From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]> Date: Sun, 1 Jul 2012 23:11:49 -0500 Anthony, as you surely know, for a long time now universities have been making decisions about which faculty get subsidies to help with the publication of their monographs when required as a condition of publication by scholarly publishers--and not just university presses. It would not be so extreme a step to extend this common practice to making decisions about which faculty get APCs. Sandy Thatcher > 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 > [log in to unmask]