From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2013 00:53:10 -0500

Fair enough. But I can tell you that I constantly heard complaints
from book authors about one very prestigious scholarly publisher's
treatment of authors, and it seemed to be pretty common knowledge
among authors. Yet the publisher's prestige was so great that a low
quality of service didn't seem to make much difference to how many
submissions it received. I suspect the same may be true also in the
journals world.

Sandy Thatcher


> From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Wed, 12 Jun 2013 14:14:40 +0000
>
>> Open reviews of journals would be as useful as book reviews on Amazon
>> where one usually has no idea what qualifies the reviewer to express
>> an opinion.
>
>
> But no one is proposing "open reviews of journals" here, Sandy. The system
> in question here wouldn't review works of scholarship (about which
> relatively few people might be qualified to express a truly informed
> opinion); it would review services provided -- i.e. reviewing, editing,
> dissemination, etc. The ones qualified to comment on the quality of the
> service are the ones who were provided it -- i.e., authors. I'm not a
> plumber, and in fact I know very little about plumbing, but I am fully
> qualified to rate the quality of service my plumber provides: Did he
> arrive when he said he would? Did he work with reasonable speed and
> efficiency? Was the final bill reasonably close to the original estimate?
> Did he leave a mess? When he left, had the leak stopped? These are
> questions that the customer, rather than a plumbing expert, is in a
> position to answer, and the answers are likely to be very useful and
> interesting to the plumber's other potential customers.
>
> By the same token, any author who places a manuscript with a publisher
> comes away from that experience fully qualified to comment on it. In other
> words, what we're talking about here is not "open reviews of journals,"
> but open review of the way journal publishers interact with their
> customers, who are, in the first instance, authors. (Such a mechanism is
> especially interesting because journal publishers are vying for authors in
> a conventionally competitive marketplace -- which, given the monopolistic
> nature of copyright, is not true of the marketplace for readers.)
>
> ---
> Rick Anderson
> Interim Dean, J. Willard Marriott Library
> University of Utah
> [log in to unmask]