presses are doing
> some experimentation in Open Access with books - not sure how it is going.
>   Open Access is a descendant of Richard Stallman's Free Software
> movement/Foundation.  It is both an intellectual and a political approach
> to information.   To simply try to overlay the idea of Open Access on a
> pre-existing, heavily product for profit system probably does not work.   I
> wonder if anybody has ever done a study on how peer review reflects the
> traditional market system.  At the same time there is the worry that
> because there is so much free information through the Web, and it will only
> be increasing, that academia will become irrelevant if it keeps its best
> product behind some type of paywalls (see current newspaper industry - even
> to a certain extent The New York Times).   Why can't there be a re-thinking
> of how we build a peer review system for vetted information?  One that
> realizes the dangers of segragating information based on position or
> ability to pay.
> >
> > Michael
> >
> > ________________________________
> >
> > From: xmca-bounces@weber.ucsd.edu on behalf of Jay Lemke
> > Sent: Sun 3/4/2012 2:57 PM
> > To: XMCA Forum
> > Subject: [xmca] Open Access journals
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > I just want to make clear that I'm all in favor of Open Access journals,
> under some financial models for supporting operating costs.
> >
> > There certainly are some very well respected OA journals, of which PLoS
> ONE is probably the best known (in biology, started by senior researchers).
> So far as I know these are almost exclusively in the natural sciences,
> where most research is grant-funded and where granting agencies, government
> and private, are moving steadily to a policy of paying publication charges
> so that the articles will then be available free online to all.
> >
> > That model assumes that funding agencies pay, and the costs can be
> substantial ($1000-2000 per article). In addition to PLoS, which publishes
> several journals of this kind, Springer publishing in the UK has a division
> that also uses this model, and makes a profit. I am not sure, but I think
> PLoS is essentially non-profit.
> >
> > I can't see many social science researchers paying this kind of money to
> publish. ScienceDomain, whose quality is in question for now, is aiming at
> this market, but also and mainly at natural sciences, with its rate of $500
> per article.
> >
> > There is an alternative Open Access model, the repository model (also
> known as the Green OA model) in which you publish in a regular journal but
> the copyright agreement allows you to deposit a pdf of the article in an
> institutional repository, where it can be accessed online for free. Some
> government-sponsored research now requires a depository copy and the
> publishers are being forced to agree (though they are also lobbying in
> Congress against the policies). Of course you can also just put the pdf on
> your own website and let Google do the rest of the work.
> >
> > It's not at all clear to me what costs for OA would add up to hundred or
> thousands of dollars per article. Certainly not the cost of uploading pdfs
> to the cloud. I also can't see justifications based on indexing costs
> (which have been claimed). If the journal has no subscriptions, but runs
> entirely on publication charges, then it's going to have some basic
> operating costs, even if it's not doing print publishing, but these
> journals do not pay peer reviewers, who do most of the work, and in general
> I don't think they pay editors very much. There are also obvious economies
> of scale to be realized; fewer journals publishing more articles would make
> the operating cost per article less.
> >
> > If you operate 20 online journals, and each publishes 100 articles per
> year, even at $500 per article, you are generating $1 million a year in
> revenue. If you are based in India (and I am guessing this is true for
> ScienceDomain), that ought to buy a lot of copyediting, typesetting (really
> necessary anymore??), and cloud storage. Plus a small staff, small
> subsidies to editors, and the rest comes in free labor from us. It ought to
> be possible to run such an operation for a lot less than $500 per article.
> >
> > Now it's a widely known secret that the average journal article is only
> read by about 2-3 people and most articles never get cited. That means that
> you can't rely on small per-download charges for adequate revenue. UNLESS
> of course you only publish really GOOD research, which tends to get read
> and cited by lots of people, each of whom could afford a modest charge like
> $1 to download. (yes, there are international issues; the current models
> mostly have sliding scale charges already)
> >
> > The other major question is the quality of the review process. Looking
> at ScienceDomain for 2 journals (the BERJ clone and their Physical Review
> clone) they each have a couple of senior academics on their editorial
> teams, plus a lot of people who are very likely not qualified, and who
> certainly would not command the degree of widespread confidence by their
> respective research communities to be in charge of a journal. Editors
> choose reviewers and evaluate their reviews. Editorial Boards are supposed
> to remind the editor once a year to keep standards high (and we sometimes
> actually do reviews, too). It's a reputation system, and it can be overly
> exclusive and sometimes too "in-group" oriented, but it's a lot better than
> a system in which no one has any idea whether "peer-reviewed" means
> anything better than a random draw. Blind review is not supposed to mean
> that the blind are reviewing the blinded. Someone is supposed to be able to
> see quality differences.
> >
> > But who pays? And how much?
> >
> > JAY.
> >
> >
> > Jay Lemke
> > Senior Research Scientist
> > Laboratory for Comparative Human Cognition
> > Adjunct Professor, Department of Communication
> > University of California - San Diego
> > 9500 Gilman Drive
> > La Jolla, California 92093-0506
> >
> > New Website: www.jaylemke.com
> >
> > Professor (Adjunct status 2011-2012)
> > School of Education
> > University of Michigan
> > Ann Arbor, MI 48109
> >
> > Professor Emeritus
> > City University of New York
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
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