From: Brian Simboli <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2019 22:45:14 -0500

Joe,
Well, yes, dysfunctionalities is a clunker of a word; it's far too
sesquipedalian.

And I entirely agree that scholarly publishing is an insular world and in
the big scheme of things, such as the ultimate fate of the universe or much
earlier on, the potential engulfment of the earth by the sun turning into a
red giant, scholarly publishing is a pretty paltry thing indeed.

But we have to live in the here and now. And from where I sit, researchers
are now engulfed by too much to read, scientific results are going to be
rediscovered and rediscovered, and the t and p process feeds this growing
heap, creates hyper-specialists, and potentially wrecks creativity.

More close to home, people like me become cantankerous and dyspeptic about
this whole system, requiring as it does the annual caffeine-fueled ritual
of wading through acres of CPU and other metrics in spreadsheets, making
one's eyesight feeble. The endless epic rounds of negotiations year over
year to juggle and re-juggle the stock of subscribed journals and avoid
Trojan traps. And think too of all those poor peer reviewers and how much
they are expected to wade through. Someone has to do peer review, but
there's too much of it. I suppose however some of them actually doing so
much superfluous work, but these are the ones we worry about.

I suspect your instincts are pretty Burkean. Mine are too. The system
doesn't need overthrow, as some of our friends seem to think.  It just
needs tweaking to bring out the best of what has worked since the 17th
century, so it can shine.

In the meantime, I actually watch all this unfold with mild amusement. Not
to worry, the world is not coming to an end. Let that happen billions of
years from now.

Brian Simboli



From: JJE Esposito < <[log%C2%A0in%C2%A0to%C2%A0unmask]>[log in to unmask]
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>
Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2019 19:44:59 -0500

"There are no panaceas to scholarly publishing dysfunctionalities." But
here is the good news: what dysfunctionalities? (Not a pretty word, by the
way: English counts.)  It seems to me that the ordinary push and pull of
any endeavor has good things and bad things, with the good usually
outweighing the bad (otherwise we would not be here). Making a crisis out
of a simple irritation is not a useful strategy. Let's not make the small
problems of the insular and privileged world of scholarship into an epic.
Let Achilles rail before the gates of Troy. We can simply sit down and have
a negotiation, with coffee, black.

Joe Esposito
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