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

[Bosman, J.M. (Jeroen)]

Heather your question is valid and his been raised and debated in many places. But change does happen, albeit indeed at a very slow pace. Scholars are indeed conservative in their work habit,s and maybe there's even a good side to that.

Without elaborating too much I think we may expect to see:
- The further rise of megajournals/plaforms, reducing the number of publication venues from some 50,000 to less than 1,000
- The relative growth of imortance of datapublications, with the article just an ad for or intepretation of the data
- In the long run perhaps the rise of networked scholarly nanopublications, roughly along the lines of the wikipedia model

Of course this is all mere conjecture and will probably prove wrong, but it's the most likely path I can imagine at this moment.

Best,
Jeroen



Op 6 apr. 2015 om 08:16 heeft "Gavin Moodie" <gavin.moodie at rmit.edu.au<mailto:gavin.moodie at rmit.edu.au>> het volgende geschreven:

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
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Mobile +1 416 806 3597
gavin.moodie at rmit.edu.au<mailto: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<mailto: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
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