Re: [tlug] Journals, Authors and 'Free Peer Review'

[Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com>]

On Tuesday, September 25, 2018 05:06 PM, Curt Sampson wrote:
> On 2018-09-20 22:14 +0800 (Thu), Raymond Wan wrote:
> > Still with publishing, some authors choose to release their work
> > publicly first on open access preprint repositories ... Journals
> > have to accept this... with some conditions.  (i.e., that you've
> > declared it and that, after all the pretty formatting is done by the
> > journal, this final version isn't made public).
>
> Except that it seems that the pretty formatting is almost invariably
> done by the author, not the journal. At least in the world of
> LaTeX-using journals, they expect a source file using their templates
> and whatnot that will produce camera-ready copy.


Unfortunately, moving outside of the engineering fields 
leads to publishers that still ask for manuscripts formatted 
using Microsoft.  Like many of you, I've used LaTeX for many 
years...but if that's what they want, that's what they want. 
 Even if they gave authors an option between the two, the 
other hard part is convincing your colleagues and many who 
aren't from engineering are quite happy with Word.

Assuming you have your manuscript accepted, the publisher 
sends it to (what I think is) a third party who then 
reformats it according to the journal's specifications.  You 
then get a look and nitpick at how many mistakes they made.

I have no idea why they haven't moved to LaTeX...definitely 
moving at a snail's pace...


> > I'm not so sure if this works as it seems to be a way for authors to
> > "have their cake and eat it".... They get "free peer review" via
> > their peers on Twitter...
> Oh come on. Journals don't pay for peer review (via real reviews, not
> Twitter) either. They expect people working in the field to do review
> for them for free. Nor do they usually pay their editorial committees,
> either.


Well, perhaps I don't mean "free" in the sense of the 
journals paying for it.  I guess I meant that authors get 
people to look at their manuscript without the "cost" of 
having submitted it to a journal.  Because if you submit it 
to a journal and get it rejected, you can't submit it there 
again without substantial changes.

So, I guess that's what I meant by "free".


> > But it's the state of some research fields now and I think journals
> > are forced to accept it in order to compete with others [for now]?
>
> The problem is that the journals aren't providing much beyond some
> coordination work, printing (for those still taking paper copies) and
> another place to download the PDF. Given the massive increases in
> subscription prices for many of them, it's no suprise a lot of authors
> wonder just what the journal is doing for the quite nice profits most
> of them are making. (And this is why predatory journals have grown so
> much over the last decade or so: it's just not very much work to
> produce a new 'journal' now.)


Oh...I'm not here to defend journals.

But I don't think we can deny that there is still a 
difference in terms of perception by readers.  I can write a 
page about the pros and cons of publishers and put it in a 
blog...perhaps some people will read it.  Or, I can write 
the same text but work for some newspaper like the 
Washington Post and suddenly more people will take notice.

Predatory journals aside, the journals that have lasted for 
a long time have a vested interest in keeping the quality of 
their name up.  Of course, we will see how long they can 
keep that up...

Ray