Re: Parallel journals

From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Tue, 6 Oct 2009 06:51:49 -0400

On 5-Oct-09, at 8:49 PM, Klaus Graf wrote:

> 2009/10/6 Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>:
>
> > (5) A journal issue is just a hodge-podge of mostly unrelated
> > articles; no
> > need to "reconstruct" that; open access to all the articles plus good
> > boolean search power is all that's needed.
>
> I do not think that you can prescribe readers how to browse journal
> issues. There are lots of theme-issues where browsing makes sense.

Then just retrieve all and only the entire theme-issue with a suitable
boolean descriptor...

(You vastly underestimate the power of online boolean search over an
OA inverted full-text corpus -- and you also overestimate the
persistence of obsolete, dysfunctional habits, once more powerful
means become available. But the real reason all this prognostication
is missing the mark is the persistent absence of most of the target OA
full-text corpus. The latent power is not at all evident from the
arbitrary, sparse OA subset we have so far. Until the token drops and
we realize that the only thing standing between us and that full
corpus is author keystrokes -- and that all that is needed to inspire
those author keystrokes is Green OA self-archiving mandates from
universities and funders -- our imaginations will continue to fail,
and mislead us.)
Received on Tue Oct 06 2009 - 12:02:13 BST