From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 4 Mar 2013 22:35:07 -0600

I agree with Joe that time will tell how much pressures to keep Gold
OA  fees down affects editorial quality, of both the types that have
been discussed here.  There is some evidence already, in such
decisions as PeerJ's not providing editorial services as part of what
the basic fee covers, that he has a point.

But I think we need to understand that there are very clear
differences among the types of editorial activities that various
actors play in the system, and that they come into play differently in
journal and book publishing.

In journal publishing, the role of the journal editor has been most
dominant. Joe has given a pretty good description of what a journal
editor does in his second paragraph. The role of the publisher's staff
is mostly subsidiary in journal publishing to that of the journal
editor.  A journal has to be acquired by a publisher, and it has to be
designed, but for journals, unlike books, these are activities
performed once, at the outset and not repeated. Copyediting is
ongoing, but in my experience copyediting for journals is more routine
and less extensive than it is for book publishing and can follow a
model style sheet established for the journal at the outset.

In book publishing, by contrast, staff editors play a major role in
the whole process. They determine what the profile of a list in the
fields they cover is, actively solicit books that fit the profile,
directly manage the peer-review process, work out a detailed
publishing plan for each book, and engage in sometimes intensive
editorial massaging of the book before and after acceptance. This last
generally goes by the name of "developmental" editing and focuses on
large-scale features of a book, leaving the detailed line-by-line
editing to the copyeditor.  It can't be emphasized enough how much
wider and deeper this work by an acquiring editor is than is typical
for journal editors.  In an essay I wrote about acquisitions in 1999,
I identified nine different functions that such editors perform, which
I called "hunter, selector, shaper, linker, stimulator, promoter,
ally, reticulator, and listbuilder":
http://www.psupress.org/news/pdf/THEVAL~1.PDF.  The closest analogue
to the journal editor in the world of book publishing is the book
series editor.  For university presses, another key component of the
system is the faculty editorial board.  For book publishing, each book
is a separate entity that requires its own special copyediting and
design (though some publishers have attempted to achieve economies by
funneling books into a finite set of "model books" that define the
parameters for both design and copyediting).

How Gold OA will affect book publishing is even less certain at this
point than it is for journal publishing. Palgrave Macmillan just
recently announced a Gold OA option for its monograph publishing
program, which received some comment on this list, and Amherst College
is about to launch an OA-only press based, it appears, on an endowment
model.  The latter, presumably, would be less subject to the kind of
pressures affecting quality that Joe worries about than the PM
approach, but we'll have to wait and see.

Sandy Thatcher


> From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sun, 3 Mar 2013 20:50:14 -0500
>
> I am a great admirer of the work of Andrew Odlyzko and have even
> recently recommended some of his papers to someone who is putting
> together a "greatest hits" collection on scholarly communications. (I
> only recommended 4 people.)  But I simply do not agree with his view
> of the editorial process.
>
> First of all, editing is not just copy-editing.  Copy-editing is of
> uncertain merit, at least to me.  Mark Kurtz's post on this thread
> pretty much sums up my own view, so I won't restate it here.  The more
> significant editorial decisions are, first,  in choosing the editor of
> a journal.  This could be called a publishing decision rather than an
> editorial one, but it certainly has a great impact on the final
> product.  The second is what could be called "the personality of the
> publisher."  This is hard to explain to people who have not seen this
> in action, but it is fundamental to traditional publishing.  That
> personality is what makes an editor accept or reject a piece because
> it, well, just feels right to do so.  Editors, that is, are not just
> looking or what is good as opposed to what is bad but are interested
> in the direction that certain materials are taking.  Those who believe
> that personality is "subjective" (as though that were a bad thing)
> don't appreciate that scholarship, including in the sciences, is moved
> forward as much by the force of an individual's will as it is by its
> "correctness."  There are many things to be correct about, but why
> choose one direction over another?  Thus the editorial process not
> only reviews material but also helps to set the agenda for the domains
> it covers.  (This of course is highly unwelcome in some circles.)
> Finally, the editorial process helps to shape material (more true of
> books than for journals), which is a great service to readers.  Peer
> review is subordinate to these other editorial functions.
>
> I should add (having just read Anthony Watkinson's and Ken Masters'
> posts) that I am not asserting that traditional publishing is good and
> that Gold OA is bad.  Nor am I suggesting that everything that goes
> into a traditional journal is of high quality or that the traditional
> publishers somehow or other have attained the moral high ground.
> There are scoundrels everywhere.  In terms of my own professional
> activity, I spend more time on OA services than on traditional ones.
> If you are looking for an apologist for traditional publishing, you
> will have to look elsewhere.  I am making a simple assertion, that the
> need to drive down costs in Gold OA publishing is likely to have an
> impact on the kind of editorial attention that OA materials receive
> pre-publication.  You can argue that that attention is unnecessary (I
> chuckled at Mark's example of the use of the "series [sic] comma"),
> that post-publication review in the form of readers' comments is of
> equal or greater value, and that the merits of openness outweigh
> whatever is lost of the traditional editorial process.  But I don't
> think you can argue that the editorial review, across all OA
> publications, of the same kind as in the traditional model.  Note the
> gap between the $5,000 revenue per article in Andrew Odlyzko's recent
> paper and the $1,250 fee for articles in PLoS ONE.  That's a big gap
> to close and editorial activity must contribute to part of it.
>
> The number of Gold OA services is exploding.  I hear of about two new
> ones each week.  We have a living laboratory here from which we will
> be able to make judgments in a few years.  I am happy to wait.
>
> A last technical point:  Ken Masters notes that some traditional
> publishers have OA options and asks whether that means that standards
> are lower.  No, it does not.  OA options for traditional publications
> represent a "two-sided economy," in which revenue received from
> libraries is supplemented by revenue from authors.  There is no
> financial pressure to cut editorial activity in these situations.
>
> Joe Esposito