[GOAL] Re: Peer review, OA, etc.
Jan- I just don't think the ArXiv model would work for archaeology. Part of the reason may be the heterogeneous nature of the field, which runs from hard science to interpretive humanities, and part may be the overall lower level of agreed-upon disciplinary standards (related to, but not isomorphic with, the first point). If archaeology were to jettison peer review, I would stop publishing in those journals and declare myself a historian or a sociologist. Mike Michael E. Smith, Professor School of Human Evolution Social Change Arizona State University www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9 -Original Message- From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf Of Jan Velterop Sent: Thursday, January 12, 2012 10:32 AM To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) Subject: [GOAL] Re: Peer review, OA, etc. Mike, I totally accept that your discipline suffers from practitioners of psychoceramics, a field of study involving cracked pots (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_S._Carberry - tomorrow, as every Friday the 13th, it's Josiah Stinkney Carberry day). It's probably true of many disciplines, and it's certainly a well-known phenomenon in physics, where highly fantastic theories about the universe and everything abound. Yet ArXiv seems to be able to keep those crackpots out with a fairly simple - and cheap - endorsement system: http://arxiv.org/help/endorsement. Would this really be impossible in archaeology? It may well not be completely fail-safe, but then, what in life is? To all intents and purposes, we know that ArXiv works. Jan Velterop On 12 Jan 2012, at 16:46, Michael Smith wrote: I would not presume to talk about the value of peer review for all of science, but for some fields it is absolutely essential. I am a archaeologist, and we desperately need peer review to weed out papers by two groups of authors (many of whom can write scholarly-sounding and scholarly-looking papers). First we lunatics who would like to think they are part of the scholarly discipline. They are into Maya prophesies for 2012, boatloads of Egyptians who (supposedly) showed the Incas how to mummify the dead, phony pyramids in the Balkans, and the like. Some of these people write books and articles that appear to be scholarly, but are not. The second group is more insidious. These are scholars with valid degrees who have a very non-scientific epistemology, producing stories of the past with little plausibility. Taking a more humanities-oriented approach, they are willing to propose interpretations that the more scientifically-minded of us consider baseless speculation. High-energy physics presumably has fewer lunatics and hangers-on than archaeology, and they are probably easier to spot. We desperately need peer review to keep some sort of sanity in our field. Mike Michael E. Smith, Professor School of Human Evolution Social Change Arizona State University www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9 ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Peer review, OA, etc.
I would not presume to talk about the value of peer review for all of science, but for some fields it is absolutely essential. I am a archaeologist, and we desperately need peer review to weed out papers by two groups of authors (many of whom can write scholarly-sounding and scholarly-looking papers). First we lunatics who would like to think they are part of the scholarly discipline. They are into Maya prophesies for 2012, boatloads of Egyptians who (supposedly) showed the Incas how to mummify the dead, phony pyramids in the Balkans,  and the like. Some of these people write books and articles that appear to be scholarly, but are not. The second group is more insidious. These are scholars with valid degrees who have a very non-scientific epistemology, producing stories of the past with little plausibility. Taking a more humanities-oriented approach, they are willing to propose interpretations that the more scientifically-minded of us consider baseless speculation.  High-energy physics presumably has fewer lunatics and hangers-on than archaeology, and they are probably easier to spot. We desperately need peer review to keep some sort of sanity in our field.  Mike  Michael E. Smith, Professor School of Human Evolution Social Change Arizona State University www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9 [ Part 2: Attached Text ] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
download counts and self-archiving
When I was pitching self-archiving to some colleagues last week, two of them mentioned the following argument AGAINST self-archiving. University bean-counters have started using the number of times articles are downloaded (from publishers sites, I guess) as a measure of faculty productivity or impact. If one self-archives, then people will be less likely to download from the publishers site, thereby lowering oneâs download score. I can think of various reasons why this is NOT a good reason to avoid self-archiving, but I wonder if there are any data on this, or if any bibliometric researchers have addressed this topic explicitly.  Mike Smith  Michael E. Smith, Professor School of Human Evolution Social Change Arizona State University www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9 Â
Tenurometer
Tenurometer is great! I evidently get assigned the publications of all the ME Smiths in any discipline, inflating my h-index to far higher than the most widely-cited scholars in my discipline. I wonder if I can fool my Dean with this! Seriously, the search function does allow me to find most of my own publications, but the statistics function must take in all the ME Smiths out there. Assigning tags a priori to searches (that is, before the search has been run), rather than to actually entries, is a strange procedure that may be to blame for my inflated data. Mike Smith Michael E. Smith, Professor School of Human Evolution Social Change Arizona State University www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9 http://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com http://calixtlahuaca.blogspot.com
How can I convince administrators of the value of an IR?
I wonder if readers could provide me with some ammunition to try to convince university administrators that an institutional repository would be a good idea. When I periodically bug our librarian in charge of things digital about this, he says there is no interest at all among deans and vice-presidents for a repository. Although I am an anthropologist, I have very little understanding of how this local tribe (the administrators) thinks and acts. It seems to me that a campus obsessed with raising its external image would want to exploit its many productive units and make their work widely visible and available. But what do I know about the rarified atmosphere in administration-land? Now with the state of Arizona in a financial crisis and budgets being cut across the campus, things do not look promising for new initiatives. My immediate plan is to try to set up a small repository for my own unit (with help from the Library) and hope the campus comes on board later. But it would help to have some succinct arguments and evidence, presented in a form that administrators will understand. Any suggestions? Thanks, Mike Smith Michael E. Smith, Professor School of Human Evolution Social Change Arizona State University www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9 http://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com http://calixtlahuaca.blogspot.com
OA in developing countries
It is good to know that there is considerable interest and work on OA in developing countries, and this is not at all surprising. The intention of my brief post was NOT to say nobody cares about or is doing anything about OA in developing countries (and I certainly did not intend to insult anyone). Rather, my intention was to point out what seemed to be a bias in much of the talk and writing on OA: issues are typically framed solely in terms of the US and Europe. I follow the OA literature at a distance, and this bias seems pretty clear in things that I come across. Mike Smith Dr. Michael E. Smith Professor of Anthropology School of Human Evolution Social Change Arizona State University www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9 http://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com/ http://calixtlahuaca.blogspot.com/
Problems with Author-side payment
The practice of author payment for open access journals may work for the hard sciences, but it presents major difficulties for various categories of scholars, including: (1) social sciences and humanities, where grants are smaller and fewer than in the natural and physical sciences. (2) graduate students and younger scholars. (3) scholars in the third world. I work closely with authors in Mexico, and in my field (Mexican archaeology) an author-pay model is simply unworkable. Archaeologists and other scholars in Latin America barely have enough funds to carry out their research, and funding for journal author charges does not exist (except possibly in a very small number of venues). This is the situation in most of the third world today in many disciplines. The author-pay model puts people in the above categories (and others) at a serious disadvantage. It would effectively leave out an entire sector of scholarship in the third world. Panglossian arguments about convincing funding agencies to pay for author charges, or transferring university library budgets from subscriptions to author charges, ignore the current financial plight of research in most of the world today. Mike Smith Dr. Michael E. Smith Professor of Anthropology School of Human Evolution Social Change Arizona State University www.public.asu.edu/~mesmith9 http://publishingarchaeology.blogspot.com/ http://calixtlahuaca.blogspot.com/
