Learned Publishing - Issue 1 - 2011

 

From the Editor:

 

Go for tiered pricing and become a pariah - or not

 

Want to switch to tiered pricing for your journal - perhaps because you
think it's fairer, and even expand your market at the 'low' end? Want to get
it totally wrong and bring down the wrath of all, clog up the listservs with
complaints and maybe lose significant revenue? 

 

Not that I'm suggesting that that's happened recently, of course. But we do
have an article in our latest issue that might just help you get it right.
Charlie Rapple explains in detail, based on a real-life example, all the
steps you have to take to help give you the best chance, at least, of
getting it right.

 

Your editor, in his normal iconoclastic fashion, manages to get mention of
sex, or homosexuality, in his editorial on scholarly communication. He would
have done it more, he says, but was terrified in equal amounts of being
thought either homophobic or too interested in the topic. 

 

We do get quite scholarly ourselves in one paper, which reviews the
literature on the ethics of 'peer review'. If you look up 'peer review' on
the search engines, you'll get thousands of apparently relevant items, so
even finding out how Lawrence Souder from Drexel chose what to review is
interesting, and the whole 18-page paper with its 136 references should be
something of a benchmark for those interested in, and researching on, this
topic.

 

There's an awful lot in medical journals about how to deal with research on
humans - but how do we do, as a publishing industry, when it comes to
animals? Nikki Osborne, from the RSPCA, has done some more research, and
finds us sadly lacking - have a look at her findings.

 

David Nicholas and the CIBER people are back again, measuring away as usual
- fascinating stuff - this time looking at two years' use of e-journals by
researchers, and even suggesting that some of the traditional library role
has moved away to, as they call them, 'the new librarians' - check out to
see who(m) they are talking about.

 

Cliff Morgan of Wiley has a nice and short piece just explaining the
mysteries and complexities (in case you thought there weren't any!) of the
Creative Commons Licence.

 

Eefke Smit tells us why all of us need to care more about preservation of
data (broadly defined) and results from the PARSE project - otherwise, as
she says, we might be in for a 'Digital Dark Age for Data'.

 

And then we have book reviews, and a couple of comments on an earlier
article just to give you, we hope, a compelling package. Can you resist?
(all right, I know the answer to that - but don't try - give in to
temptation).

 

Alan Singleton

Editor, Learned Publishing

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