At 12:35 06/11/01 +0000, Barry Mahon wrote:
Richard Poynder wrote:
> I shall be interviewing Michael Mabe, Elsevier Science's Director of
> Academic Relations, for a publication called Information Today
> (www.infotoday.com) next week, and would welcome suggestions from any
> "users" as to the kind of questions that they would like to see put to him.
Hi Richard,
I expect you'll get some pretty unprintable responses from this list!!
I would like to ask what Elsevier feels about the movement away from
peer review to open archives. Besides feeling threatened which they
would not admit, do they feel that (in certain subject areas) the peer
review process as a concept is no longer valid? If not why not?
For a fascinating independent view on this see
Jean-Claude Guédon
In OldenburgÂ’s Long Shadow: Librarians, Research Scientists, Publishers,
and the Control of Scientific Publishing
http://www.arl.org/arl/proceedings/138/guedon.html
He tackles exactly this point. It's a long paper (published as a monograph
in fact), and you have to read a long way down to find it, but the whole
paper is excellent throughout and leads to a full understanding of why
publishers like Elsevier are as they are.
Steve Hitchcock
Open Citation (OpCit) Project <http://opcit.eprints.org/>
IAM Research Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
Barry Mahon, Executive Director ICSTI
> [Moderator's Note: The above posting contains an incorrect
> enthymeme, which needs to be corrected before it spreads: The Open
> Archives Initiative OAI (http://www.openarchives.org) is not a
> "movement away from peer review." OAI has nothing at all to do with
> peer review; it concerns the establishment of metadata tagging
> standards so that OAI-compliant Online Archives will be
> interoperable. Nor is the special subset of the Open Archives
> Initiative dubbed the "Self-Archiving Initiative"
> (http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/nature4.htm) a "movement
> away from peer review." On the contrary, it is a movement toward
> the self-archiving of both non-peer-reviewed preprints and
> peer-reviewed (published) postprints and presupposes the continued
> practise of peer-review as a condition for publication, the service
> currently implemented by journal publishers (including Elsevier).
> Perhaps what Barry Mahon has in mind is the view of certain ArXiv
> users (http://arxiv.org) who have expressed their own view
> (http://www.eprints.org/results/2arXivUsersComments.htm) that peer
> review may no longer be needed (e.g. Greg Kuperberg in this list:
> "The Preprint is the Postprint"
> http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/1024.html)?
> In that case, Elsevier's opposition to that particular subview
> would be shared by the majority of self-archivers, as well as
> non-self-archivers
> (http://www.eprints.org/results/2arXivNonUsersComments.htm),
> and hence would hardly be informative.
> It might be more informative to ask Elsevier specifically about
> their policy regarding online self-archiving of peer-reviewed
> papers by Elsevier authors, in particular, Elsevier copyright
> transfer policy on online self-archiving.
> -- Stevan Harnad, Moderator, American Scientist Forum]
