From: Brian Simboli <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 27 Nov 2019 08:46:26 -0500

Thanks Stephen Bosch.  I'd like to cite this statistic and wonder if you
can provide the title of the report etc. It would be great to understand
their methodology or at least try to reverse engineer it.

These statistics, if correct, provide one more argument for not continuing
to fund the long tail of journals (and to pare down what's in the
"core",appropriately defined), thereby putting long-term downward and
incremental pressures on  tenure and promotion expectations that
incentivize so much stuff.

Now that would be a truly "transformative" move by large consortia, to say
the least. I'd happily be corrected on this point, but I don't get sense
that this is a major concern (or even something on the radar) of large
consortia or networks of university libraries. The drivers in negotiations
appear to be primarily if not solely working out APC arrangements with
publishers.

OA is ok, who is to dispute that? But hasn't this monolithic and mantric
drive for OA obscured other parts of the picture that might even be much
more important than OA?

E.g., are people at Princeton who work on fusion confinement reading the
past literature? Could that slow down work on this as an alternative source
of energy? A speculative question but one that can be repeated for
thousands of other research agendas. Another physics example: the so-called
"standard theory" in physics has been stagnant for what, 40 years or so?
Might the huge glut of exotic mathematical speculations in theoretical
physics distract  from rich earlier discussions in the literature? Read
physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's neat work on this theme and her book, Lost
in Math.

I talked to two scholars recently whose judgment about these matters I
respect a lot. They echoed the concern about the glut of research. A while
back I talked to another scholar who admitted to reading only a few
trailing years of the literature. Not statistically representative, but no
doubt a survey of a large number faculty would confirm this point.

To Danny Kingsley's point, what are the educational ramifications for
students of so much stuff being published? Is it harming the ability of
students to find high quality, educationally valuable articles? Especially
ones that provide a nice overview of late-breaking developments?

The problem as I see it, once again, is that there are two distinct needs
in scientific communication (with apologies to non-scientific realms of
journal publishing): time stamped announcement/claims of discoveries, and
ex post highly critical evaluation (peer-reviewed) of research agendas
disclosed in other journal articles, in preprints and in other formats.
(This is distinct from one understanding of an "overlay" journal. . Elide
the two emphases, and you get the explosion of publishing at the long tail
that we see today.

A project for next year that I hope to work on is to create a library guide
or something online that documents the various ways these two needs have
been addressed since the 17th century.
-- 

Brian Simboli
Science, Mathematics, and Psychology Librarian
Library and Technology Services
E.W. Fairchild Martindale
Lehigh University
8A East Packer Avenue
Bethlehem, PA 18015-3170
(610) 758-5003; [log in to unmask]
Profile & Research guides
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