A few months ago, I got an email from “iConcept Press” inviting me to write a book chapter in their IR journal based on my AAAI paper. I ignored it, like I ignored another email in a similar vein from another “publishing house”, and found at least one blogger who was just as suspicious at this seemingly mass solicitation.
You see, in the academy we are conditioned to believe that the lower chances of acceptance, the better the venue for publishing, so if you’re willing to accept me to your club right from the start – huh, forget it!
A couple of weeks ago I got another mail from them. This time, the happy bunch invited me to be a reviewer on one of their books. Now, that was really amusing – if not a writer, then I’d be a reviewer? pathetic, I thought. But is the picture really this simple?
It was interesting, first, to see that they do actually use a peer-review system, even if perhaps not a super-duper double-blind system. And then I started wondering, is that conditioning for favoring low-acceptance publications really still relevant in the self-publishing era?
I remember when I published my first paper on AAAI, I was quite outraged at the idea that you have to pay, then to give away all copyrights, and then be used as a money bait for readers, as the publication meant I could not give free access to my own readers, unless I pay again. In a time when publishing your words on the web is such a common privilege, that seems plain wrong.
Back in the times when publishing was a costly process, high selection rate guaranteed that subscribers won’t waste their money sponsoring the print of low-quality papers. Furthermore, anything not printed had a very low chance of getting read by other researchers, not to mention cited, and so readers relied on editors to indeed include only the best. Nowadays, papers are read mostly online, and if your paper is accessible to search engines, that suffices – whoever finds your research useful will read and cite it. This Wikipedia entry has the whole story in a nutshell.
So as for myself – I still did not publish or review in iConcept press, but I am now less dismissive of this somewhat disruptive industry; not because it will win over the established venues, but because it will accelerate the move towards decentralized and online publishing, better fit for our era.
The Alter Egozi 