RE: Authors and OA (RE: Mandating OA around the corner)

["Rick Anderson" <rickand@unr.edu>]

Brian's suggestion is absolutely possible, and in fact, I think it makes
much more sense in an online environment than the current arrangement, in
which most of the worst aspects of traditional journal publishing are
simply being replicated in an online format.

Of course, these bodies would be publishers, and would face all of the
costs that publishers face now (except for those associated with the
transition from print to online).  Those costs would have to be recouped
somehow.  There would also, inevitably, arise the problem of competing
credentialling bodies.

None of this is to say that this kind of solution can't work -- I think 
it can.  But it will be difficult to get it going, and it will not 
maintain itself automatically.

---
Rick Anderson
rickand@unr.edu

________________________________

From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Brian Simboli
Sent: Fri 7/16/2004 4:40 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Re: Authors and OA (RE: Mandating OA around the corner)

Couldn't there be a credentialling body for a specific subject that 
would give the "seal of approval" for selected articles in institutional
archives? So an article in an institutional repository could be labelled
"this article has received the xyz seal of approval", where xyz is say a
society committee, or an editorial board along traditional lines. The
institutional repositories could be centralized for long-standing and
stable consortia, such that faculty at member institutions in that
consortium could submit articles to the centralized repository. It would
be up to the author to get the seal of approval from xyz. Once they do 
so, they would submit the article, marked with that approval, to their
consortial archive, and that would be that in terms of author 
involvement. A and I resources and webpages for the approving body (xyz)  
could give organized access to all the articles, spread across
institutional repositories across the land, that have that particular seal
of approval.

Brian Simboli
Lehigh University

P.S. apologies if this merely recaps suggestions already broached. If it
does (as I suspect), if anyone knows where the suggestion is
entertained, please let me know. Am trying to come up to speed on such
issues.