From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2013 07:54:08 -0500

I think that many of the commenters on this thread are missing the
point. The point is not that mistakes happen.  The point is not that
you can find mistakes even in traditionally published work.  And the
point is not that you can find errors in Gold OA publications (as I
did).  The point is that lower editorial standards are part of the
basic architecture of Gold OA.  That's a fundamental shift.  We don't
know where it will lead, but when you build a road, don't you get the
urge to ask where you are driving?

Joe Esposito


On Wed, Feb 27, 2013 at 9:34 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2013 17:47:26 -0600
>
> I'd like to think that a good copyeditor would have caught the error
> Joe brought to our attention, but David is right: this is not a
> problem unique to OA publishing, and publishers--even prestigious
> university presses--have indeed cut back on copyediting and
> proofreading in recent years, some horrific examples of which I have
> cited in book reviews I have written for Learned Publishing and the
> Journal of Scholarly Publishing.
>
> One of the worst cases I have come across recently concerned the "PA
> Guide to Going Digital" published by the British Publishers
> Association in 2010. As I said in my review in Learned Publishing:
>
> No such excuse is available to explain the numerous editorial lapses,
> however. Inconsistencies abound, for instance, with regard to use of
> the serial comma, US or USA, capitalization, punctuation (IT or I.T.),
> use of acronyms before the full names are given, and like basic points
> of style. In Parts One and Two I counted over 100 such mistakes, which
> are distracting, to say the least. It is shameful for a publishers'
> association to issue a book in such a flawed state when it otherwise
> has so much to recommend it.
>
> The PA, to its credit, did correct these mistakes after I sent them a list.
>
> But even those of us who take great pride in striving for perfection
> fall short from time to time. The very first book I ever copyedited,
> for Princeton University Press, contained an embarrassing error that
> slipped through me, the author, the compositor, proofreader, and
> everyone else: the name of the city "Moscow" appeared as "Mosow" on
> the map that served as the frontispiece!
>
> One all too common failure of scholarly authors is to rely on earlier
> scholars to have quoted passages correctly, rather than going back to
> the originals to check.  This kind of error is not something that, in
> the old days, copyeditors would typically catch because checking
> quotes against original sources would require the time-consuming labor
> of roaming around a library's stacks. Nowadays, however, there is so
> much scholarship accessible in digitized form that many quotations can
> be checked via Google searches against the originals.  Despite
> cutbacks in copyediting, this is a task that at least some copyeditors
> now  perform, which they did not in the analog era.
>
> OA itself is not at fault. Gold OA should maintain the same high
> standards as regular publishing, though it appears that newer OA
> publishers like PeerJ are not trying to do so.
>
> My concern is with the readiness to accept Green OA peer-reviewed but
> not copyedited articles as a completely satisfactory substitute for
> the "versions of record."  This prompted me to join with Todd
> Carpenter in guest-editing an issue of Against the Grain on this topic
> back in April 2011. Here is our introduction:
> http://www.psupress.org/news/pdf/fea_intro_Carpenter_Thatcher_v23-2.pdf
>
> In a separate essay I addressed the problem in the following way:
>
> The problem of having multiple versions of articles is a real cost of
> Green OA that needs to be studied further.  Perhaps, for purposes of
> teaching in the classroom or simply sharing knowledge with colleagues
> around the world, unedited versions would suffice. But even at this
> level there are risks of propagating errors, as in mistakes in
> quotations that once used incorrectly may be multiplied many times
> over, as readers do not bother to go back to the original sources to
> check for accuracy but trust the authority of the scholar using them
> to have quoted them correctly. (My correspondent who edits articles
> for science journals confirms the seriousness of this problem: "Huge
> errors can creep into the literature when authors use preprint
> [unedited, unreviewed] versions of papers, and the problem snowballs:
> so few authors return to primary sources that incorrect
> interpretations are perpetuated and persist in the literature to
> damage future generations.") Surely, then, for purposes of formal
> publication, the additional level of quality control that is provided
> by good copyediting is a value worth paying for, and libraries would
> do well to reflect whether their needs as repositories of
> authoritative knowledge would be well served by relying on anything
> but the versions of articles that are in their very final form,
> suitable for long-term archiving. Whether students and scholars who
> access the unedited versions will bother to go to the archival
> versions for citations in writings that they produce remains to be
> seen, but clearly they should be encouraged to do so-students, because
> they need to be taught responsible scholarly methods, and scholars,
> because they have a professional obligation to their peers to do so.
>
> How big a problem may this turn out to be? Some sense of it comes from
> a recently published, and much discussed, paper with the cute subtitle
> "Fawlty Towers of Knowledge?" by Malcolm Wright and J. Scott Armstrong
> in the March/April 2008 issue of Interfaces, who write on "The
> Ombudsman: Verification of Citations"
> (http://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/Marketing_Content_Management/Marketing_files/Publication_Files/Citations-Interfaces.pdf).
> Their first paragraph neatly summarizes the nature and extent of the
> problem: "The growth of scientific knowledge requires the correct
> reporting of relevant studies. Unfortunately, current procedures give
> little assurance that authors of papers published in leading academic
> journals follow this practice. Instead, the evidence suggests that
> researchers often do not read the relevant research papers. This
> manifests itself in two ways: First, researchers overlook relevant
> papers. Second, they make errors when reporting on the papers, either
> through incorrect referencing or incorrect quotation of the contents
> of the cited paper."  They go on to cite previous studies of incorrect
> references in other disciplines ranging from 31 percent in public
> health journals to as high as 67 percent in obstetrics and gynecology
> journals and studies of errors in quotation with similarly disturbing
> numbers, such as 20 percent for medical journals in a systematic
> survey conducted in 2003. Remember that these errors occur in
> published articles. The likelihood is that the rates would be
> significantly higher without the intervention of copyeditors.
>
> The fact is that, for all the value of peer review, it is the rare
> academic reader who will take the trouble to check references and
> quotations for accuracy. Scholars are aware that copyeditors can be
> relied upon to scrutinize manuscripts more closely for such details,
> so they generally do not bother to spend time on this task themselves.
> But even copyeditors cannot afford to check everything; it is very
> costly to do the kind of fine-grained editing, involving trips to the
> library, that I was allowed to do at Princeton forty years ago. The
> economics of publishing can no longer afford such a luxury, and many
> publishers have cut back on proofreading, too, or even eliminated it
> altogether for cost-saving reasons. Fortunately, the ease of access to
> reliable online resources for fact-checking, reference-checking, and
> even checking of quotes has made it possible for copyeditors to
> continue doing some of this very detailed work even in today's economy
> at reasonable expense. And editing online provides other advantages
> that improve the efficiency of copyeditors and help keep costs in
> check. It would be a shame if concerns for reducing costs target
> copyediting as a dispensable frill, for its contribution to the
> excellence of scholarship is much greater than most people who have
> not directly benefited from it realize.
>
> I end, therefore, with a question and a plea. The question is: how far
> do we want to allow open access to exacerbate the problem of "Fawlty
> Towers of Knowledge"? The plea is: when open access is discussed as a
> panacea for facilitating the dissemination of knowledge worldwide,
> don't forget the contribution that good copyediting makes to ensuring
> that such "knowledge" is communicated clearly and accurately.
>
> The full article is accessible here:
> http://www.psupress.org/news/pdf/fea_Thatcher_v23-2.pdf
>
> Sandy Thatcher
>
>
>
> From: David Prosser <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2013 08:59:59 +0000
>
> Between 10 and 20 years ago I worked for two large journal publishers.
> One a massive commercial publisher, the other a prestigious
> university press.
>
> In neither of these organisations would copy-editors routinely
> fact-check the articles they were working on, and the type of issue
> that Joe has highlighted would not have been picked up.  I know that
> it is tempting to view this as a failing of the APC OA business model,
> but it really isn't.  The vast majority of publishers have been
> striving to push-down costs, including costs for copyediting and
> proof-reading.  I'm sure we all have our own lists of favourite
> publishing errors (mine is a photo clearly upside-down in an article
> put out by the aforementioned massive commercial publisher that made
> it past the proof-reader), but let's not pretend this is necessarily
>
> an OA issue.
>
>
> David Prosser