Re: electronica

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Date
Responses to Henry Gee's recent posting.

>1) There is no such thing as a free lunch. To use another cliche, you get
>what you pay for. I wouldn't give much credit to a journal that was 'free'.
>To use yet a third cliche, I wouldn't join a club that admitted me as a
>member. And yet a fourth cliche -- TIME IS MONEY. The work Stefan Bengtson
>puts in to Lethaia and F&S is probably worth 100,000 dollars a year, at least.

Not giving much credit to any journal that is "free" begs the question "why
not?" Henry may think that it would be very difficult to put out a high
quality journal unless you paid somebody for something. I can understand
that feeling, even though I don't share it. The way I look at it, the vast
majority of the work that goes into making a journal "high quality" (e.g.,
the editing, the reviewing, ms creation and revision by the authors)
already is donated "free" and the costs associated with the rest (e.g.,
typesetting, figure formatting) can be greatly reduced in electronic
publishing. Surely we should judge the quality of a EPJ (or any journal)
based on factors that have something to do with "quality," and not on
price. In my experience the there is precious little correlation between
subscription price and scientific quality in the marketplace of
paleontological journals.

Let's also be clear that my "radical idea" of a "free" journal was just
that - despite Stefan's protestation to the contrary ;-> I believe such a
journal is possible and from the comments posted over the last few days
(both on- and off-line) a number of people appear to agree with me. However
there is wide spectrum between a "free" EPJ and one that charges current
print rates for a subscription. The over-riding message is that the
transmission of quality palaeontological information need not be as
expensive as it current is if we (= the paleontological community) make
appropriate use of available technology.


>2) Web publication may be fine for molecular and cell biology which
>re-invents itself every year or so, but palaeontology papers are meant to
>have a long shelf life. We still refer to stuff from the 17th century. Can
>we guarantee that web-published palaeo will be as durable, given that one
>needs a computer to translate unreadable (i.e. magnetically encoded)
>material that you'd otherwise read with your unaided eyes?

How many more ways can I say this? Computers are here to stay. For the vast
majority of professional paleontologists, and a large number of amateurs,
computers are as common as pencils (more so in some people's offices). We
are not going back to a pre-computer world - or if we do it will require
such a dramatic social upheaval that paleontology will be the last thing on
our minds. Like peer review, like "publication quality" images, the
existence of an EPJ does not mean that all print journals will suddenly
vanish or that the Print... button on your computer software menus will
disappear. The use of this technology will make paleontological information
more available in more forms to more people, not less available in fewer
forms to fewer people.


>3) How will people refer to web-published material in years to come, once we
>transcend the limitations of volumes and page numbers? It will be
>interesting to see how the new breed of electronic geology journals copes
>with this.

Surely this isn't a serious criticism of electronic publishing. Electronic
formats will require changes in scientific publishing traditions. It will
also require changes in library practices, changes in professional
societies, etc., etc., etc. That's the point. These changes are going to
take place whether we like it or not. We need to come up with solutions
that make these changes work for the benefit of paleontology. If just a
single "important" paper came out in an electronic form I'm sure many
authors would find a way to cite it. I know I would. These things will come
in the same way the invention of libraries and bibliographies post-dated
the invention of books.


>4) As someone said, the time it takes to publish a journal depends on the
>speed of review, not the medium of publication.

Agreed.


>5) As I said earlier, print publishers are very keen on electronic
>publication, but are unsure how to proceed (hence Elsevier's guarded
>response to Mark Purnell's query). At Nature (my employer -- I'm a
>manuscript editor there, when I'm not on sabbatical here at UCLA), we still
>plan to publish on paper, but will probably extend our existing web-site
>with subscriber-only pages which will publish the journal 'proper'. This
>will help us solve our biggest problem, which is distribution. It takes a
>week or more for an issue of Nature to snailmail it to California, which is
>a week too long.

Agreed.


>6) QUALITY CONTROL. Electronics or not, it is VITAL that journal editors do
>not see the web as licence to print yards of verbiage which they would not
>otherwise do. There HAVE to be limits. Strict pagination goes with HIGH
>REJECTION RATES, which is essential for maintaining the high quality that
>ensures journal health. People complain when papers are rejected, but would
>prefer to send material to journals with higher rejection rates, as the
>material that is published has higher credibility. At Nature we reject more
>than nine in ten submissions. Much of what we reject is fine stuff, but we
>want to be in a position of having to choose the very best from a field of
>excellent work.

As Henry says, this pertains to print as well as electronic journals.
However, I do disagree with the idea of high rejection rates simply for the
sake of high rejection rates. If the review process were absolutely fair
and all mss were correctly ranked in terms of their quality all the time in
every journal that would be one thing. Reality is quite different. One only
needs to look at why most scientific journals get started in the first
place (a group of people gets tired of having problems getting their papers
accepted by "established" journals) to uncover many examples of
"established" journals' review policies being somewhat short-sighted on
occasion. In fact, a number of the scientific professions' most prestigious
journals don't even send all submitted mss out for objective peer-review,
but instead rely on a small group of editors to decide what is and is not
appropriate for consideration. There certainly is a quality "control" issue
here. However, it plays no role in distinguishing between electronic and
print formats. Electronic publication could free us of the economic
constraints that require certain journals to reject otherwise excellent
papers simply because they are too long, they have too many illustrations,
the journal already has too much of a backlog, or the ms doesn't conform to
the intellectual "flavor of the month."


Norm MacLeod



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Norman MacLeod
Senior Scientific Officer
N.MacLeod@nhm.ac.uk (Internet)
N.MacLeod@uk.ac.nhm (Janet)

Address: Dept. of Palaeontology, The Natural History Museum,
         Cromwell Road, London, SW7 5BD

Office Phone: 0171-938-9006
Dept. FAX:  0171-938-9277
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