Re: [tlug] Open Access Journals

[Raymond Wan <rwan.kyoto@example.com>]

On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 11:14 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull
<turnbull@example.com> wrote:
> Simon Cozens writes:
>  > On 20/03/2014 23:25, Raymond Wan wrote:
>  > > in the article?  But for IEEE and for the conference mentioned in the
>  > > article, the publisher here puts faith in the organizers of the
>  > > conference who handle all aspects from call for papers to reviewing
>  > > and the conference itself.
>  >
>  > What you're implicitly admitting here is that the publisher doesn't add any
>  > value to the process at all, outsourcing the actual hard work to willing
>  > volunteers and exercising precisely zero quality control over the results.
>
> No, the publisher does choose the organizers (more precisely, refuse
> to deal with some organizers), and implicitly control quality in that
> way.


Yes, but it is really difficult to control since IEEE is based in the
USA and this conference in question is based in China.  Has IEEE in
the USA met the conference organizers in China?  Probably not.  Should
they?  If their name is on the line, they should (much like Starbucks
opening outside of the USA but using its name), but unfortunately,
they are not.

Most likely it's just a long line of trust and somewhere along that
line, something broke.


> The question is, does this provide any additional quality from the
> point of view of the users?  From the point of view of the IEEE (a
> "user" we can't ignore in this context -- we can use another word if
> you've got a better one than "user"), the print version is higher
> quality for the price if they use a well-known publisher.  From the
> point of view of readers, though, it's the actual editors first and
> the IEEE second that determines their opinion I suspect, with the
> publisher not contributing at all.


Are we not considering IEEE as the publisher?  I guess if we are
picky, it may not be.  The publisher is (usually for IEEE material)
"IEEE Press" and one could argue that it is a separate, sub-entity of
IEEE.


> So I see a publisher-conference correlation in quality here.  Whether
> that's useful to the scientific community is unclear to me.


IEEE supports a wide range of conferences and surely one that is in
its 1st year and another which is in its 25th year will differ in
quality.  If you're in the field, you'd probably know that and submit
to one without having the expectations of the other.  Nevertheless,
they are both conferences supported by IEEE.

Ray

[*]  Disclaimer, since we seem to be dwelling on the IEEE for a bit.
I'm a committee member of an IEEE Chapter here and have a very
rudimentary idea of how conferences are organizes, even though I've
never organized one myself.  Actually, the procedure for organizing a
conference under the IEEE is probably spelled out on their web site:
http://www.ieee.org/conferences_events/conferences/organizers/index.html
.  Not very interesting reading, I'm afraid...