From: Nawin Gupta <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2012 23:06:51 -0600

I agree with Sally—peer review by one person is not sufficient to the
practice of scholarly publishing as we have come to know it.

The publishers who still believe in the preeminence of scholarship and
quality, values and practices honed over a few hundred years, cannot
compete with the OA gold publishing ventures in terms of speed and
cost, nor should they try to.

Most of the gold OA is an entirely different paradigm—a distribution
and content delivery model where speed counts and volume is needed to
be commercially successful.  What matters is getting the "goods" from
point A to B.

Nawin Gupta

Informed Publishing Solutions, Inc.
[log in to unmask]


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

From: Sally Morris <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 20 Dec 2012 12:09:17 +0000

Peer review by one person only is not, in my book, proper peer review
- there should be at least three independent reviewers, with the
Editor-in-Chief (or an appropriately delegated deputy) making the
final decision

Would others agree?

Sally Morris
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK
Email:  [log in to unmask]


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

From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 22:48:33 -0600

I've visited the web site and can find no list of the 100 reviewers
anywhere on it. There is a list of the "Editorial Team" consisting of

14 members, only two of whom are based in the U.S., one of them being
the overall "Editor," William Martin Modrow, who is a Rare Books  &
Manuscripts Librarian at Florida State, who has an MA in history and
MLIS, both from that university:

http://www.lib.fsu.edu/about/faculty/profiles/ModrowB.html--a rather
odd choice, I'd say, to be the editor of a journal covering all of the
social sciences, which are outside his listed fields of expertise.

The other U.S. scholar on the "Team" is one Monroe Friedman, an
emeritus professor of psychology at Eastern Michigan University, known
mainly for his work on consumer behavior.

Over the years as an editor in the social sciences (covering every
field except psychology) for 45 years, I have never come across the
names of any of the 14 members of this "Editorial Team." Moreover, the
description of the editorial peer-review process makes it clear that
each manuscript is assigned to one member of the "Editorial Board"
(which may or may not be different from the aforementioned "Editorial
Team") who, in most cases, do the peer review themselves and make the
final decisions, occasionally consulting with an expert not on the
Board. What Mr.

Scott says about one of the key goals being speed of dissemination is
hardly reassuring about the quality of the peer-review process. He
boasts that it takes just weeks, instead of months, suggesting to me,
at least, that the reviews conducted are pretty superficial. I wonder
if Mr. Scott would care to share with us a sample reader's report on
an accepted manuscript, removing the name of the reviewer (though the
site also says that the Editorial Board members's name always appears
when the article is published)?

Sandy Thatcher


At 8:23 PM -0500 12/18/12, LIBLICENSE wrote:

> From: Dan Scott <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2012 09:20:16 +0000
>
> If any Liblicense members would like to know more about us, there is
> plenty of information on the website or you can read an article that
> was published recently in Insights, the journal of UKSG. To access,
> visit our homepage
> (www.socialsciencesdirectory.com) and scroll down the page below the
> main picture to follow the link.
>
> One of our key goals is dissemination - can we speed up the time to
> publication and will people then use the content? The answer to both
> is

Yes:

> our peer review process takes weeks, rather than months or years; and
> in the three months since publication our COUNTER-compliant statistics
> show there have been over 3,300 downloads.
>
> Dan Scott