Re-sending as a result of mail host crash on 2/20. ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jan Velterop <[log in to unmask]> Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2013 19:52:51 +0000 Those who think publishers have a role to play with regard to filtering the overwhelming amount of articles that are being submitted and published are right, of course. Nobody can read it all. I've earlier pointed to the article by 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) as a good example of the situation. Unfortunately, what I see and hear is that the role in filtering that publishers undoubtedly have is invariably interpreted in terms of deciding which article to publish and which to reject, with the help of peer review and 'quality' criteria. But almost every article submitted will be published, eventually, after cascading down the journal pecking order. And no serious scientist that I know of decides to read an article just because it's published in a prestigious journal, or, perhaps even more to the point, decides not to read it just because it's published in a lesser journal. He or she tries to find must-read articles via searches, consulting colleagues, following references, often without realising or taking note of the journal in which they are published. Of course, if the journal title is noticed, a scientist will interpret the meta-information that the label of a journal attached to an article conveys. A paper with the label of a high-ranking title, one of the scientific glam mags, say, may well be interpreted as "interesting, quality, citable, but not repeatable or useful in the field" and one with the label of a lesser journal as "practical, repeatable, useful in the field, giving me ideas for my next grant application, perhaps not too citable if I care about my career." (A friend, who worked on tropical diseases, once said, only half-jokingly, that the Impact Factor is inversely proportional to the actual usefulness of a journal). The really useful filtering, however, the way to use the knowledge contained in all the articles that one cannot read for lack of time, is to distill the scientifically significant assertions from the waffle in the text and get the 'picture' in that way, by combining large amounts of such assertions. A 'helicopter' view or hot air balloon view (with, indeed, the noise or the hot air). An overall picture of the lay of the knowledge landscape that enables you to decide where to dig, what actually to spend time on reading. The role publishers could play to enable this is to optimise articles for machine reading, making them interoperable for data- and text-mining, without the barriers that make that impossible. And to focus copy-editing on the essentials for machine reading (my hobby horse, because it goes wrong very, very often: correcting the German sz ligature - ß - where clearly a bèta - β - is meant; they may look alike, but they are very different to a computer). It's the only way to stay relevant as publisher, I think. And the only publishing model suitable is the 'gold', CC-BY, open access one, be it subsidised or maintained by APCs. Not the 'green' model, delivering often little more than 'ocular' access, solving yesterday's problems, not today's. Jan Velterop