04/26/2017

Decline and Fall of the Editor

Our current cultural aversion to anything that smacks of authority puts editors into the crosshairs

Among the more thankless tasks in god’s creation is that of the editor. Authors of scholarly materials rarely acknowledge their debt to their editors and may even resent their perfidious scrutiny of their texts. Readers don’t understand the editor’s role — understandably, perhaps, as it is largely invisible to the reader, who imagines him or herself in direct communion with the living spirit of the author. Our current cultural aversion to anything that smacks of authority or authority structures (this too shall pass — or we will) puts editors into the crosshairs, as they have come to represent the gatekeeper and, hence, the oppressor: It’s as though there were a coherent conspiracy to set self-reinforcing standards for the ruling class. Where once we had Maxwell Perkins, now we have a pigeon-flecked statue of Columbus torn from its pedestal.

The current war against scholarly editors takes many forms, but the most deadly are (a) conflating editorial work with peer review and (b) starving organizations for the money they need to maintain significant editorial operations. I say “maintain” advisedly: there is to my knowledge no effort underway to initiate an editorial operation of the kind we see at, say, The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) or Science. Editorial operations of that kind could only have come into being in the past and those that persevere today owe their existence to their early origins. Indeed, even the work at NEJM and Science, to cite just two of the truly prestigious brands in STM publishing, is regularly derided by opponents of “bench” or “desk” editing as “subjective.” Peer review is sufficient; no need to bring in the gratuitous comments of editors who are not working scientists (even if they were trained as scientists). It would take a dramatic change in the climate for people to understand the word “subjective” not as “not true” or “not based on empirical evidence” but as “point of view.” The subjectivity of an editor is a hypothesis; the experiment is the act of publication; the results are measured in the marketplace. Viewed in this way, Nature and The Lancet have proven themselves to be brilliant hypotheses.

While advocates of traditional publishing often criticize open access (OA) publishing as lacking in editorial standards, this is not necessarily so. Green OA has the same editorial standards as the traditional publications that provide the articles for a Green deposit into a repository. Gold OA is a different matter, however, as the “author-pays” aspect of it limits the payment to what the traffic — meaning the author or his or her benefactor — will bear. Kitchen readers have heard me make the point about the average revenue per article before: If the journals industry has combined revenues of $10 billion, and the number of articles published each year is around 2 million, then the average revenue per article is about $5,000. In an all-Gold world, publishers with revenue greater than $5,000 per article (which includes every one of the most prestigious journals) are highly exposed, especially when some Gold publishers charge as little as $1,500 per article. Thus in a dystopian future where Gold OA dominates, there will be insufficient revenue to cover the high editorial costs of the most distinguished editorial operations. The accelerating decline and fall of the editor can thus be laid at the feet of BioMed Central, which pioneered the Gold model. Of course, not everyone will be unhappy if editors find their next career as a Starbucks barista.

Please click here to read the complete article from The Scholarly Kitchen.