From: Sean Andrews <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2012 22:26:27 -0600

On Mon, Feb 13, 2012 at 6:28 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: "Boyter, Leslie" <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2012 10:47:52 -0800
>
> My two cents--
>
> I think this is a frightening practice:
>
> >(4) One can quote from the OA version (which is usually identical to the version-of-record, apart from minor copy-editing).
>
> Can you imagine the "minor copy-editing" required for an article that
> might completely change the meaning of a sentence or paragraph? I can. I have seen a ridiculous number of papers written by people that leave out "minor" words.


Thanks for these thoughts, Leslie.  I respect what you are saying here
and see the very important points you are making .  I don't mean to
minimize the scholarly importance of the issues you and Sandy raise.
But it seems to me that this really doesn't have to be a problem any
more.  As the practice of Open Access evolves - and the more authors
have ungated, preprint versions of an article in sites that allow
commenting and reader feedback, the more the peer review process will
become relegated to the cloud.  If the author eventually decides to
revise the posted paper in response to the reader feedback, they can
post a revised version of the paper - just as pamphleteers,
playwrights, and philosophers did when print was just a baby (much to
the chagrin of later scholars who have to chase down those versions in
helpful special collections.) Now we've evolved so that print is more
orderly, editions are clearly distinguished, and citations clearly
reflect which edition is being referenced.

I agree that any subsequent citation of whichever paper should indeed
include a specific reference to the version you are citing - and
careful readers and critics of THAT piece will have to be cautious in
looking at whatever source is cited, something that is true today for
all scholars, even if it isn't always practiced.  The more the
articles appearing in the citations are on the web - again in open
access portals - the easier it will be to perform this check of the
sources, and to do inline critique in order to show others in the
comments where a problem appears in/w the cited source.  A wiki would
work fine for this - and theoretically, they should cite whatever
version of any other wiki they are using e.g. the date/archive stamp.
By doing so, this becomes a "version of record" simply because you can
record the version, and cite it accordingly.  The issues you and Sandy
point to are a call for different bibliographic practices amongst
authors and readers, not evidence that the only way one can consecrate
a paper of record is with subscription gates.

After all, the most important peer review happens after a paper
(whatever version) appears in public and can create a conversation
among its audience.  It is only papers that resonate with, prove or
touch on something important, unique and fundamental in the readers
and fellow scholars that will be read widely.  And the best way to get
something read widely, is to publish it in a place the most people can
read.

If there is a problem, it's that most preprints seem to sit in
institutional repositories that, so far as I can tell, are
functionally invisible to most search engines.  Is this mandated or am
I just mistaken?  I haven't explored Google Scholar much, but I don't
find this to often be the case.  Maybe a platform like Academia.edu
will become a more common form of repository (using something like
Scribd, which I think it does) and be easier to search.

In this case, the peer review process inside a journal is really more
of a guarantee to the tenure seeking and tenure granting faculty.  For
both, it is a guarantee that the article will be (and then has been)
reviewed by someone.

From the perspective of the publishing scholar, there is a certain
thanklessness to the internet as a primary publishing venue - for
instance, I've kept a blog for the better part of four months, sent
things around to people I would think are the relevant audience and
only a small handful of people have randomly stopped by to say
anything about a post.  I don't say this as a complaint, but in that
time, I've sent two or three proposals to people for a traditional
publishing opportunity (in conferences journals, book chapters, or
books) and I've received pointed feedback about them in very helpful
ways.  Therefore, at this point in my career, the traditional
publishing route is a way to guarantee SOMEONE will HAVE to look at it
- and, it if it is published, help me improve and clarify my argument.
And since, as a tenure track faculty member, I have to prove and
guarantee that someone has looked at it, someone we all agree is a
good judge.

The peer review inside a journal will help guarantee that for both of
us and therefore help us both to make a timely arrangement as to my
future employment.  After all, if we all had to wait around for that
"most important" peer review above, we might all be waiting a long
time - and I very well might not make it.  The latter, on the other
hand, isn't necessarily because what I wrote wasn't worthwhile, but
just because the discovery problems make it hard.  I don't recall how
many journal articles were published last year but it was well over
1,350,000 in 2006 or so: that is hard enough to sort through.  How
many multiples of this number would come close to counting the number
of websites or blog posts published in that timeframe - or in the last
year!  Back to your discovery problem, Joe.  Not everyone can be a
Habermas or a Lessig - and even they took time getting noticed.
Meanwhile they had to eat (and, so far as I can tell, now that Lessig
has moved onto government corruption as the meta-force behind
copyright's problems, he seems to have abandoned his practice of
giving away copies of his book for free: if I want to read his latest
book, I might actually have to - gasp - buy it.  His job is safe now,
though, so the rest is gravy.)

On the other hand, there is nothing to keep both processes from
appearing in an open access setting.  More journals with peer review
operating on that platform, and the more of those journals that become
respected in their field for producing good work (society journals,
such as the recently launched HAU Journal of Ethnographic Theory

http://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau/issue/current/showToc

which operates on the Canadian Open Journal Platform

Or the other web journals First Monday or Ephemera, which have been
around for many years)

the more these open access venues will be seen as reliable places to
get your work reviewed formally - and satisfy your committee that they
are being reviewed.  Then the only problem is the TIME of the review
process; but as I just said, however long this may be, this time is
still more reliable than going all in on more micro venues (though for
people who are able to make this splash early and often, tenure
committees need to revise how they think about these examples of "the
most important peer review above." Perhaps a requirement that, in
comments sections, you have to have engaged thoughtfully with people
who make important critiques of the work.  This would have the added
advantage of making comments sections more constructive as the
practice became more disciplined.)

In any case, while I see the point you're making Sandy - and plan to
check out the longer version of your argument in the journal (if I
have access ;-) - I think this is only really a problem with the
current configuration, i.e. where gated final versions exist.  Were
the final versions ungated, they would still be the final versions:
just more people could read them.

I think that's closer to a nickle, but maybe someone here can loan me
some change.

Sean Andrews