Re: Is OA (Gold) really a desirable goal for scientific journal publishing?

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Sat, 13 Jan 2007 23:21:07 +0000 (GMT)

On Sat, 13 Jan 2007, Prof. Tom Wilson wrote:

> And with 'market forces' prevailing, with the resulting downsizing and
> abandonment of whatever is deemed to be unnecessary expense, in the name of
> keeping the shareholders satisfied, the publishers would then accept anything!

(1) And since both the authorship and the usership of a peer-reviewed
journal are determined by the journal's track record for peer-review
quality standards, journals that lower their standards will slide down
the quality hierarchy, exactly as they always did, losing their quality
authorship and its corresponding usership. So what else is new? (We
always knew there was a vanity press at the bottom of the ladder, and
everyone knows which journals those are.)

(2) Ceterum censeo, the matter at hand is OA, via mandated OA (Green)
self-archiving. Journal downsizing to peer-review-only and Gold under
cancellation pressure from Green is still pure speculation at this
point. The practical need to mandate OA self-archiving, and the concrete
benefits of doing so, in contrast, are not.

Stevan Harnad
Received on Sun Jan 14 2007 - 19:24:03 GMT