From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 09:28:58 +0000

Dear Zac

I was talking mainly about the past. In my experience over forty years is
that publishers work much harder now to make sure that the editorial
structure is doing its job of peer review and that they are much more
concerned with the mechanisms of peer review including quality. I really
meant to instance online editorial systems is that they enable an insight
for publishers into how long reviewing is taking, how many reviewers are
used etc. When I started in this business editors were appointed and were
then left to their own devices. There was no proper contract outlining roles
and responsibilities and the editors could go on until they were very out of
touch and very old. The assumption was that every academic knew how to
ensure good and timely peer review. Now there is much more ongoing
interaction between publishers and editors over standards and processes.
Then journal publishing was seen as a mechanical process. I can think of a
very major journal edited by a long dead Nobel Laureate. The peer review
process for him was that his secretary went to a very top international
laboratory on a weekly basis and went round the labs throwing a selection on
the desks of younger researchers.

I do not know what happened then but I suspect that there was very little
control from on top or any sort of proper instruction.

Anthony

-----Original Message-----

From: Zac Rolnik <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2014 22:26:25 -0500

Anthony,

I agree that it is hard for the publisher to really know the quality of
articles we publish since we are usually not academics in those areas, but I
think we have a sense when the quality is there and when it is not.  The
idea that the publisher relies on the editor who relies on the guest editor
seems like we are distancing ourselves from our responsibility as
publishers.  Furthermore, I don't see how online editorial systems
necessarily improve quality control and I might even argue the peer review
is declining as the number of articles increase beyond the available pool of
high quality reviewers.  This was not just bad science, but "computer
generated gibberish".  Unfortunately, I happen to believe that there is a
lot of human-generated gibberish also getting published.

Zac Rolnik
now publishers


-----Original Message-----
From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 26 Feb 2014 10:02:57 +0000

I thought Jean-Claude might come up some sort of remark along these lines.

This story highlights a problem that anyone who has actually worked in
publishing is familiar with. It is generally accepted that the proceedings
of a conference are better placed in a journal than published stand alone. I
appreciate that some disciplines rate conference proceedings much higher
than others, but the recent CIBER/UTK study on Trust in information sources
for the Sloan Foundation (in which I was involved) found that even in those
disciplines journals are rated higher see:

http://www.ciber-research.eu/download/20140115-Trust_Final_Report.pdf.

Publishers and journal editors routinely get requests from the organizers of
symposia: it is no longer (I understand) quite such a big deal as it once
was when supplements often bought to give to recipients were very helpful
both to the journal visibility and to its finances. As we see from the
"gibberish" this is not just commercial publishers.

Now, it was not uncommon for editors very familiar with the organisers of
symposia, people they rate highly and trust, to delegate editorial
responsibility to them to do the proper refereeing. The editor is at one
remove from the peer review and the publisher is two removes. A long time
ago I found myself forced to intervene (as the publisher) when the peer
review for an Italian symposium had just not been done - as was clear to the
copy editor who reported it. Fortunately we had copy editors of such
calibre.

I have made the point before - and not everyone agrees with me, but it is my
view that standards of controlling peer review are much higher across all
types of publishers than they were, partly if not mainly because every
article goes through the online editorial systems which enables much more
oversight.

Anthony

-----Original Message-----
From: Jean-Claude Guédon <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 25 Feb 2014 08:44:50 -0500

We all know that the value added by publishers is peer review....

And it is what justifies the "reasonable" prices of access licenses...

Perhaps the "rogue" category of journals should be considerably enlarged.

jcg



Le lundi 24 février 2014 à 21:48 -0500, LIBLICENSE a écrit :

From: Ann Okerson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 24 Feb 2014 21:42:31 -0500

The news du jour:  "The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than
120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher
discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense." In today's
article by reporter Richard Van Noorden, you can even find out how to make a
start on your own gibberish paper.  These were published mainly in
conference proceedings.

http://www.nature.com/news/publishers-withdraw-more-than-120-gibberish-paper
s-1.14763