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
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