From: Joseph Esposito <[log in to unmask]> Date: Mon, 18 Jun 2012 22:39:52 -0500 The reference to the Scholarly Kitchen in Sean's post caught my interest because I am a contributor there. No one speaks for the Kitchen; there is no overarching editorial policy, though Kent Anderson assiduously deletes my references to the Beatles and the Yankees when they exceed a quota. Speaking for myself, real solutions to the problems of scholarly communications abound. PLoS ONE is one of them. PeerJ is another. ScienceDirect is also a solution, as is arXiv and the publications of the American Chemical Society. This is a diverse field. There will be no single, comprehensive solution. Indeed, I remain befuddled by the notion that there is even a problem. Unsustainability is a good thing. All things must pass (the Beatles again), and when they do, they encourage us to innovate and come up with better solutions--and a whole new set of problems. Joe Esposito On Mon, Jun 18, 2012 at 8:08 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote: > 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