From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2012 23:11:49 -0500

Anthony, as you surely know, for a long time now universities have
been making decisions about which faculty get subsidies to help with
the publication of their monographs when required as a condition of
publication by scholarly publishers--and not just university presses.
It would not be so extreme a step to extend this common practice to
making decisions about which faculty get APCs.

Sandy Thatcher


> From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2012 10:06:45 +0100
>
> Dear Rick,
>
> I am not sure when university presses mainly published the output of their
> universities as did learned societies the output of their members but
> certainly in the past this was their function. What I do know is that part
> of the success of commercial publishers was due to the fact that these
> existing publishing organisations were seen as stifling new developments and
> being in the hands of a relatively narrow group who decided what should be
> published. I am not saying that this was in fact the case but I can say from
> experience of someone who has started 100s of new journals in my time that
> those who came to me with proposals usually if not invariably did so on this
> basis.
>
> These are publishers. It seems to me that the idea that departments should
> decide who gets funding to pay APCs is much more of a problem. Wearing my
> academic hat I would suggest that where disbursement of any funds is
> concerned it is not infrequent that heads of department use their patronage
> to favour those in their own group. They are the filter. Even Wellcome, who
> are really generous funders of publications, pass the responsibility
> downstream to institutions holding grants from them after a period of time.
> There will have to be selection. I do not think academics in general want
> their peers or superiors to be the selectors. Like you I am not suggesting
> that such problems are insuperable.
>
> Back in 2002 Raym Crow wrote an extremely lucid explanation of the new
> publication environment which could be centred on the institutional
> repositories in his Case for Institutional Repositories - see
> http://www.arl.org/sparc/repositories/readings.shtml. The fact that his
> suggested re-alignment of scholarly communication has not come to pass does
> not mean the analysis is other than excellent. I have just been teaching a
> class of students and using his thinking as a starting point. I cannot
> remember whether he mentions branding
>
> Anthony
>
> -----Original Message-----
> 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
> [log in to unmask]