On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 03:39, Dario Taraborelli
<dtaraborelli(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Having founded and run a peer reviewed journal with
Springer over the last 2
years (I stepped down as editor-in-chief a few months ago due to
incompatibility with my new WMF duties) – and having considered an OA option
at the time of writing the first proposal for this journal back in 2009 – I
thought I'd share my 2 cents.
Costs of creating a new journal
What are the benefits of creating a dedicated OA journal for Wikipedia
research? Traditional, closed access journals are run mostly by scholarly
societies or by editorial boards to increase the visibility of research
within their respective communities. OA is producing a number of disruptive
changes in scholarly publishing. One of these disruptive changes is in the
function and scope of journals. The most promising model OA publishers
appear to be currently pursuing (based on the talks Daniel and I heard last
week at COASP '11– a report on RCom-l will follow shortly) is the one of
so-called OA mega-journals. These mega-journals are blurring the boundaries
between traditional, narrow-focused scholarly journals and large OA
repositories such as ArXiV; mega-journals publish papers in virtually every
field and promise a large distribution, a lighter peer-review model
(inspired by post-publication filtering criteria) and in some cases (e.g.
PLoS One) increased visibility and bibliometric impact. These journals
appear to be cannibalizing resources and readers from traditional journals
and I think it's fair to expect that in 5 years from now most research will
be published in 5-6 large OA journals acting as global research repositories
and undermining the need of narrowly focused (and closed access)
disciplinary outlets. At the moment, the only serious advantage of creating
a new journal is to bridge a disciplinary gap, to build a new research
community or to create/reinforce a brand, but there are other important
costs to consider if one wants to go for an OA option (see below) and my
question is: wouldn't our community be equally well served if it were to
publish its research in one of the many OA journals already available? Would
community and brand creation justify the effort of creating a new outlet
instead of, say, creating and tracking an on-demand collection of articles
within one or more existing, general-purpose OA journals? To put it bluntly:
do we need a journal or a feed?
Costs of going OA
Setting up and running a journal, especially without the support of a
traditional publisher, requires an insane amount of effort. As an author or
reviewer of a journal, one typically sees only the tip of the iceberg of the
editorial and publication workflow, which includes, among other things,
effectively triaging and dispatching submissions, inviting and chasing
reviewers, supervising the production process, promoting the journal in
relevant outlets, maintaining relations with organizations that
store/consume metadata and evaluate contents. A self-run journal, without
the support of a dedicated production team, also incurs extra costs related
to manuscript handling, copyediting, proof creation. OA publishers typically
offset these extra costs by charging author fees, which are only waived in
particular circumstances. Creating and running a successful OA journal is
definitely not something a group of people can achieve as a hobby or with
limited financial resources.
Supplementary barriers to OA
Crazy as it may sound, in 2011 OA is just starting to get traction. When
starting a new journal, the question you typically face is whether you want
to have a high scholarly impact within your community (i.e. attract and
publish the best research within your field) or change the rules of the game
(e.g. embrace OA, publish open-licensed research or explore new, disruptive
editorial models). With the exception of OA mega journals and some popular
niche journals, by creating a new journal you *either* seek impact *or* game
change. The risk is that, as a new OA journal, you'll get to publish papers
that have gone through cascading peer review (rejected by other outlets) and
that for some reason have failed to be submitted to OA mega journals. One
could try an experiment in publishing OA research without focusing on
impact, but the effort and risk involved in making this project successful
are even higher.
So my recommendation would be: forget about, "it sounds easy, let's try
it"
as this will result in a lot of frustration and wasted efforts. If someone
wants to work on the creation of a new OA journal what's needed is a sound
business plan with an analysis of risks and costs involved and an assessment
of all, less costly and equally effective alternatives (which at the moment
I'd be personally in favor of considering).
The main reason why I asked for creation of peer reviewed journal
in-house is ability to offer a standard procedure for publishing
scientific paper (not necessarily research paper) for those who
address particular issue needed by Wikimedia. If it could be done in
cooperation with a friendly organization, like PLoS is, then the
reason for my purpose could be shifted toward creating procedures of
cooperation with such organization.