[GOAL] Re: Squashing the brand? Re: Interview with the Scholarly Kitchen's Kent Anderson

[Ross Mounce]

On 9 November 2012 11:09, Steve Hitchcock <sh94r at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

> Ross,    In your view, but in this case what would be the point of any
> journal?
>
>
Steve, you've got it in one here: what *is* the point of journals?
Many have asked this question before e.g. Decoupling the scholarly journal
http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fncom.2012.00019 , but here's my take:

They're a vestigial concept in modern research.

Journals made sense from 1665-200X? (a fuzzy endpoint as the usefulness
fades out at a different rate in different subjects depending upon
web-technology uptake in different research communities). Research is
digital now. Even most of the ancient legacy literature in my domain
(Biology) has been digitized via initiatives such as
http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/

An example: Do *any *practicing Bioinformaticians read *paper *(deadtree)
journals to keep up with the latest research? I would think not. Paper
journals, and thus the 'journal concept' are useless to me - journals were
just a way of economically distributing physical copies of similar research
papers to interested recipients, and along way became a significant way of
generating income & profit for Learned Societies & commercial publishers
(you know the rest...).

Admittedly, I gather many in the humanities are still reliant on the
deadtree format to keep up with new research - but perhaps by 2020 even
this will change as the benefits of the digital medium are fully realised -
when all academics have either a Kindle, iPad, smartphone, laptop... and
those that have eschewed technology in favour of paper journals quietly
retire? I'm not even against paper copies either, if people want them a)
for short papers I suggest printing a copy oneself might be more efficient
b) for very long papers POD services might be better than 'journals' all
things considered IMO.

I don't need 'journals'. I just need effective filters to find the content
I want amongst the ~2million papers that are published this year, and the
~48million from all years previously (basing my figures on
http://dx.doi.org/10.1087/20100308 ).

Perhaps we need standardized metadata tags, MeSH terms, keywords, and most
importantly the ability to index, query & mine the *full* text to find what
we want and Open Bibliographic Data to clearly see who cites who. But we
don't need journals for any of that. All of the functions of the journal
can be better done independently of the integrated-package of functions we
called 'the journal'.

Is there any function I've missed that we do need 'journals' for? Journals
are just an additional metadata tag to me with little or no added
information content that can't be found in the fulltext or metadata of the
paper.


I hope this provokes some thought...


Best,


Ross

PS this is of course very relevant to Open Access. The sooner the digital
medium for research is explicitly preferred as the normal mechanism for
distribution & consumption, rather than as an 'alternative' or
'complementary' option to paper journals, the sooner the inevitability of
Open Access (in whatever form, Green or Gold) will be realised, right?
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20121109/10e20cd1/attachment.html