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
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