Thanks for the stats. In this kind of surveys much depends on how the
question is formulated and what naming is used. I think "communication"
is a very abstract term and not really the root motivation for
publishing. If they asked about "impact" (like "having impact on your
discipline of research") instead of "communication", the fraction of
people to vote for this option would be much higher that 33%.
-Marcin
On 11/07/2012 11:17 AM, Sally Morris wrote:
It's along time ago now, but Alma Swan and Sheridan
Brown surveyed nearly 11,000 scholarly authors for ALPSP in 1998/9 and
received 3 218 replies.
33% put communication with peers as their primary reason for
publishing; career advancement was next (22%). Personal prestige (8%),
funding (7%) and financial reward (1%) were way behind.
Sally
Sally Morris
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK BN13 3UU
Tel: +44 (0)1903 871286
Email: sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk
------------------------------------------------------------------------
*From:* goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] *On
Behalf Of *Marcin Wojnarski
*Sent:* 06 November 2012 21:57
*To:* open-acc...@lists.okfn.org; Global Open Access List (Successor
of AmSci); Peter Murray-Rust
*Subject:* [GOAL] Re: [Open-access] Re: Hitler, Mother Teresa, and Coke
Eric's distinction between publishing for communication or for
prestige is quite thought-provoking, if not provocative. Does anyone
have an idea how many authors fall to each group? What's more
important for majority of academics: communication or prestige? ...
I think there's a misconception regarding prestige and its real
significance. This issue has been raised many times recently in
discussions about OA: the frequently repeated claim, expressed also by
Eric in his blog post, is that _scholars publish for prestige_ (and
for: high metrics, tenure, "exposition", benefits, rewards,
incentives, ...) - that's why adoption of OA is slow and costs of
traditional journals are high. Do you think this claim is true?
I don't.
The statement that "scholars publish for prestige" is an euphemism for
"scholars are careerists who care more about tenure than quality and
meaningfulness of their research". I don't believe this. I don't
believe that majority of academics are careerists who don't care if
their papers are read by anybody. Suggesting that entire academic
communication is nothing else but a PR bubble (prestige! prestige!)
driven by primitive rules of social darwinism - is not just totally
wrong, but also offending to academia. Maybe 5% of academics are
careerists, the other 95% are extremely interested in whether their
papers have _real_ impact or not ("real" in contrast to "measured by
IF"). I mean: they have a deep _hope_ that their research will
ultimately have an impact. I'm convinced that this hope accounts for
at least 90% of motivation of those people for becoming a scientist
and doing laborious research job that's compensated with a half or 1/3
of what's paid for similar skills outside academia.
The key problem is that prestige of the journal and size+quality of
potential audience for the paper - are correlated. Every author who
respects his own work seeks as large and reputable audience as
possible - not for prestige (!) but for the ability to communicate own
discoveries to people who are able to understand, appreciate and make
use of them. That's why authors must rely on prestiguous journals even
if prestige itself has no value for them! (BTW, looking at the society
as a whole, I think scientists are the people with _least_ respect for
prestige, compared to any other community).
The way to change the situation is by decoupling communication
potential of journals from their perceived prestige; and by enhancing
visibility of small, niche, low-prestige journals. The focus must be
on communication, community and readers; not on prestige.
-Marcin
--
Marcin Wojnarski, Founder and CEO, TunedIT
http://tunedit.org
http://www.facebook.com/TunedIT
http://twitter.com/wojnarski
http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcinwojnarski
TunedIT - Online Laboratory for Intelligent Algorithms
On 11/06/2012 09:58 AM, Peter Murray-Rust wrote:
Copied only to the OKFN open-access list.
It may be useful to consider the question: "what can we do to change
the situation?" - the OKF has a strong tradition of building things
to change the world. The distinction between publishing for
communication and publishing for reputation is valuable. Maybe by
changing and improving the former (which I think OKFN is well placed
to do) we can separate them.
On Tue, Nov 6, 2012 at 8:23 AM, Leslie Carr <l...@ecs.soton.ac.uk
<mailto:l...@ecs.soton.ac.uk>> wrote:
Publishers are capitalists - I don't think they'd argue the point.
This is a generalization. Many learned societies and scientific
unions are not capitalists.
--
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
_______________________________________________
open-access mailing list
open-acc...@lists.okfn.org
http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/open-access
Unsubscribe:http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/options/open-access
_______________________________________________
GOAL mailing list
GOAL@eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
--
Marcin Wojnarski, Founder and CEO, TunedIT
http://tunedit.org
http://www.facebook.com/TunedIT
http://twitter.com/wojnarski
http://www.linkedin.com/in/marcinwojnarski
TunedIT - Online Laboratory for Intelligent Algorithms
_______________________________________________
GOAL mailing list
GOAL@eprints.org
http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
