[Irtalk] Fwd: [GOAL] Re: Unnecessary Services

[Hilton Gibson]

FYI.

*Hilton Gibson*
Ubuntu Linux Systems Administrator
Stellenbosch University Library
http://staff.lib.sun.ac.za/~hgibson/docs/cv/cv.html


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Michael Eisen <mbeisen at gmail.com>
Date: 30 May 2015 at 14:53
Subject: [GOAL] Re: Unnecessary Services
To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal at eprints.org>


There is no evidence that post publication review can assure quality, I
agree. But there is a wealth of evidence that pre-publication review DOES
NOT assure quality, and it is absurd to spend $10b a year and delay the
open availability of typical papers by 10 months to achieve it.

On Friday, May 29, 2015, Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at gmail.com> wrote:

> Mike Eisen
> <https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/?tab=wm#inbox/14da0a74f200e99b> writes:
>
> *“I believe we should get rid of publishers… the services they provide are
> either easy to replicate (formatting articles to look pretty) or they
> currently do extremely poorly (peer review)… these services are
> unnecessary… [we should] move to a system where you post things when you
> want to post them, and that people comment/rate/annotate articles as they
> read them post publication.”*1. PLOS
> <http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1580> (like other publishers) seems
> to be charging a hefty price for “services that are unnecessary.” ;>)
>
> 2. I agree completely that we should get rid of publishers' unnecessary
> services <http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/harnad/Tp/resolution.htm#4.2> and
> their costs. But how to do that, while they are still controlled by
> publishers and bundled into subscriptions in exchange for access?
>
> My answer
> <http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1154-The-Inevitable-Success-of-Transitional-Green-Open-Access.html> is
> the one Mike calls “parasitic <http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1710>”:
> Institutions and funders worldwide mandate Green OA (with the
> “copy-request” Button to circumvent publisher OA embargoes). The
> cancellations that that will make possible will force publishers to drop
> the unnecessary services and their costs and downsize to Fair-Gold for peer
> review alone..
>
> 3. But I disagree with Mike about peer-review
> <http://www.nature.com/nature/webmatters/invisible/invisible.html>: it
> will remain the sole essential service. And the (oft-voiced) notion that
> peer-review can be replaced by crowd-sourcing, after “publication” is pure
> speculation, supported by no evidence that it can ensure quality at least
> as well as classical peer review, nor that is it scalable and sustainable
>


-- 
Michael Eisen, Ph.D.
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Professor of Genetics, Genomics and Development
Department of Molecular and Cell Biology
University of California, Berkeley


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