On Mon, 20 Nov 2006, Peter Suber wrote:
> > SH:
> >My own guess is that
> >eventually authors will submit to journals via their own IRs, the
> >journals will perform the peer review and certify the outcome, which
> >will simply be the journal-name tag, in the author's own IR. I think
> >the days of both central archives and of journals as access-providers
> >-- rather than just peer-review service-providers -- are numbered.
> >But that's just speculation....
>
> Stevan: When I read this, I had a thought. I'm only sending it to you,
> not everyone on your cc list, but feel free to share it with anyone you like.
> You could take a large step toward the vision you sketch here by
> adding a module to Eprints. The new module would allow authors to submit a
> deposited preprint directly to a participating journal. This would take
> some programming and some diplomacy. But suppose an author could deposit a
> preprint and then scan a menu of journals willing to take submissions
> directly from the repository. The author picks one, writes a cover letter,
> and clicks. Eprints emails a copy to the journal's submission address, or
> emails a link to the journal's editor, or uploads a copy to the journal's
> management system (depending on the journal). In a minute, the author
> receives a receipt acknowledging that the preprint has been submitted.
> The diplomacy part is to get a healthy number of journals to take
> submissions in this form. I suspect that it wouldn't be hard to find OA
> journals willing to do so, if only to help the experiment. But in practice
> you'd only need one to test or prove the concept, and it could be OA or
> TA. Then you could recruit others based on the proven utility. At that
> point you could either stipulate the format for these automatic submissions
> or convene a meeting (more diplomacy) to work out a standard agreeable to
> all parties. At the same time you could stipulate or work out the
> standards for the reverse process when the journal approves an article and
> the postprint automatically comes back to the repository for deposit
> (perhaps with a human-readable citation and altered machine-readable
> metadata).
> The easiest standard is to leave the text in the repository, email
> just the link, and let the author deposit new revisions as needed. But
> some journals, perhaps most, will want the full-text in their journal
> management system in order to facilitate peer review.
> Eprints could work with Open Journal Systems, the leading open-source
> journal management package, so that OJS and Eprints could swap submissions
> back and forth seamlessly --uploading for submission and downloading for
> dissemination. It's even possible that a new version of OJS, or some other
> journal management package, could leave the text in the repository and
> still support a full range of features to facilitate peer-review and revision.
Dear Peter,
EPrints has been adapted for this at least twice, and quite some time
ago:
http://www.bbsonline.org/
http://psycprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
See also:
http://archives.eprints.org/?action=home&q=&country=&version=eprints2&type=journal&order=name&submit=Filter
But this is all premature. The objective is not to streamline journal
submission (either for journals or for authors) at this time. The
objective is to get all journal articles self-archived and OA. Authors
have a pretty good idea what journal they want to submit to without a
pull-down menu, and most journals by now have a pretty efficient online
submission mechanism. Not all authors -- probably not even most --
yet want to make their preprints OA. So depositing them in IRs for the
convenience of their journals doesn't mean they want to make them OA; nor
will journals find it much of a convenience *now*. What I was describing
above was the possible end-state of a process that *begins* with 100%
postprint self-archiving, which then *might* eventually lead to journal
cancellations, downsizing and unbundling of the peer review service,
and *then* submission via IRs (and indeed access-provision via IRs)
will become both attractive and cost-effective. But not now.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmsctech/399/399we152.htm
Some of the APS's journals, by the way, accept submission via Arxiv. It
would be simple to generically adapt EPrints to make that convenient
for journals, but my prediction is that there would be next to no
takers, either on the journal side or on the author side, at this time.
Lets get the mandates adopted and the self-archiving up to 100%. Then
the time for this may come...
Chrs, Stevan
Received on Tue Nov 21 2006 - 01:14:02 GMT