Re: [tlug] Open Access Journals

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Simon Cozens writes:
 > On 20/03/2014 00:14, Raymond Wan wrote:
 > > Well, one "good" thing that publishers still do is quality control.
 > 
 > Funny that we're talking about this while the whole Riken thing is
 > happening.
 > 
 > Anyway, being published by a major publisher guarantees precisely
 > nothing about quality control, as this story (and other similar
 > ones) demonstrate:

Guarantee, no, of course not.  Nothing can 100% guarantee quality (not
even a "Simon Cozens" byline! :-)

 > The only reason editorial boards haven't moved to shoving all their
 > accepted papers up onto a free Wordpress blog or similar
 > is... well, Stephen mentions inertia, which is certainly true, but
 > really, it's about prestige.

I see your point, but I don't think I'd go that far -- it's just one
important factor among several.  Like running an open source project
(or any software shop), managing a journal is like herding cats, and
the big prestigious publishing houses are pretty good at that.
Including stroking the fattest cats.

 > On the other hand, a Real Astronomer friend mentioned the recent
 > age-of-the-universe thing (BICEP2) in rather negative terms: they
 > BICEP2 team put out a press release first, then afterwards an arxiv
 > pre-print (for a journal "to be decided"). If journals didn't exist
 > or if publication in a journal wasn't seen as the gold standard of
 > truth, this would be a good "open source" way to do things -

But a press release is vaporware in any industry, and the arxiv
preprint clearly is:

 > a way of generating buzz in advance and manipulating the submission
 > process.
 > 
 > It may just be that good, thorough science and bazaar-mentality
 > processes aren't (seen as) compatible.

Universally, I'd say they aren't, just as not all software is
compatible with bazaar-mentality processes.  OTOH, most theoretical
science is, as is a lot of science based on public-access data (social
sciences in particular do a lot of that).