RE: Provostial Publishing: a return to circa 1920

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

I agree entirely that one is not likely to start with an IR to 
find the most important work in a discipline, unless one happens 
to follow the work of a particular scholar, in which case one 
would likely go to the scholar's own web site first, not the IR.

But I do continue to question what the institution gains from its 
IR. Does Harvard really need, or will it gain, any more 
"prestige" by having its faculty's work deposited there?  It 
seems equally likely that it will lose some respect if too many 
scholars post articles that are first drafts or occasional pieces 
that would never appear in any peer-reviewed forum. It could 
easily become a grab bag of miscellany that will not reflect well 
on Harvard's presumed reputation for quality. Harvard authors, on 
the whole, are no better writers than scholars elsewhere, I would 
suggest, and their unedited prose will not do any good for the 
institution.

And, as for the general public, what members of that public are 
really going to bother spending their time pouring over esoteric 
scholarship when they can go to Wikipedia to get the information 
they need? This seems to me as false an assumption as the 
expectation that somehow members of the public are going to 
benefit greatly from reading the technical articles posted on 
PubMed Central under the new NIH program. I imagine that very few 
members of the public are going to be able to understand the vast 
majority of these articles, let alone derive any useful lessons 
for life from them. There seems to be a general fantasy that the 
whole world is somehow waiting breathlessly for access to all 
this highly specialized knowledge. I speak as director of a press 
that has a hard time selling books that we think to be of 
"general interest," compared with our monographs. The audience 
just isn't there, folks!  And institutions that believe their 
reputations are going to soar because of what their faculty post 
on their IRs are just kidding themselves.


At 9:33 PM -0400 5/28/08, Pikas, Christina K. wrote:
>At the risk of restating Ehling's more eloquent comment on the
>post itself -- this brings us back to gaining participation in an
>institutional repository.  It is my opinion (which I know a few
>people share) that contributions to an IR benefit the institution
>and raise the social capital of the institution -- not the
>individual author. Individual authors need to get cited and get
>recognized and the easiest way to do this is to be found.  Your
>work is more likely to be found in ArXiv or other disciplinary
>repositories than in your IR due to size and co-location with
>other similar works. You might be one of two physicists working
>in an area at your institution - why would someone who wanted
>information in that area go to your institution's repository?
>Yes, search engines and harvesting, but many researchers still
>chain and browse and look at the "what's new" section.
>
>More attention should be paid to virtual journals and a newer
>counterpart, the blog carnival.  When the new physics journal
>looks like a phone book (or Sears catalog -- does anyone remember
>them?) and with another physics publisher disaggregating their
>journals, to an extent, then these new aggregations should become
>more important.  Will the stamp of the editor or selector for the
>virtual journal become meaningful?  Will one large chemical
>society's refusal to participate in nano virtual journals lessen
>their relevance in that research area?
>
>Who does look at the institutional imprimatur is the public.  I
>think this came from Gieryn in his work on the demarcation of
>science.  The public relies most heavily on the institution's
>reputation to judge the authority of scientists and scientists'
>work.
>
>
>Christina K. Pikas, MLS
>R.E. Gibson Library & Information Center
>The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
>Voice  240.228.4812 (Washington), 443.778.4812 (Baltimore)
>Fax 443.778.5353
>
>
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
>[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Phil Davis
>Sent: Tuesday, May 27, 2008 9:07 PM
>To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
>Subject: Provostial Publishing: a return to circa 1920
>
>This starts looking like publishing at the turn of the century --
>a college-centric model of dissemination where titles like
>'Bulletin of the College of Agriculture' were the norm (and still
>exist in places like India).  These collections of collective
>faculty output gradually faded when subject-centric models of
>publishing became the norm.  They faded because researchers can
>create 'invisible colleges' [1] of other like-minded researchers
>from other colleges, and because these new communities (lets call
>them 'journals' and 'societies') become much more salient than
>one's home institution.
>
>To use Joe's business term, 'brand', a college or publisher is a
>much weaker brand than a journal or society brand.  The Harvard
>brand carries a gatekeeping stamp [2], since it necessarily
>filters out everyone who cannot (or does not care) to be part of
>the Harvard faculty.  Yet, it is still stuck in the 1920s model
>of college-centric publishing.  Now someone will respond to my
>post and claim that it is possible to create 'channels' or
>'layers' to provide some organization to this shoebox model.  Or
>alternatively, that when enough colleges do this, we could create
>'information streams' that would facilitate a democratic
>participatory model of subject-focused publishing.  Folks, you
>have just reinvented the modern journal.
>
>--Phil Davis


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