From: Laura Quilter <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2013 22:21:09 -0500

I look forward to explaining to faculty that their submitted
manuscripts are the equivalent of bauxite to the publishers' aluminum.
 I'm a fan of publishers' work and role in the process.  I believe
that a lot of thinking needs to be done to figure out how to carry
that value forward in a transitioning scholarly communication process,
but this analogy really strains credulity.

Scholars do a little more than merely uncovering "ore" (facts,
perhaps?), and a submitted manuscript is considerably more than ore.

The peer review process -- mediated and managed by the publishers, but
not conducted by them -- oftentimes gives guidance as to further
refinement, but the work is conducted by the authors.  Not just the
experimental and research work, but the writing.

If the intellectual input in an author's work were as significant as
suggested by this bauxite-to-aluminum analogy, then the publisher
wouldn't need a transfer of copyright agreement -- they would be
co-authors -- or hell, just give them authorship and drop a footnote
to the original authors.

As for developing markets -- this too is really rather outrageous.
Publishers do a lot of work in servicing markets, and exploiting them;
call it development if you will, but the relationship of industrial
manufacturers like aluminum to product development is again a very,
very poor analogy to the relationship of scholarly and academic
publishers to the consumers of research -- the fellow academics who
read the materials, the libraries who purchase them, the industries
that rely on them downstream or in other ways.

I am really just flabbergasted by this analogy.

Laura