No Such Thing As "Provostial Publishing"

From: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_GMAIL.COM>
Date: Tue, 3 Jun 2008 19:07:41 -0400

There is no such thing as "provostial publishing". There is
only peer-reviewed publishing and non-peer-reviewed publishing. And
the peer review itself can vary in rigor and selectivity: The quality
standards and track records of journals differ.


Journals also differ in whether or not they make their articles
accessible for free online. If they do, this is called Gold Open
Access (OA) Publishing. Otherwise it is ordinary, non-OA publishing.


Non-OA publishers differ in whether or not they give their "green
light" to authors to make their own articles OA (accessible free
online) by self-archiving them in their Institutional Repositories.
When articles have been made OA by their authors through
self-archiving, this is called Green OA.


If provosts mandate that their authors self-archive their published
articles, that too is called Green OA -- but not Green OA publishing,
of course, because it is the journal that publishes and the author
merely self-archives, to provide (Green) OA to his own article.


The author may also self-archive articles published in
non-peer-reviewed journals; this too is access-provision, not
publication. The publisher is again the non-peer-reviewed journal
that published the articles.


The author can also self-archive unpublished papers. Legally
speaking, this counts as "publishing," but of course in an academic
("publish or perish") CV the author cannot list such a paper as
"published" (let alone as peer-reviewed). It is listed (and cited) as
"unpublished."


In all of this, there is no such a thing as "provostial publishing"
-- though provosts whomandate self-archiving might perhaps be
honored, by calling this "provostial access-provision" (though the
author does the keystrokes)...


Stevan Harnad
American Scientist Open Access Forum
Received on Wed Jun 04 2008 - 00:10:29 BST