From: Anthony Watkinson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2012 10:06:45 +0100

Dear Rick,

I am not sure when university presses mainly published the output of their
universities as did learned societies the output of their members but
certainly in the past this was their function. What I do know is that part
of the success of commercial publishers was due to the fact that these
existing publishing organisations were seen as stifling new developments and
being in the hands of a relatively narrow group who decided what should be
published. I am not saying that this was in fact the case but I can say from
experience of someone who has started 100s of new journals in my time that
those who came to me with proposals usually if not invariably did so on this
basis.

These are publishers. It seems to me that the idea that departments should
decide who gets funding to pay APCs is much more of a problem. Wearing my
academic hat I would suggest that where disbursement of any funds is
concerned it is not infrequent that heads of department use their patronage
to favour those in their own group. They are the filter. Even Wellcome, who
are really generous funders of publications, pass the responsibility
downstream to institutions holding grants from them after a period of time.
There will have to be selection. I do not think academics in general want
their peers or superiors to be the selectors. Like you I am not suggesting
that such problems are insuperable.

Back in 2002 Raym Crow wrote an extremely lucid explanation of the new
publication environment which could be centred on the institutional
repositories in his Case for Institutional Repositories - see
http://www.arl.org/sparc/repositories/readings.shtml. The fact that his
suggested re-alignment of scholarly communication has not come to pass does
not mean the analysis is other than excellent. I have just been teaching a
class of students and using his thinking as a starting point. I cannot
remember whether he mentions branding

Anthony

-----Original Message-----
From: Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wed, 27 Jun 2012 23:50:07 +0000

Isn't this becoming a debate about whether research institutions
should take responsibility for publishing the research done by their
staff? This is a big shift since, historically, institutions have
largely left responsibility for publishing to their research staff.

If we accept that institutions need to take over this responsibility
from individual staff, then we need to ask the question: will
institutions be any good at discharging this responsibility?

Another question is whether scholars will trust institutions to
perform the kind of branding for their own output that is currently
performed by third-party journals. Under the current system, if I
publish an article in a prestigious journal, those who see the
citation have pretty good reason to expect that my article is of high
quality, because the journal publisher has no vested interest in
advancing my career. But what if those who see the citation know that
the publisher is also my employer?

I'm not saying this is an insuperable problem, only that it's one more
thing that would have to be considered if we want to get serious about
moving in this direction. What it would amount to, really, is
institutional self-publishing. Every journal would be seen as,
essentially, a vanity press of its institution unless some kind of
structurally rigorous discrimination were built into the system. (And
what would be the institution's incentive for building such rigor in?)

--
Rick Anderson
Acting Dean, J. Willard Marriott Library
University of Utah
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