Date: Wed, 13 Nov 2019 19:44:28 -0500

I detest Edmund Burke. David Brooks loves him. 'Nuff said.

The problem with this discussion is that *there is no system.* There are tendencies and participants of different sizes, but it is not as organized as people believe. It is also not the hell on earth that people imagine. It mostly works most of the time. It does not work all of the time and it certainly does not work for everyone.

My problem is with the passion that people bring to these issues. Personally, I prefer to reserve passion for passion. Figuring out how to build a library collection or how to price a publication sits on the passion meter somewhere next to whether you want the cream cheese with or without scallions or whether you prefer the red tie with the blue shirt or the yellow. This misplaced passion (personal aggrandisement, as it makes what we do seem far more important than it is--but cocaine does this better) gets in the way of solving practical problems because it is hard to have a conversation with someone who vilifies you or whom you vilify.

I happen to agree with you that there is too much being published and that incentives are misaligned. If you want to reduce the amount of published material, you can simply cut library budgets by half. No one publishes to a shrinking or nonexistent market. I bet that will be a popular suggestion.

Joe Esposito

On Wed, Nov 13, 2019 at 7:20 PM LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

From: Brian Simboli <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2019 22:45:14 -0500

Joe,
Well, yes, dysfunctionalities is a clunker of a word; it's far too sesquipedalian.

And I entirely agree that scholarly publishing is an insular world and in the big scheme of things, such as the ultimate fate of the universe or much earlier on, the potential engulfment of the earth by the sun turning into a red giant, scholarly publishing is a pretty paltry thing indeed.

But we have to live in the here and now. And from where I sit, researchers are now engulfed by too much to read, scientific results are going to be rediscovered and rediscovered, and the t and p process feeds this growing heap, creates hyper-specialists, and potentially wrecks creativity.

More close to home, people like me become cantankerous and dyspeptic about this whole system, requiring as it does the annual caffeine-fueled ritual of wading through acres of CPU and other metrics in spreadsheets, making one's eyesight feeble. The endless epic rounds of negotiations year over year to juggle and re-juggle the stock of subscribed journals and avoid Trojan traps. And think too of all those poor peer reviewers and how much they are expected to wade through. Someone has to do peer review, but there's too much of it. I suppose however some of them actually doing so much superfluous work, but these are the ones we worry about.

I suspect your instincts are pretty Burkean. Mine are too. The system doesn't need overthrow, as some of our friends seem to think. It just needs tweaking to bring out the best of what has worked since the 17th century, so it can shine.

In the meantime, I actually watch all this unfold with mild amusement. Not to worry, the world is not coming to an end. Let that happen billions of years from now.

Brian Simboli

From: JJE Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 11 Nov 2019 19:44:59 -0500

"There are no panaceas to scholarly publishing dysfunctionalities." But here is the good news: what dysfunctionalities? (Not a pretty word, by the way: English counts.) It seems to me that the ordinary push and pull of any endeavor has good things and bad things, with the good usually outweighing the bad (otherwise we would not be here). Making a crisis out of a simple irritation is not a useful strategy. Let's not make the small problems of the insular and privileged world of scholarship into an epic. Let Achilles rail before the gates of Troy. We can simply sit down and have a negotiation, with coffee, black.

Joe Esposito
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