Re: Journals are Quality Certification Brand-Names

[Stevan Harnad]

On Wed, 2 Jun 1999, Arthur Smith wrote:

> 
> the article, by Colin Day, is titled "Digital Alternatives:
> Solving the Problem or Shifting the Costs". The subject was
> academic monographs rather than journal articles, but I think
> many of the same arguments apply in both cases.

Not quite, for two very basic reasons:

(1) Monographs, like most of the rest of the literature -- and
unlike refereed journal articles -- are written to be sold, and the
author hopes for some royalty revenue.

(The royalties are often not much, and the authors of some monographs
that are too esoteric for any market, and hence at some risk of not
getting published at all, would gladly waive royalties just to have them
appear. So in that respect some monographs do fit the no-royalty, no-fee,
give-away criterion that separates the refereed journal literature --
and perhaps also esoteric conference proceedings -- from the normal
trade literature. But this only represents a minority of monographs.)

(2) Self-publishing of monographs (unlike self-archiving or refereed
journals articles) bypasses peer review.

However, those monographs that do fit the give-away formula, if they
are peer reviewed by a reputable monograph series, could indeed benefit
from being self-archived in a free archive rather than remaining stillborn
for want of a market to pay their conventional publication costs. Ditto
for conference proceedings, both refereed and unrefereed.

The work that goes into the creation, revision, mark-up and
self-archiving of 6-12 journal articles is probably equivalent to
the work that goes into doing the same with a monograph. So in that
respect the shoe fits, and I would argue that self-archiving is indeed
the optimal route for give-away monographs of this sort.

There would accordingly probably be a niche for "virtual monograph"
publishers (or a virtual branch of a paper monograph publisher) who
would provide rigorous peer review and a prestigious imprimatur to
virtual monograph series, archived exactly the same way refereed
articles are.

Apart from the quality control, most of the document preparation is
being off-loaded onto authors already anyway. Once on-screen editors
and version-controllers are optimized, and windows-based XML or SGML
tagging platforms are perfected, authors will be able to handle it all
with minimal effort.


Stevan Harnad har...@cogsci.soton.ac.uk
Professor of Cognitive Sciencehar...@princeton.edu
Department of Electronics and phone: +44 1703 592-582
Computer Science  fax:   +44 1703 592-865
University of Southampton http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/
Highfield, Southamptonhttp://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/
SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM   ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/

Re: Journals are Quality Certification Brand-Names

[Ransdell, Joseph M.]

This is a comment occasioned by what Arthur Smith said -- more of the
nature of a qualification than an objection -- about taking due account
of the costs that are implicit in authors doing their own archiving,
publishing, etc.:

> But what is worse is that people who would otherwise be doing research and
> teaching, or who would otherwise be support staff enabling those crucial
> activities, are now engaged in the work of publishing to the detriment of the
> time available for teaching and research.

Let me explain why I think this might have to be qualified.  One of the
things I had to learn the hard way is that doing network development
work (which I understand to be doing a variety of sorts of construction
of publication and communication facilities and practices, including the
development of a telecommunity of users of the facilities) is not
activity of a sort which people in the humanities usually know how to
relate to because it does not fit into any of the categories of activity
they take for granted as they understand them:  teaching, research,
service.

But we have to start with something more basic to understand what is
happening in this respect.  Outside of the hard sciences, there is
little or no reward for any work done in network development in so far
as it concerns research in particular, as distinct from teaching.  (In
spite of the fact that a research faculty can never be persuaded to
change their professional lives in order to improve the teaching
situation -- that approach has been tried for nearly two decades now and
produced negligible results -- this is where all of the rewards and
incentives have been and still are.)  To change the faculty you have to
change their lives as researchers and, of course, networking now offers
marvellous opportunities to do that for people in every field.  But to
do that, basic network development by professors themselves must be done
because the basic tools, chiefly in the form of websites with the
relevant facilities for purposes of research, have to be built.
(Document archives are essential but by no means all that is required to
attract people into networking practices, as far as the humanities
goes.)

But who is to build them?  Obviously it must be the profs in the various
fields and areas of research who know what sort of site to build, what
sort of facilities and resources it should contain, and so forth,
because they understand the problematics, the aims, and the mores of the
field.  You can't just call up an expert website builder in computer
service and say "Build me a website!" because they don't know what is
and is not important for this and that field and discipline.  Only the
active inquiring members of these fields can do this, and it has to be
done experimentally, not from a single a priori vision of what is wanted
or needed.

Question: is this sort of development activity research work?  Let me
add another question to that.  If in a given science you have to have an
instrument of a certain sort in order to proceed further in your
inquiries in that field, do the scientists call up an expert instrument
builder and say "Build us an instrument that does such and such and let
us know when you are finished. Thanks."  I don't think so.  An
instrument of inquiry in the sciences is surely crafted out on the basis
of theoretical and experimental understanding of the state of inquiry in
that field at that time and of the problems which its use promises to
solve, and brought to some minimum state of perfection over some period
of time in which it is still under construction.  I know that Charles
Peirce, a philosopher-scientist whom I am especially interested in,
built his own pendulums when he was working as a geodesist, helping to
perfect the pendulum itself as a geodesic instrument in doing so, and
built a number of other instruments as needed. I don't see how it would
be possible to hire an outsider who was simply an instrument maker to
come in and build the instrument.  It must be that even now scientists
who are themselves on the leading edge take some time out to cooperate
in constructing the instrument, maybe not literally putting it together
physically but at least overseeing everything going into it that is of
any importance.

So is that research?  I really don't know how this is handled in
physics, say, and the question is a genuine one to Arthur Smith or
whoever else wants to respond to it. Is it a part of a research agenda
or is the construction of "mere" instruments regarded simply as time
wasted professionally, something best done by others, so that the
scientists who are involved in it are regarded as doing something other
than what they really should be doing as researchers?

Well, I can tell you that in the humanities they don't know what to make
of work on instruments at all because the instruments of humanistic
research are all of the nature of texts or facilities for producing and
accessing texts.  The technology of the paper te

Re: Journals are Quality Certification Brand-Names

[Arthur Smith]

All these arguments about self-archiving are wonderful, but creating and
maintaining material to be publicly accessible on the web has costs, and
finding appropriate material has costs to the reader, and one
really should be analyzing the total system costs for any scheme, not just
local "costs" for author, library, institution, etc. Scholarly authors
and readers are actually supposed to be spending most of their time
DOING research and teaching, not publishing, archiving, and becoming
their own librarians. An interesting article looking at total costs
and benefits from this sort of angle appeared in the September 1998
issue of the Journal of Electronic Publishing:



the article, by Colin Day, is titled "Digital Alternatives:
Solving the Problem or Shifting the Costs". The subject was
academic monographs rather than journal articles, but I think many of the
same arguments apply in both cases. While I can't entirely
agree with everything he says, he has a lot of good points. A
couple of quotes:

> For example, the universities cut their library budgets, the libraries 
> consequently cut their book
> purchases, and so demand for books falls. More academic manuscripts become 
> uneconomic for
> publishers and are declined. The scholars, eager to get their work 
> disseminated, turn to self
> publication or departmental publication. Those routes do not eliminate the 
> costs of publication, they
> merely shift them and very often hide them in other university budgets. In 
> fact they probably
> increase the total costs, as it is unlikely actually that the work will be 
> done either as well or as
> cheaply as it would be by professional-publishing people -- the economic 
> benefits of
> specialization are well-attested in every other industry, after all. But what 
> is worse is that people
> who would otherwise be doing research and teaching, or who would otherwise be 
> support staff
> enabling those crucial activities, are now engaged in the work of publishing 
> to the detriment of the
> time available for teaching and research.

[...]
> As should already be clear, any systemwide evaluation must take account of the
> impact on the time of faculty members. Faculty time, both as teachers and 
> researchers, is the most valuable resource in the
> university. Effective use of that time is crucial to the success of the 
> university in fulfilling both its teaching and research
> missions. Thus time diverted from those activities to prepare and publish 
> their own manuscripts, time spent to search for
> materials that are no longer available through well-established channels, 
> time spent reading things that prove after an hour
> or two to be valueless, increased time spent evaluating their colleagues for 
> tenure -- these are all costs, true costs, using
> the scarcest resources of the academy.

Re: Journals are Quality Certification Brand-Names

[Tony Barry]

At 06:32 PM 1/6/99, Stevan Harnad wrote:
>Journals certify quality with a known brand-name. They will and should
>continue doing that. Whether the articles appear in paper or online,
>whether for fee or for free, is irrelevant to that underlying quality
>control and certification function that journals have always performed.

But you can decouple the certification of quality from the publication via
for instance an RDF server.

Authors could then publish where they liked and an RDF server could provide
the certifciation of quality by pointing to them and also serve up indexing
metadata needed for search engines. There is no longer any need for
publication and certification of quality to be done by the one institution.
For than matter RDF servers could compete to provide the best service over
the same domain of papers rather that the quasi monopoly which exists with
the journal system.

Tony

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