Re: [tlug] Open Access Journals

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

Simon Cozens writes:
 > On 20/03/2014 23:25, Raymond Wan wrote:
 > > in the article?  But for IEEE and for the conference mentioned in the
 > > article, the publisher here puts faith in the organizers of the
 > > conference who handle all aspects from call for papers to reviewing
 > > and the conference itself.
 > 
 > What you're implicitly admitting here is that the publisher doesn't add any 
 > value to the process at all, outsourcing the actual hard work to willing 
 > volunteers and exercising precisely zero quality control over the results.

No, the publisher does choose the organizers (more precisely, refuse
to deal with some organizers), and implicitly control quality in that
way.

The question is, does this provide any additional quality from the
point of view of the users?  From the point of view of the IEEE (a
"user" we can't ignore in this context -- we can use another word if
you've got a better one than "user"), the print version is higher
quality for the price if they use a well-known publisher.  From the
point of view of readers, though, it's the actual editors first and
the IEEE second that determines their opinion I suspect, with the
publisher not contributing at all.

So I see a publisher-conference correlation in quality here.  Whether
that's useful to the scientific community is unclear to me.