[GOAL] Re: Why are we still publishing journals anyways?

[Gavin Moodie]

Thanx very much to Heather for drawing attention to Odlyzko's (1995) paper,
which I hadn't seen before.  It was most interesting to be returned to the
days when all those without access to Mosaic had to do was to write a few
commands to get an ftp file sent to them!

It was also interesting to read Odlyzko's discussion of the pressures on
peer reviewing even then and his discussion with Stevan Harnad of various
options for open access.  In the first 2 sentences of his abstract Odlyzko
predicts that -

'Scholarly publishing is on the verge of a drastic change from print
journals to electronic ones. Although this change has been predicted for a
long time, trends in technology and growth in the literature are making
this transition inevitable. It is likely to occur in a few years, and it
its likely to be sudden.'

One reason for this prediction being so spectacularly wrong at least in its
timing, and an answer to Heather's question about why scholars cling to a
technology that is optimal for paper and mail distribution, may be derived
from Schaffner's (1994) account of the evolution of scientific journals in
the mid 17th century which Odlyzko paraphrases -

'. . . owed little to technological developments, and was driven by
developments in scholarly culture. Also, while scholars may be
intellectually adventurous, they tend to be conservative in their work
habits.'


Gavin


Odlyzko, Andrew M (1995) Tragic loss or good riddance? The impending demise
of traditional scholarly journals, *International Journal of Human-Computer
Studies*, volume 42, issue 1, pages 71-172.

Schaffner, Ann C (1994) The future of scientific journals: lessons from the
past, *Information Technology and Libraries*, volume
<http://search.proquest.com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/indexingvolumeissuelinkhandler/37730/Information+Technology+and+Libraries/01994Y12Y01$23Dec+1994$3b++Vol.+13+$284$29/13/4?accountid=13552>13,
number 4, pages 239-40.



Gavin Moodie, PhD
Adjunct Professor in the Department of Leadership, Higher, and Adult
Education
OISE, University of Toronto

Adjunct professor of education at RMIT University, Australia

22 Sussex Avenue
Toronto, ON, M5S 1J5
Canada
Mobile +1 416 806 3597
gavin.moodie at rmit.edu.au
http://rmit.academia.edu/GavinMoodie

On Sun, Apr 5, 2015 at 11:35 AM, Heather Morrison <
Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca> wrote:

> The discussion about traditional and predatory journals seems to be
> missing a key point: why are we still publishing journals anyways? The
> format was developed in the 1600's and was the state of the art technology
> for dissemination of scholarly work at the time. Today we have the World
> Wide Web: why do we cling to a technology that is optimal for paper and
> mail distribution?
>
> Odlyzko wrote in 1994 about the forthcoming demise of the scholarly
> journal as "tragic loss or good riddance":
> http://www.dtc.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/tragic.loss.txt
>
> best,
>
> Heather Morrison
> _______________________________________________
> GOAL mailing list
> GOAL at eprints.org
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20150405/fa34b469/attachment.html