On Mon, 22 Apr 2002, Sally Morris [ALPSP] wrote: > I am intrigued by David's last statement - please elucidate! > > From: "David Goodman" <dgood...@phoenix.princeton.edu> > > What will prove or disprove the case is not [ALPSP's] study, or anyone's, > but the market. If people value the features, they will pay for them. > And it is really that simple, assuming there are no artificial constraints, > such as excessively rigid tenure requirements and other > administrative interference.
I fervently hope that we will not be led down the garden path of "evaluation/assessment reform" (or "peer-review reform") in continuing this discussion. There are no doubt grievances and gripes in both those domains too, and plenty of room for reform, but they have nothing to do with what we are discussing here, causally, apart from the fact (which changes nothing) that academic evaluation/assessment currently depends in part on publication ("publish or perish") and on publication in high-imact peer-reviewed journals in particular. Yes, academic evaluation/assessment relies in part on the peer review implemented by the high-quality, high-impact journals. And so it should. It is quixotic (and borders on absurd) to imagine that the remedy for high serials prices and access-barriers is to have tenure/promotion committees take on the function of implementing the peer-reviewing of the annual research output of all their academics themselves! Not only would that be prohibitively costly and time-consuming, but it would be less rigorous peer review, because not implemented by a disinterested third party (the journal). It is equally quixotic (and as close to absurd) to imagine that the alternative remedy for high serials prices and access-barriers is to have tenure/promotion committees drop their reliance on peer review and impact altogether. This is throwing out the baby, bathwater, and bassinet. Please, there are so many red herrings that have been keeping us back from freeing access to the peer-reviewed literature at last, despite the fact that it is entirely within reach and has been for some time. Some of these distractions, like the "evaluation/assessment" non-sequitur, just keep us jousting with irrelevant conspiratorial shadows, diminishing the credibility of our cause, while access/impact loss continues happily along its independent way, and those who benefit from the status quo chuckle at our naivete, or invoke it as evidence of our out-of-touchness with reality. (It is but a few weeks since we were led down yet another garden path -- that of royalty payments to authors of peer-reviewed articles -- in this same Forum, on this same thread!) Let us not get into tenure evaluation/assessment again. It is not our area of expertise, as researchers, publishers and librarians. Nor is it a relevant area of expertise. We may have our own amateur ideas on the subject. But, please, let us not rehearse them here. We are here to free this peer-reviewed literature, such as it is, from its impact-blocking access-tolls, not to free it from peer review or impact, nor from the uses to which the output of those quality-control methods and metrics are subsequently put. Stevan Harnad Harnad, S. (2001) Research access, impact and assessment. Times Higher Education Supplement 1487: p. 16. http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Tp/thes1.html http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/documents/disk0/00/00/16/83/index.html NOTE: A complete archive of the ongoing discussion of providing free access to the refereed journal literature online is available at the American Scientist September Forum (98 & 99 & 00 & 01): http://amsci-forum.amsci.org/archives/American-Scientist-Open-Access-Forum.html or http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/index.html Discussion can be posted to: american-scientist-open-access-fo...@amsci.org See also the Budapest Open Access Initiative: http://www.soros.org/openaccess and the Free Online Scholarship Movement: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/timeline.htm