{"id":1440,"date":"2012-06-11T10:48:43","date_gmt":"2012-06-11T14:48:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/?p=1440"},"modified":"2013-12-17T13:00:06","modified_gmt":"2013-12-17T18:00:06","slug":"editorial-board-members-what-to-ask-of-your-journal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pamphlet\/2012\/06\/11\/editorial-board-members-what-to-ask-of-your-journal\/","title":{"rendered":"Editorial board members: What to ask of your journal"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n
\"Thumbs<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
…good behavior…<\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Harvard made a big splash<\/a> recently when my colleagues on\u00a0the\u00a0Faculty Advisory Council to the Harvard Library<\/a>\u00a0distributed a Memorandum on Journal Pricing<\/a>. One of the main problems with the memo, however,\u00a0is the relatively imprecise recommendations that it makes. It exhorts faculty to work with journals and scholarly societies on their publishing and pricing practices, but provides no concrete advice on exactly what to request. What is good behavior?<\/p>\n

I just met with a colleague here at Harvard who raised the issue with me directly. He’s a member of the editorial board of a journal and wants to do the right thing and make sure that the journal’s policies make them a good actor. But he doesn’t want to (and shouldn’t be expected to) learn all the ins and outs of the scholarly publishing business, the legalisms of publication agreements and copyright, and the interactions of all that with the policies of the particular journal. He’s not alone; there are many others in the same boat. Maybe you are too. Is there some pithy request you can make of the journal that encapsulates good publishing practices?<\/p>\n

(I’m assuming here that converting the journal to open access is off the table. Of course, that would be preferable, but it’s unlikely to get you very far, especially given that the most plausible revenue model for open-access journal\u00a0publishing, namely, publication fees, is not well supported by the scholarly publishing ecology as of yet.)<\/p>\n

There are two kinds of practices that the Harvard memo moots: it explicitly mentions pricing practices of journals, and implicitly brings up author rights issues in its recommendations. Scholar participants in journals (editors editorial board members, reviewers) may want to discuss both kinds of practices with their publishers. I have recommendations for both.<\/p>\n

Rights practices<\/h2>\n

Here’s my\u00a0candidate recommendation for ensuring a subscription journal has good rights practice. You (and, ideally, your fellow editorial board members) hand the publisher a copy of the Science Commons<\/a> Delayed Access (SCDA) addendum<\/a>. (Here’s a sample<\/a>.) You request that they adjust their standard article publication agreement so as to make the addendum redundant<\/em>. This request has several nice effects.<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. It’s simple, concrete, and unambiguous.<\/li>\n
  2. It describes the desired result in terms of functionality \u2014 what the publication agreement should achieve \u2014 not how it should be worded.<\/li>\n
  3. It guarantees that the journal exhibits best practices for a subscription journal.\u00a0Any journal that can satisfy the criterion that the SCDA addendum is redundant:\n