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