Franck Ramus writes
> For the moment, i would say that the reasonable choice is rather between
> established journals that allow public archiving and those that don't.
...
> Of course all this information is available to all authors upon request from
> each journal, but it could be part of a project like Cogprints to centralize
> it, order it, update it regularly, and make it available to all authors,
> inciting them to choose journals that serve best their interest.
I wanted to do just that just a couple of years ago for the RePEc
dataset, under a project heading "Journal Watch". But members in
my community voiced opposition against the project. One academic,
associated with the journal Econometrica, wrote
1> Econometrica, at least from some, has no direct policy on papers on
1> the net - absence of a policy can be easily taken to permit posting.
1> Getting a society to make a statement places them at some risk and
1> most societies are risk averters. Would be nice if they all signed
1> off on a statement, but that requires a good deal of lobbying,
1> convincing folks that there is no harm, etc.
and another added
2> I've often heard the saying, "It is easier to ask for forgiveness than
2> to ask for permission." and I think it really applies well here. Asking
2> for policy might yield something you don't like, but going along with
2> a somewhat ill-defined situation will often give results you like.
a senior librarian noted
3> I would be reluctant to do such a study at this moment. The fact is
3> that only a few publishers really have defined a strategy for their
3> (electronic) future. Most publishers, the small and medium-sized
3> ones, are currently in a stressy and uncertain situation. Most of
3> them don't know what to do.
I gave up my plan. That was two years ago, have things changed?
Thomas Krichel
http://gretel.econ.surrey.ac.uk
RePEc:per:1965-06-05:thomas_krichel
offline 1999-09-21 to 1999-09-26
Received on Wed Feb 10 1999 - 19:17:43 GMT