What is the $value$ of an editorial decision ?
(warning: random thoughts ahead)
From my viewpoint open access is doing great. PLoS has demonstrated that authors want to publish in open access journals and that these journals can quickly establish themselves as high impact forums for their respective audiences. BMC is set to show that open access can be profitable and within BMC some journals are are also trying to position themselves in the top tier of perceived impact.
How will BMC manage this and will PLoS and others find a way to serve the authors interest while keeping the direct costs to the authors within reasonable ranges (even if they are paid by the funding bodies) ? I can't really answer this :) but I do note a trend. Open access publishers like PLoS and BMC are increasingly publishing more and decreasing the rejection rates (when considering all that is published within the brand).
BMC has primarily focused on publishing high volume (peer-reviewed) articles without regarding to much on perceived impact in the field. I might be incorrect but more recently they have been trying to highlight a group of flagship journals (BMC Biology, Genome Biology and Journal of Biology) where they filter on perceived impact. They have even said that papers submitted to other BMC journals can even be suggested "up" if they are found to be of high impact.
PLoS on the other hand had the the exact opposite direction. PLoS started with their flagship journals (PLoS Biology and later PLoS Medicine), then created the community journals (PLoS Genetics, Computational Biology and Pathogens) and now opened PLoS ONE that will not filter on perceived impact.
On an author pays model, the most obvious way to limit the cost per paper and still provide a solid evaluation of perceived impact, is to have journals that cover the broad spectrum of perceived impact. In this way, for the publisher, the overall rejection rates decrease, the papers are evaluated and directed to the appropriate "level" of perceived impact.
Also, on closed publishers it is custom to be able to transition a manuscript with the peer-review comments from one journal to another of the same publisher. This practice is can be advantageous to everyone. saving the time of the another peer-review process.
Taking away the costs of editing and printing (online this can be very small) most of the costs of sustaining a science journal should mainly come from the editorial staff. So, what is the value of an editorial decision ? In other words, could there be freelance editors ? Could the editors be separated from the publisher ? Imagine I read a paper from a pre-print server, ask some people to peer-review (why would they?) and sell our evaluation to a journal.
Also, can a publisher sell the editorial decision to another publisher ? Lets imagine a journal that has a very high rejection rate, the editor asks referees for comments but ultimately the manuscript is rejected. The editor could then ask the authors where they want to send it next and offer to provide the referee report and editorial comments directly to the next journal to expedite the process. Could this journal get paid for this ?
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Posted by Pedro Beltrão at 5:52 PM
Labels: publishing
6 comments:
I think you're really onto something with this line of thinking! In response, some public rambling of my own.
There is a market here but the dynamics are a little bit different than a standard buy/sell configuration.
Let's call the author the "seller", trying to get the paper published.
We'll say the "price" they get for it is the impact factor of the journal. Other factors come into play, but we'll make it simpler here.
The journal is the buyer, trying to get papers that will be highly referenced in the future.
Currently an author sends it to the journal with the highest impact factor they think they can publish in. Then they wait. And wait. And the journal likely rejects. So they drop down a notch or two and try again. Rinse, repeat till you get published.
The idea of passing on the information is nice but there's less of a business case behind it (read: selfish reason). In the model you mention of passing on, the comments will be passed "downwards" from high impact journals to low impact journals. Not much in it for a high impact journal (unless its passing to lesser journals by the same publisher), in fact it would likely increase submissions.
I can imagine a market of some sort where journals bid on a paper within a set time limit (publication, say plus possible waiving of fees, or even payment). Author chooses which bid gets it.
But what do journals really provide? The value of the editorial decision. In the long term it translates into some sort of impact factor: If Science (high impact factor) publishes it it's likely to be good. Imagine a Journal-free publication market where people post stuff and "editors" (could be anyone) comment and *rate* it. These ratings can be a proxy for impact factor of a publication and eventually the paper will have its own impact factor based on citations. This would have the dual effect of providing an initial (predictive) rating of the paper and later rate the predictive abiliity of the reviewer. The good reviewers (whose high rankings correlate with future high levels of citation) would get their own sort of high impact factor. Obviously this sort of thing would take some tweaking, but even the calculation of these things need not have a single scalar impact factor type metric if the raw data is available, a variety of different ones could be calculated.
Kim Stanley Robinson talks a little bit about the gift culture of science where there is much unacknowledged and un-credited work done: committees, reviewing papers, etc. It would be neat to see some of that become more credited.
I think the editor biding model would be an interesting possibility. Something like what I mentioned in a couple of posts back.
I think you are right that high impact journals would not go for a model of passing information down without a very good compensation.
I also hope that in the long run the soft peer review measures (like blog citations, usage counts, etc) will be used to access the impact of individual papers.
I guess that (without really saying it) I was thinking about alternative sources of funding for publishers that mostly carry high impact journals with high rejection rates that could want to change to an open access model.
The most obvious is advertisement. I would not be surprised if things like the new Nature reports webpages are both meant to inform the mass public and at the same time have a large audience for targeted advertisement (nothing wrong with that by the way).
Interestingly, Nature Publishing Group already offer a service such as you suggest - if a mansucript is rejected by a journal, the author receives a link that allows her or him to resubmit to another NPG journal with referees' reports, without having to fill out the web submission forms again. This process is entirely under the author's control, so if he/she does not want the new journal to see the referees' comments, s/he can use the usual submission system. Or indeed, submit to another pubilsher's journal.
At Nature, we sometimes (fairly regularly) receive a submission with referee reports attached from another journal because the author wants us to see them.
I think reviewer impact factors are a superficially nice idea but it would be hard for a journal to implement even within a journal (weighing up speed vs quality - eg your best reviewer might say "no" more often, but turn in fewer but better reviewers.) Lots of other reasons why this would be difficult. And doing it across different publishers raises a whole new spectrum of problems. I'm not saying it isn't a good idea, but rather, the criteria really have to be thought through, as well as how you'd do it practically.
PS I disagree about the online publishing costs being small cf printing. This is a common misconception. Online publishing is very resource-intensive, I can tell you. (for a journal, that is, I am not talking about blogs et al).
I had no idea that the reviewers comments can (and already) transition from one publisher to another. Good to know.
About the costs. I am certainly naive since I was never in contact with the economics side of it but I am curious. I can't help think however that it has more to do with implementing the right pipeline in order to cut down the costs. Again, disregarding the printing part and the editorial costs, there is the copy editing, the web layout and the related PDF layout.
So if you request the authors to submit in a standard format via web forms or some template the layout should be automatic. This is what i mean by near zero cost. The copy editing can be of course expensive and I maybe this is what increases the costs.
I should do a proper search to look for costs.
There should also be investment costs associated with developing new technologies but I was not even thinking about these. Also some of this might be covered by open source projects (like the upcoming Topaz project from PLoS).
One of the reasons the cost of something like blogging came down, was the availability of CMS' like Wordpress and Blogger. Right now, most CMS' in the publishing space are proprietary, which, IMO is tough to scale (although with the number of juornals NPG has it should be easier. With CSS, etc, it shouldn't be too hard to do some branding around a standard.
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