Carol Tenopir, The Value of the Container, TCMNet, January 27, 2006. Apparently forthcoming from Library Joural. (Thanks to William Walsh.) In order to focus on OA-related issues, I'm cutting a good discussion of the effect of the long tail on journals, as opposed to books. Worth reading. Excerpt:
Why all the fuss about electronic journals? That was the question raised by Michael Gorman, the outspoken president of the American Library Association (ALA), at a session on Future of Libraries at the recent Online Information Meeting in London. What we want is articles, said Gorman, calling the idea of putting them together in things called journals irrelevant. We dont need e-journals, said the controversial Gorman. Articles should be put together by our interests, not the editors. The real problem, according to Gorman, is that there is no viable economic model. Buying all articles (including those no one reads) is not sustainable. The comments got me thinking about the containers in which we package information. When the entire text is digitized and searchable through various search engines, traditional containers might not matter anymore. The concept of a journal may not matter now that we have article e-print servers and institutional repositories....I conduct surveys to find out how faculty, students, and others use scholarly information. All find relevant scholarly articles by searching databases, the web, and e-print servers, but a journal often delivers value greater than the sum of its article parts. For current awareness, readers in many disciplines browse through entire print or electronic issues of journals. They select journals they trust, based on past experience and such factors as the journals affiliation, prestige, and reputation with scholars in their discipline. An issue devoted to a special topic or a bundled collection of related articles in a journal can guide readers to related material that they might not read otherwise.
Even when searching for articles on a specific topic, readers often find the journal title indicates its scope and quality. In health-related fields the stamp of peer review plus journal prestige is vital.
Comment. There are two kinds of added value to keep distinct. One is the kind added by peer review, especially peer review by a known editorial board with its particular disciplinary orientation and standards. The second is the kind added by clustering articles together. OA is compatible with both, but some OA proposals would preserve the first without preserving the second.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 1/28/2006 11:08:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
