[RCom-l] Peer reviewed journal?

[Milos Rancic]

On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 03:39, Dario Taraborelli
<dtaraborelli at 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.