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Editorial Notes The Journal of Peer Production New perspectives on the implications of peer production for social change Journal of Peer Production Issue 13: OPEN http://peerproduction.net — ISSN 2213-5316 EDITORIAL NOTES honorable tradition, donate intellectual work Mathieu O’Neil and Steve Collins and lend expertise to review and edit one another. Springer Nature, Wiley, and the other OPEN: OPEN ACCESS AND THE ACADEMIC oligopolists bundle that labor and then sell it FIELD back to us—to our universities—for budget- crushing prices. This issue of the Journal of Peer Production begins with a celebration of peer-reviewed Open Access The absurdity reaches new heights with the (OA) journals. We approached a number of OA introduction of so-called ‘Gold’ and ‘Green’ Open journal editors – see RFC Special section on open- Access, where authors are charged thousands of access publishing for JoPP #13 – and requested that dollars in order to make their work freely available they respond to a questionnaire where they could with the desired publication badge. Not only that, reflect on their practice (see Ten questions to OA but it turns out that some of the ‘Big Five’ academic editors). We also suggested they select an editorial, publishers are truly bad corporate actors, combining manifesto or article which we could showcase in this their 34% profit margins (based on forcing libraries issue. We were delighted by the enthusiasm with to buy ‘bundles’ of journals) with shady or frankly which our colleagues responded and we thank them illegal practices such as organizing arms trade fairs; for their time and effort. creating and selling fake journals to pharmaceutical companies to produce pharma-friendly content; and The journals ranged from professionally funded and selling access to articles they don’t own, including staffed ventures to wholly volunteer DIY projects. articles licensed for non-commercial use.[1] This However, all shared a similar concern with the state prompted scholars in the mathematics community of our field. The facts of the matter have been to launch the Cost of Knowledge pledge in 2012, by repeated often, to the point of exhaustion: academic which they pledge never to publish, and/or review publishing is a grotesquely egregious instance of and/or edit for the worst offender, Elsevier.[2] monopolistic exploitation of labour. Jefferson D. Pooley, in his article ‘Open media scholarship: The To be fair, the time and effort put in to improve the case for open access in media studies’ (originally quality of an argument by reviewers and editors of published in the International Journal of excellent paywalled journals like Sage’s Communication), summarises the situation: Organization Studies is commendable – papers are sent out for revision once, twice, three times, until Knowledge sharing is a means to make more the article has ‘reached its full potential’. There is and better knowledge, to be sure, but it is also something admirable about the peer review process, an end in itself. We rightly recoil from when it is done right. But not only is this process proprietary knowledge cultures, such as those often frustratingly long, it is problematic because of in industry, which hoard ideas as competitive the invisibility of the work of reviewers. Readers only advantage. […] The galling bit is that all those see the end result and have no idea as to the role profits are nothing but our labor. Scholars, in an played in this scientific and creative process by © 2018 by the authors, available under a cc-by license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) | 1 The Journal of Peer Production New perspectives on the implications of peer production for social change Journal of Peer Production Issue 13: OPEN http://peerproduction.net — ISSN 2213-5316 reviewers who each make a distinctive and unique simply rely on authors’ claims about the contribution: who knows how the article would have excellence of their own research: while the read if it had been reviewed by someone else? author knows the content of the paper, he or she is not impartial. Similarly, since no-one is The Journal of Peer Production’s peer review process an expert in all fields, readers also need to rely was explicitly developed to acknowledge reviewers on others’ assessments concerning the quality and speed up the peer review process. We elected of the research. For these reasons, there is a to publish not only reviews (reviewers can choose to strong demand for quality indicators in remain anonymous) but the original submissions. research – which would prevail even if one Our approach was also informed by Whitworth and decided, as postulated in the DORA declaration, Friedman’s (2009) criticism of academic publishing to disregard the role such indicators play in as a form of competitive economics in which hiring or funding decisions. The (informal) ‘scarcity reflects demand, so high journal rejection journal hierarchy can be regarded as a rates become quality indicators’. This self- response to this. reinforcing system where journals that reject more attract more results in a situation where ‘avoiding Open access rubs up against the iron law of faults becomes more important than new ideas. academic promotion. Since nothing challenges the Wrongly accepting a paper with a fault gives journal hierarchy which derives from the information reputation consequences, while wrongly rejecting a deficit caused by an over-abundance of literature, in useful paper leaves no evidence’. To this end, we the current system promotion boards only reward introduced ‘signals’, numeric values attributed by publications in highly-ranked paywalled outlets. Until reviewers after the revised paper has been new metrics are introduced, those university submitted. It is then up to authors to decide whether workers who are impelled by their habitus to pursue they are happy with publishing a paper with the validation and success in their field will need to (at given signals. Letting authors decide whether to least partly) conform. publish enables the journal to release a wider variety of submissions at a faster pace, whilst The interpenetration of price-gouging publishers and protecting its scientific reputation. Whilst this universities goes beyond exorbitant fees and solving approach is worthwhile and innovative, its impact on information deficits. To stay with the example of the field is of course limited. Elsevier, this company uses its Scopus citation research database to propose a metrics system Systemic initiatives such as Plan S and DORA aim to called SciVal to universities. Small and medium- compel publicly-funded research to be openly sized players in the field thus embark in a accessible. In their previously unpublished article partnership with SciVal in the hope that SciValled Plan S and the economics of scientific journal staff will be more productive and that this will boost publishing, Karine Nyborg et al. argue that this will their position in the university rankings. Major not change the fundamental dynamics of the field in players in the field such as the University of which article quality is proxied by journal status: California, who have longstanding reputational capital and strong research outputs, can afford to Given the extremely large amount of research sever ties with Elsevier.[3] In other words petitioning that exists, users cannot browse everything. libraries is not enough: many universities are part of They are left to rely on indicators of others’ a network of business arrangements of which assessments when deciding which papers to scientific publishing only forms a small part. read: citations, journal quality, personal knowledge of the author, information from The articles selected by the OA editors and their colleagues, and so on. One cannot, of course, responses to our questionnaire contain a wealth of © 2018 by the authors, available under a cc-by license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) | 2 The Journal of Peer Production New perspectives on the implications of peer production for social change Journal of Peer Production Issue 13: OPEN http://peerproduction.net — ISSN 2213-5316 proposals addressing paywalling. We highlight two that we found particularly interesting: The peer reviewed articles in this issue explore openness beyond open access. Thomas Roulet (M@n@gement) emphasises the role of professional associations as these entities are In ‘A topological space for design, participation and often well-endowed, and powerful: ‘if top journals production: Tracking spaces of transformation’ move to OA (and a large number of top journals are Sandra Álvaro Sánchez draws on Serres’ concept of spaces of transformation and applies it to analysis of supported by an association that could finance such hackerspaces and shared machine shops. Alvaro an endeavour) then it can trigger a movement’. This examines the topology of the network formed by is known as journal flipping: converting a journal hackerspace and shared machine shop nodes to from closed to open access (Solomon et al., 2016). understand the transformative capacity of these As Pooley puts it (op. cit., this issue), ‘submitting to spaces both locally and globally. a low-prestige OA title is an act of quixotic self- sacrifice, whereas flipping a journal gets at the main Should everything be open? ‘Openness, inclusion thing propping up a publication’s status: the ongoing and self-affirmation: Indigenous knowledge in open labour and attention scholars invest.’ knowledge projects’ tackles the challenges of establishing a Wikipedia and Wikimedia
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