The role, if any, of librarianship journals

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

This continuation of Phil's important work brings to mind the following
question:

His downloaded ms. is a preprint. The "real" article will not be published
for 6 months.  Everyone who is likely to be concern will see it here, or
when it is mentioned on other lists and blogs.

Nonetheless it must be published in a conventional journal to be part of
the formally indexed literature (or to count for promotion or tenure,
though I am not sure that is relevant for this instance).  There probably
also are people who have not yet made the transition from reading out of
date journal articles to reading up to date Internet discussions, and of
course authors would generally want to include even them.

On this list, we talk about how people in other fields should publish. If
instead, we ourselves published only like arXiv, then those would read the
article either because the topic seemed interesting and important (which
it certainly is) or because they recognized the author's name and knew
from previous articles that it would be likely to be very much worth
reading. Those are the ways I'm told people use with arXiv, and it would
work just as well for us. If our database had a good index, and there are
many examples, we'd have everything we needed. Those used to journals as
such would soon make the transition.

Even if librarians were less clever than physicists, we could learn from
their example.  I do know the physics journals continue. (It may not be
irrelevant that physics research departments are inherently very well
funded.)

Apparently physicists have not yet convinced either themselves or senior
academic administrators that the journals aren't necessary for promotion.  
Maybe we will find aspects where we are the smarter.

Dr. David Goodman
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu on behalf of Phil Davis
Sent: Fri 1/7/2005 6:34 PM
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: Emerald/MCB duplication update
 
January 7, 2005.  For immediate release:

Article duplication in Emerald/MCB journals is more extensive than first
reported:  Possible conflicts of financial and functional interests are
uncovered

Letter to the editor of Library Resources & Technical Services.  
Submitted January 7th, 2005, expected publication v. 49, no. 4 (Summer
2005).

Philip M. Davis
Life Sciences Librarian, Cornell University


Abstract

....

Download draft manuscript from: 
http://people.cornell.edu/pages/pmd8/emerald_update.doc
.

Philip Davis, Life Sciences Bibliographer
Mann Library, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853
(607) 255-7192 ;  (607) 255-0318 fax
pmd8@cornell.edu
http://people.cornell.edu/pages/pmd8/