…a much needed discussion, indeed. Thanks for initiating this debate, Jeroen, and congratulations to the successful launch of GeoHumanities, Deborah and Tim!
Just a brief post Easter holiday addition: Articulo - Journal of Urban Research,
http://articulo.revues.org/ is yet another online open-access journal run via an Open Edition portal and indexed by both SCOPUS and the French Evaluation Agency for Research and Higher Education (AERES) in 2013. Both
online traffic (and paper downloads) and the number of paper submissions have increased tremendously since.
See you at Simon’s (and other’s) session at the AAG, 8am on the first day.
Best,
Sabine
From: A forum for critical and radical geographers [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
On Behalf Of Rebecca Kennison
Sent: 03 April 2015 19:45
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: a forward looking publishing model for human geography?
What a great discussion!
Some observations ...
Technology has lowered dramatically the barrier to produce and distribute scholarly work so that now it can be done in a very cost-effective manner. What does *not* get reduced in the cost of "traditional" publication? The cost incurred by everyone within the
system to limit access to this work. Open access is looking to solve for the access part -- but often does so by leveraging a cost structure of its own. A financial model based on APCs rests on two assumptions, both of which are the reality in 2015, although
neither of which are certain to be a reality even in the foreseeable future: (1) that there is an article to process and (2) that to process said article often requires a charge of some kind to cover someone's costs. Both assumptions have rightly been called
into question, explicitly and implicitly, by others on this thread, but here's my take.
Even assuming the ongoing primacy of the journal and its fixed-format article, there is of course much more to research and its outputs than simply the description of that work, no matter how it's packaged,
and there is increasing acknowledgment that those outputs should also be rewarded -- that, for example, creating a well-designed and well-described dataset that can stand alone, not merely appear as part of a journal article, is every bit as valuable as the
story told about its results in an article, or that a multimodal project that has an ongoing life can and should in and of itself also be recognized as an important contribution to the scholarly discussion -- but these outputs are not easily reduced to cost-per-unit
pricing, such as the APC. (For one possible approach to addressing this, please do take a look at my aforementioned white paper, the link to which I'm including again here for the sake of this new thread: http://knconsultants.org/toward-a-sustainable-approach-to-open-access-publishing-and-archiving/).
So what can be done? While we definitely need to start where we are, what I particularly like about the new subject line of this thread is its "forward looking" aspect. What do we imagine the publication (by which I mean "making public") landscape to look like
in a year? five? ten? And how do we think differently *now* so that we can work, even incrementally, toward the environment we want to have in place in the future?
And even more critically, if we're honest with ourselves, how much do we really truly want change to take place? And by "we" I mean everyone in the scholarly communication system, including funders.
The discussion about impact factor highlights very well the problems with doing the work necessary to change a system that is for many very comfortable. The problems with impact factor are well documented; even
Thomson Reuters tells people not to use the impact factor as some kind of proxy for quality. Curt Rice has written quite eloquently on the problems inherent in using impact factor as some sort of mark of quality (see, for example,
http://curt-rice.com/2014/12/03/quality-control-science-mysterious-case-impact-factor/), urging, "We must build an infrastructure for research that delivers genuine quality control. Ad hoc windows that treat different fields differently and systems in which
importance gets confounded with commercial interests cannot be part of this system. And if we succeed in finding new ways to determine quality, impact factor will surely get bounced."
Thankfully, there are other ways to determine quality -- including the quality of research output that goes beyond journals. Just a few days ago, Todd Carpenter, the executive director of the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), gave a talk at
the UK Serials Group meeting arguing that it's time to remove the "alt" from "altmetrics" and begin to embrace what should now just be considered "metrics." ((You can find his slides here:
http://www.slideshare.net/BaltimoreNISO/carpenter-lets-remove-alt-from-altmetrics-uksg.) The problem with widespread adoption of these new metrics, Carpenter notes, is not that they are not good metrics, at least as good and often demonstratively better
than impact factor; the problem, he says, is the community's trust in them. NISO is working with stakeholders across the spectrum to solve for that trust factor, but of course the question I asked above still applies:
If we're honest with ourselves, do we really truly want change to take place?
Until we all answer that question with a resounding YES, real change -- transformative change -- will be very slow indeed.
My 2 cents' worth ...
Best,
Rebecca
On Apr 2, 2015, at 16:34, Abel Polese <[log in to unmask]> wrote: