"Disaggregated Journals"

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

On Thu, 14 Jul 2005, Anthony Watkinson wrote (in liblicense):

> The quotation from Raym Crow (whose work incidentally I admire) needs to
> be taken in the context of his model in the same piece. To repeat - this
> disaggregated model leaves almost no role for publishers...

Raym Crow's 2002 SPARC Position paper "The Case for Institutional
Repositories":

    http://www.arl.org/sparc/IR/ir.html
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/2194.html

lost a lot of its potential usefulness because it made far too much of a
completely untested (and, I suspect, ultimately incoherent) speculation
(from J.W.T. Smith) about "Disaggregated Journals."

It is a great pity that a concrete, tested, and proven practical means of
maximizing research usage and impact -- namely, authors self-archiving
their published (traditional) journal articles in their own institutional
repositories (aka archives) -- was conflated with a mere piece of
speculation in what should have been an authoritative SPARC document.

Here is my original critique of Crow's paper (which I was, alas, persuaded
not to post publicly in the American Scientist Open Access Forum at the
time (2002), ostensibly on the grounds of maintaining solidarity among OA
advocates; but that was a mistake -- it's always a mistake to remain mute
about a flawed idea, even among allies). I posted it only 2 years later,
in 2004, too late:

    "Comments on the SPARC position paper" (4 August 2002)
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Temp/crow.html
    Posted in March 6 2004 :
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/3303.html

J.W.T. Smith's "Disaggregated Journal" idea had already been discussed
extensively much earlier in the American Scientist OA Forum (then called
the September-Forum) in 1999. The idea has been neither tested nor patched
up since:

    "Re: Alternative publishing models - was: 
    Scholar's Forum: A New Model..." (1999)
    http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/Hypermail/Amsci/0216.html

(So much of the slow history of OA seems to consist in recycling
speculations and fallacies instead of moving ahead and doing what has
already been demonstrated to be doable, and effective. Here we are in
2005, rediscovering the "Disaggregated Journal" -- and *still* not
providing the OA that has been within reach for at least a decade and a
half. -- I'm sure the pundits will now chime in with their wise saws about
why it had be so...)

Your humble but impatient archivangelist,

Stevan Harnad