Commercial Publishing Policies

I recently had an article accepted at journal owned by Elsevier, a publisher that already has been criticized heavily. This is only the second time I've published in one of their journals. The first time the review process was so fast that I was elated. This second time the review process was equally fast, though I wondered if it is too fast? I sort of feel cheated a little. As an untenured professor in need or pubs with a capital P, I am not in any real position to complain (especially nowadays). But it seems to be connected not so much to quality but, instead, with production. This is clear digital print capitalism, with all the shrinking of time (and space) that goes a long with it. The rapidity of review and acceptance is not the only issue. Making "in press" articles available for download has less to do, I think, with making information available than it does with increasing the number of downloads Elsevier journals receive. It is interesting as a social and historical process. If something is "in press" (i.e., without a clear volume, issue, and page number designation) but is still downloadable and formatted like a "published" one, is there a difference? Are we witnessing the transformation of the entire notion of "in press" itself?

So, my first publication with this publisher was also made available as an "in press" article . But they seem to have loosened their policy a tad. Now they are making articles available as "in press" or "accepted" even before generating the copy proofs. So now your colleagues can actually download the manuscript itself. If there is a typo or two, even if it was introduced in converting the manuscript to the site, they can be seen and read. So, Elsevier has found an even more creative way to compress the publishing time.

I just read a couple articles published recently concerning another of Elsevier's journals, Agricultural and Forestry Meteorology. Elsevier is going to start publishing or providing access to published articles' peer reviews alongside the articles themselves. I've only come across this news piece in a couple sites, where the post reads more like an advertisement for Elsevier than an actual news story.

For example:
Peer Review Transparency

I honestly don't know what to think about this policy at all. On the face of it I hate the idea. I imagine there are some Feyerabend-esq reasons for supporting it (i.e., showing a more complete view of the scientific process, nasty little comments and all). One could say it will strengthen both articles as well as the content of peer reviews. The latter does seem to be a problem, especially with journals that have weak editors who fail to see clearly problematic reviews (but I imagine it is a hard job to get reviewers and hound them for their reviews). Would this process eliminate the anonymity of the reviews? It seems clearly problematic to post anonymous reviews online anonymously. Editors know their identities, but the authors' and readers' do not. How, I wonder, is this connected to the compression of publishing time I just mentioned? There's gotta be some connection to numbers (dollars and cents).

There seems to be so much criticism of these commercial publishers lately. To what extent, I ask, are the journals of academic associations fulfilling their obligations to authors, readers, and the research community in terms of (1) time and (2) quality? Are they losing the battle in providing an alternative, especially with the institutional guns pointed at the foreheads of professors (especially those on tenure track)? I waited on a decision from one such journal for...19 months. Yes, that's right. It took them 19 months to give me a decision. If one path is insane in its compression of time, the other path doesn't lead to a well-balanced place of sanity.