Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2019 17:49:42 -0700

For a researcher in the humanities, there are several categories of interest in journal articles:

(1) I have a quite specific interest in the flat earth theories of the sixth century geographer Cosmas Indicopleustes.  I search on the subject and key words and still prefer to read the more reputable journals, but I'll go a long way down that rabbit hole looking at everything to see if there's something to glean, no matter what the journal.

(2) I'm following work on Cosmas generally for an upcoming book, so I will review search hits from any and all journals reading selectively by likelihood of interest and importance -- and there e.g., another brand may outdo journal reputation, such as a known author appearing in a minor journal.

(3) I want to dip my toes into the work on the ancient astronomer Manilius to see if he talks about flat planets, so I will use the search engine to see if I'm lucky enough for a specific relevant topic to occur; if not, I will go to the highest branded articles I can find (journal, author, recent date) to get *into* Manilius' work, looking for guideposts.  There the brand of reputation is more than good enough to get me started and after that I will follow my own judgment.

(4) I just generally want to keep up with work in a couple of fields generally relevant to my interest, and there I will focus almost exclusively on the high-branded journals (trying to balance the ones guaranteed to be traditional and conservative in style with the edgier ones emphasizing new methodologies), digging deeper when points of particular interest arise.

(5) And then there are about half a dozen journals across the broad range of my field, the ones with highest reputations, that I will leaf idly on a periodic basis, just to see what's happening even quite some ways out of my special field.  That's the one use for which I'm only interested in the big brands, because I really haven't got time to follow the Azerbaijan Journal of Late Antique Archaeology *at all* without a specific promising reference.

My attitude towards brand and reputation varies in those cases, but I think I can make a coherent argument for how I use brand and reputation *without* sacrificing my own judgment or my responsibility to be thorough *enough* for my purposes.  I go into this in some detail because I think it shows how the preference of *authors* to be published in high branded journals isn't just a question of promotion and pay, but also a desire to be there when readers like me are on the prowl.

Jim O'Donnell
ASU


> From: Toby Green <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Thu, 14 Nov 2019 08:41:21 +0100
>
> Joe,
>
> Yup. (Although I might quibble that things like journal brand and JIF confer signals of quality . . . Just because something is in a prestige journal, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s of higher quality (to me) than something I just found in a repository.)
>
> Toby
>
> Toby Green
> Coherent Digital
> Email: [log in to unmask]
> Phone: +33 6 07 76 80 86
> Skype: tobyabgreen
> Twitter: @tobyabgreen
>
>
>
> On 14 Nov 2019, at 01:20, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: JJE Esposito <[log in to unmask]>
>
> Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2019 20:53:40 -0500
>
> I submit that the biggest issue is not access or affordability but discovery. The amount of material continues to grow and the signals of quality (journal brands, JIF, etc.) are being stripped away. The answer to every problem lies at the bottom of the ocean, and we lack even a skiff.
>
> --
> Joseph J. Esposito
> [log in to unmask]
> @josephjesposito
> +Joseph Esposito
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 12, 2019 at 8:49 PM LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> From: Toby Green <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: Tue, 12 Nov 2019 10:24:28 +0100
>
> Interesting that preprints were moving up the agenda at Charleston and I’m sorry I wasn’t there to hear the discussion. As I argued in a paper https://link.growkudos.com/1sqo13wi3uo published last year, I see preprints as a key part of the solution to the key challenge facing scholcom. To my mind the key challenge isn’t open access, it’s affordability - fix the latter and you probably ease the path to the former. My paper agrees with the ‘better strategy than Plan S’ which Brian lays out at the end of this post.
>
> Toby
> Toby Green
> Coherent Digital
> Email: [log in to unmask]
> Phone: +33 6 07 76 80 86
> Skype: tobyabgreen
> Twitter: @tobyabgreen

[SNIP]