From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2012 22:54:12 -0700
" But what if those who see the citation know that the publisher is
also my employer?"
Analogously, this is what may happen with eLife. The funding
organizations are going to have a complicated relationship with eLife.
What happens if one of the funding bodies supports research that in
turn is refused by the editors of eLife? What's the significance of
that? How will the granting body feel about funding things that don't
cut the mustard? And if a publication is accepted by eLife, is that
like getting a letter of reference from your mother? "He was always a
good boy. Now he is a good scientist. You should publish his work.
And he calls me every Sunday."
Joe Esposito
On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 8:55 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2012 23:50:07 +0000
>
> Isn't this becoming a debate about whether research institutions
> should take responsibility for publishing the research done by their
> staff? This is a big shift since, historically, institutions have
> largely left responsibility for publishing to their research staff.
>
> If we accept that institutions need to take over this responsibility
> from individual staff, then we need to ask the question: will
> institutions be any good at discharging this responsibility?
>
> Another question is whether scholars will trust institutions to
> perform the kind of branding for their own output that is currently
> performed by third-party journals. Under the current system, if I
> publish an article in a prestigious journal, those who see the
> citation have pretty good reason to expect that my article is of high
> quality, because the journal publisher has no vested interest in
> advancing my career. But what if those who see the citation know that
> the publisher is also my employer?
>
> I'm not saying this is an insuperable problem, only that it's one more
> thing that would have to be considered if we want to get serious about
> moving in this direction. What it would amount to, really, is
> institutional self-publishing. Every journal would be seen as,
> essentially, a vanity press of its institution unless some kind of
> structurally rigorous discrimination were built into the system. (And
> what would be the institution's incentive for building such rigor in?)
>
> --
> Rick Anderson
> Acting Dean, J. Willard Marriott Library
> University of Utah
> [log in to unmask]
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