RE: Provostial Publishing: a return to circa 1920

From: Sandy Thatcher <sgt3_at_psu.edu>
Date: Mon, 2 Jun 2008 20:27:19 EDT

> Stevan Harnad wrote:
> >
> > OA IRs provide free supplemental copies of published, refereed journal
> > articles. The best and most likely way to find and access them is via a
> > harvester/indexer that links to the item, not by directly searching the
> > IR itself. (Direct searching of the IR is more relevant for (1)
> > institution-internal record-keeping, (2) performance assessment, (3)
> > CV-generation, (4) grant application/fulfillment, and perhaps also some
> > window-shopping by prospective (5) faculty, (6) researchers or (7)
> > students.)
> >
> > The main purpose of depositing refereed journal articles is (8) to
> > maximize their accessibility, so they are accessible to all would-be
> > users, not just those whose institutions happen to have a subscription
> > to the journal in which they were published. That way (9) the usage and
> > impact of the institutional research output is maximized (and so is (10)
> > overall research progress).
> >
> > > But I do continue to question what the institution gains from its
> > > IR.
> >
> > It seems to me that (1) to (10) above is quite a list of institutional
> > gains from their IRs.

I question whether many, or even most, of these alleged benefits of IRs
really are such. Why is an IR needed for any individual performance
assessment? A faculty member simply submits relevant publications for the
P&T committee to review; having them on an IR doesn't seem much of a benefit
here. And why would anyone need to go to an IR to generate a CV? And window
shopping? I submit that faculty, grad students, and researchers will go look
for the work of the specialists in the areas they are most interested in,
not canvass a wide swathe of an institution's publications, and then rely on
more or less "objective" indicators of prestige ranking of departments by
various bodies that conduct regular assessments. Who is going to try using
an IR to measure "the usage and impact of the institutional research output"
overall? As we all know, usage statistics are only one small part of an
assessment exercise, and they do not even exist for large parts of a
university's output outside the sciences. How does an IR help measure the
success of an arts and architecture school, for instance? Given the widely
disparate nature of materials that would be contained in any university-wide
IR, I can't see how anyone could readily come up with an overall measure of
a university's contribution to research and scholarship. This is
pie-in-the-sky thinking, in my opinion.

> > > Harvard authors, on
> > > the whole, are no better writers than scholars elsewhere, I would
> > > suggest, and their unedited prose will not do any good for the
> > > institution.
> >
> > That may or may not be a good argument against depositing unrefereed
> > preprints, but it has nothing to do with OA, OA mandates, or the primary
> > purpose of OA IRs.

To the contrary, Stevan, the peer-reviewed versions of articles you are
talking about being deposited have not undergone any copyediting, and my
guess is that most of what gets posted will be versions that have not had
copyediting done on them. I keep beating this drum, but I need to remind
people that unedited faculty prose is often not something they would want to
have exposed to the wider world. You mentioned that high energy physics
hasn't seem to have suffered any from its exposure on arXiv, but then how
many people beyond specialists actually read anything on this site?

Harvard, on the other hand, is mandating deposit of the writings of its
faculty in the humanities and social sciences, which at least in principle
could be of interest and accessible to a nonspecialist public. My contention
is that Harvard will more likely be embarrassed by the unedited writing of
some of its faculty than gain anything in prestige from it.

Indeed, I can see some bloggers starting to award annual prizes to the worst
writing on Harvard's site, along the lines of the Congressional "golden
fleece" awards or the "razzies" that are given out each year to the worst
movies. Really, believe me when I say, Stevan, that excellent scholars are
not always, or even often, the best writers; many a reputation has been
saved by the good work of unheralded copyeditors working behind the scenes.
To protect its reputation, Harvard might find itself having to hire
copyeditors itself to spruce up the articles before they get posted, or at
least proofreaders who could remove the most egregious errors and typos.

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press
Received on Tue Jun 03 2008 - 03:17:50 BST