From: Jan Velterop <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 19 Feb 2013 08:37:47 +0000

Poor language and spelling errors are rife in the published
literature, regardless of the business model. Errors range from
author-originated to typesetting-introduced and clearly peer review
and copy editing (if any) are not adequate to deal with them. As an
example, because it is very easy to check, I'd like to mention the β
vs ß problem (using the latter, the German sharp s, for the former,
the bèta). Just search any publisher platform for ß and you'll find
plenty of instances where it obviously should have been β. Errors like
this, and in e.g. the spelling of chemical structures, require extra,
sometimes extraordinarily complicated, efforts to interpret them
properly when the literature is being machine-read. And the literature
will have to be machine-read more and more due to the 'overwhelm' of
scientific articles being published, beyond the reasonable ability for
most researchers to read, making machine analysis imperative. (This is
an interesting reference in regard of the 'overwhelm': Alan G Fraser
and Frank D Dunstan "On the impossibility of being expert" BMJ 2010;
341 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmj.c6815 — Published 14 December
2010)

Fortunately there are extremely clever people able to develop
algorithms to deal with many such errors, but it is a great shame that
they make it into the literature — into the 'version of record' — in
the first place at the scale they do.

Jan Velterop

On 18 Feb 2013, at 20:52, LIBLICENSE wrote:

From: Richard Poynder <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2013 15:15:45 +0100

Joe,

You might want to read the abstract to this paper:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0003455

Richard Poynder


-----Original Message-----
From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2013 05:21:55 -0600

I have been sitting in a conference this weekend in which one of the
principal topics has been the future of peer review.  So it was with
surprise and consternation that I happened to see the abstract to an
article in PLoS ONE:

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0056178

The article covers a study of how people read ebooks.  And there, in
the very first sentence of the abstract, is a simple factual error.

The abstract states that ebooks outsell print books in the U.S. and
UK.  Not true.  Ebooks outsell print at Amazon, but the book biz is
far bigger then Amazon, three to five times bigger, depending on who's
counting.

Is this a problem of peer review? A problem of insufficient
copy-editing?  A copy editor would have fact-checked that item, but
copy-editing is one of those things that is being cut back or even
eliminated to reduce costs for Gold OA services.  The problem is
structural:  Gold OA requires lower costs because the burden of paying
for the work rests with the producer instead of being spread across
all the readers.

Gold OA, in other words, structurally requires lower editorial
standards.  Much of the time we may not care about that, but then you
stumble on one simple error and begin to reflect on the entire
enterprise.

Joe Esposito