Trust Models in Scholarly Publishing

I just got an email this morning that the long defunct Journal of Electronic Publishing is back, complete with editor Judith Axel Turner.

I was delighted to see that one of articles in the relaunched issue is Geoff Bilder's "In Google we Trust". Geoff graciously agreed to talk about this issue at the last Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) Annual Meeting (you can view the PDF from his talk on the web site). The article provides a worthwile further development of the ideas presented then.

He does a nice job of explaining how trust systems like those at Amazon, ebay, and Slashdot have evolved.

Of course the trust system in scholarly publishing that we all know and some love is peer review, a much less technologically driven system, even with the rapid adoption of peer review systems in the past few years. Peer review, of course, is getting its fair share of attention these days thanks to some, er...hmmm, creative data on cloning.

Brian Crawford of the American Chemical Society gave a nice summary of the issues with peer review at the American Association of Publishers Professional & Scholarly Publshing (AAP/PSP) Annual Conference last week. Although he focused on author misconduct and omitted discussions of reviewer bias, he provided a lot of food for thought.