From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2012 22:39:52 -0500

The reference to the Scholarly Kitchen in Sean's post caught my
interest because I am a contributor there.  No one speaks for the
Kitchen; there is no overarching editorial policy, though Kent
Anderson assiduously deletes my references to the Beatles and the
Yankees when they exceed a quota.

Speaking for myself, real solutions to the problems of scholarly
communications abound.  PLoS ONE is one of them.  PeerJ is another.
ScienceDirect is also a solution, as is arXiv and the publications of
the American Chemical Society.  This is a diverse field.  There will
be no single, comprehensive solution.  Indeed, I remain befuddled by
the notion that there is even a problem.  Unsustainability is a good
thing.  All things must pass (the Beatles again), and when they do,
they encourage us to innovate and come up with better solutions--and a
whole new set of problems.

Joe Esposito



On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 8:08 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> From: Sean Andrews <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2012 10:09:59 -0500
>
> > From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
> >
> > Or is there no mention of this because
> > copyediting will be a "value added" service for which authors will
> > have to pay an extra fee each time beyond the membership fee? The
> > "pre-prints" of course will not be copyedited, but surely PeerJ cannot
> > expect to sustain itself as a high-quality journal if it does not
> > provide first-rate copyediting for the "versions of record."
>
> I have heard that copy editing might be an extra expense in their
> model, but not from any official source.  I guess it is open for
> discussion whether you need it to be a high-quality journal. Word does
> a decent job of finding glaring spelling and grammar errors, and with
> the right peer reviewers, most of the big mistakes will likely get
> caught. I think it's an open question whether it is possible to have a
> high quality journal with a few comma splices.
>
> I don't necessarily have a dog in this fight, but the idea of
> disruptive innovation says that people will tolerate low quality
> aspects of apparently down-market products when those products deliver
> innovation on another index that is temporarily of more value.  Once
> that down market product as captured more of the more discerning
> consumer base, the extra income from the latter will allow for quality
> improvements later.
>
> Clifford Christensen, the guru of disruptive innovation, is far too
> reductive in his description of this mechanism, and his faith in the
> rationality of the market is too rigid. But whatever nugget of truth
> exists in his framework portends a serious bit of uncertainty in how
> things are run - what "quality" means and what "qualities" will be
> valued in academic publishing.  I don't have a lot of faith in the
> success of PeerJ per se, but the more upstarts like this, the more
> there will be possible challenge to the mainstream.
>
> I'd much rather have the respected, high quality journals - and some
> of the folks over at Scholarly Kitchen and venues like it - take their
> considerable expertise and explore real solutions to the increasingly
> unsustainable system of publishing rather than taking potshots at the
> newcomers.  Can there be a broadly democratic and deliberative
> discussion about what we value in scholarly publishing and how to
> achieve it at a sustainable price for societies, publishers,
> libraries, authors, faculty, students, and, ideally, the general
> public?  But since, as Habermas long ago lamented, our public sphere
> has been completely refeudalized, perhaps the only space for
> experimentation is in new, possibly worse, possibly more predatory,
> possibly more unsustainable, market and technology driven solutions to
> what is basically a political, social, and cultural situation.
>
> In any case, I don't think typos will be the big sticking point in the
> coming transformation. The current generation is being weaned on a
> poetics akin to the early modern playwrights or modernist poets - with
> new forms of diction and speech invented and the dominant ways
> forgotten, misunderstood, or intentionally misspoken e.g.
>
> http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/youtube-comment-or-ee-cummings
>
> When they sit down to read journal articles of the early- to mid-2010s
> they will be happy to see the scars of its birth, even as they might
> be satisfied with a return to a more rigorous system down the line.
>
> Sean