From: Sean Andrews <[log in to unmask]> Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2012 10:09:59 -0500 > From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]> > > Or is there no mention of this because > copyediting will be a "value added" service for which authors will > have to pay an extra fee each time beyond the membership fee? The > "pre-prints" of course will not be copyedited, but surely PeerJ cannot > expect to sustain itself as a high-quality journal if it does not > provide first-rate copyediting for the "versions of record." I have heard that copy editing might be an extra expense in their model, but not from any official source. I guess it is open for discussion whether you need it to be a high-quality journal. Word does a decent job of finding glaring spelling and grammar errors, and with the right peer reviewers, most of the big mistakes will likely get caught. I think it's an open question whether it is possible to have a high quality journal with a few comma splices. I don't necessarily have a dog in this fight, but the idea of disruptive innovation says that people will tolerate low quality aspects of apparently down-market products when those products deliver innovation on another index that is temporarily of more value. Once that down market product as captured more of the more discerning consumer base, the extra income from the latter will allow for quality improvements later. Clifford Christensen, the guru of disruptive innovation, is far too reductive in his description of this mechanism, and his faith in the rationality of the market is too rigid. But whatever nugget of truth exists in his framework portends a serious bit of uncertainty in how things are run - what "quality" means and what "qualities" will be valued in academic publishing. I don't have a lot of faith in the success of PeerJ per se, but the more upstarts like this, the more there will be possible challenge to the mainstream. I'd much rather have the respected, high quality journals - and some of the folks over at Scholarly Kitchen and venues like it - take their considerable expertise and explore real solutions to the increasingly unsustainable system of publishing rather than taking potshots at the newcomers. Can there be a broadly democratic and deliberative discussion about what we value in scholarly publishing and how to achieve it at a sustainable price for societies, publishers, libraries, authors, faculty, students, and, ideally, the general public? But since, as Habermas long ago lamented, our public sphere has been completely refeudalized, perhaps the only space for experimentation is in new, possibly worse, possibly more predatory, possibly more unsustainable, market and technology driven solutions to what is basically a political, social, and cultural situation. In any case, I don't think typos will be the big sticking point in the coming transformation. The current generation is being weaned on a poetics akin to the early modern playwrights or modernist poets - with new forms of diction and speech invented and the dominant ways forgotten, misunderstood, or intentionally misspoken e.g. http://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/youtube-comment-or-ee-cummings When they sit down to read journal articles of the early- to mid-2010s they will be happy to see the scars of its birth, even as they might be satisfied with a return to a more rigorous system down the line. Sean