From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sat, 15 Jun 2013 09:45:18 +0100

Dear Sandy

I can think of two very prestigious book publishers who seem (sometimes) to
be contemptuous of authors. This is well known and has been well known for
years. I have a personal experience of one of them as an author, I do not
think the larger journal publishers have quite the same bad record. I
suspect that problems are exceptional though not to be justified because of
that and it is great if there is a channel for complaints. I suggest that
there is much more competition for papers in the journal world because there
is much more choice. If you put on one side the special case of Nature and
Science (this is not to suggest that they do not treat authors seriously)
there is plenty of choice at a high level. At the top level in monograph
publishing especially in more specialist areas there is very little choice -
I would suggest. When I wrote about monographs in 2001 I could only find one
press that was actively considering e-only monograph publication. When I
asked the publisher why she said that in the area they specialised in there
was so little quality competition that the authors would be happy to accept
anything - even the dreadful threat of no print.

Anthony

-----Original Message-----

From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2013 00:53:10 -0500

Fair enough. But I can tell you that I constantly heard complaints from book
authors about one very prestigious scholarly publisher's treatment of
authors, and it seemed to be pretty common knowledge among authors. Yet the
publisher's prestige was so great that a low quality of service didn't seem
to make much difference to how many submissions it received. I suspect the
same may be true also in the journals world.

Sandy Thatcher


> From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2013 14:14:40 +0000
>
>> Open reviews of journals would be as useful as book reviews on Amazon
>> where one usually has no idea what qualifies the reviewer to express
>> an opinion.
>
>
> But no one is proposing "open reviews of journals" here, Sandy. The
> system in question here wouldn't review works of scholarship (about
> which relatively few people might be qualified to express a truly
> informed opinion); it would review services provided -- i.e.
> reviewing, editing, dissemination, etc. The ones qualified to comment
> on the quality of the service are the ones who were provided it --
> i.e., authors. I'm not a plumber, and in fact I know very little about
> plumbing, but I am fully qualified to rate the quality of service my
> plumber provides: Did he arrive when he said he would? Did he work
> with reasonable speed and efficiency? Was the final bill reasonably close
to the original estimate?
> Did he leave a mess? When he left, had the leak stopped? These are
> questions that the customer, rather than a plumbing expert, is in a
> position to answer, and the answers are likely to be very useful and
> interesting to the plumber's other potential customers.
>
> By the same token, any author who places a manuscript with a publisher
> comes away from that experience fully qualified to comment on it. In
> other words, what we're talking about here is not "open reviews of
journals,"
> but open review of the way journal publishers interact with their
> customers, who are, in the first instance, authors. (Such a mechanism
> is especially interesting because journal publishers are vying for
> authors in a conventionally competitive marketplace -- which, given
> the monopolistic nature of copyright, is not true of the marketplace
> for readers.)
>
> ---
> Rick Anderson
> Interim Dean, J. Willard Marriott Library University of Utah
> [log in to unmask]