From: <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 14 Jun 2013 12:35:30 +0000

The terminology of the proposal might be confusing some people.  I
gather that the idea is not to review journals per se, but their
publishers, from the perspective of the author.  I'll add that there's
a similar need for reviewing monograph publishers.

Jonathan

**************************
Jonathan H. Harwell
Head of Collections and Systems
Olin Library
Rollins College
Winter Park, FL 32789
[log in to unmask]

-----Original Message-----
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]