From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2014 10:02:57 +0000

I thought Jean-Claude might come up some sort of remark along these lines.

This story highlights a problem that anyone who has actually worked in
publishing is familiar with. It is generally accepted that the proceedings
of a conference are better placed in a journal than published stand alone. I
appreciate that some disciplines rate conference proceedings much higher
than others, but the recent CIBER/UTK study on Trust in information sources
for the Sloan Foundation (in which I was involved) found that even in those
disciplines journals are rated higher see:

http://www.ciber-research.eu/download/20140115-Trust_Final_Report.pdf.

Publishers and journal editors routinely get requests from the organisers of
symposia: it is no longer (I understand) quite such a big deal as it once
was when supplements often bought to give to recipients were very helpful
both to the journal visibility and to its finances. As we see from the
"gibberish" this is not just commercial publishers.

Now, it was not uncommon for editors very familiar with the organisers of
symposia, people they rate highly and trust, to delegate editorial
responsibility to them to do the proper refereeing. The editor is at one
remove from the peer review and the publisher is two removes. A long time
ago I found myself forced to intervene (as the publisher) when the peer
review for an Italian symposium had just not been done - as was clear to the
copy editor who reported it. Fortunately we had copy editors of such
calibre.

I have made the point before - and not everyone agrees with me, but it is my
view that standards of controlling peer review are much higher across all
types of publishers than they were, partly if not mainly because every
article goes through the online editorial systems which enables much more
oversight.

Anthony

-----Original Message-----
From: Jean-Claude Guédon <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2014 08:44:50 -0500

We all know that the value added by publishers is peer review....

And it is what justifies the "reasonable" prices of access licenses...

Perhaps the "rogue" category of journals should be considerably enlarged.

jcg



Le lundi 24 février 2014 à 21:48 -0500, LIBLICENSE a écrit :

From: Ann Okerson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2014 21:42:31 -0500

The news du jour:  "The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than
120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher
discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense." In today's
article by reporter Richard Van Noorden, you can even find out how to make a
start on your own gibberish paper.  These were published mainly in
conference proceedings.

http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-paper
s-1.14763