RE: "Overlay Journals" Over Again...

["Sally Morris \(Morris Associates\)" <sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk>]

I think we're in danger of losing sight of the fact that PR does 
two different things:

1)It provides evaluation, by experts, of the validity of the 
study, its findings, and the conclusions drawn therefrom

2)It provides evaluation, by experts familiar with a particular 
journal and its readership, of the novelty, interest, and 
relevance of the work to that particular community.  You can't 
do that without a clear idea of what the 'journal' (as envelope, 
not as physical object) actually represents

To my mind, the second is at least as valuable to readers as the 
first.  (In some cases, it also contributes - through triangular 
'dialogue' between author, editor and reviewer - to significant 
improvement of both the content and the expression)

Sally Morris
Email: sally@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
[mailto:owner-liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu] On Behalf Of Stern, David
Sent: 02 July 2009 05:29
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Subject: RE: "Overlay Journals" Over Again...

The best way to both remove any conflict of interest and develop 
a scalable peer review support infrastructure on a less expensive 
OA server platform is to have a central server for materials 
supported by a centralized payment scheme.  One collection agency 
(imagine something like SPARC, or SCOAP3 by discipline) could 
make direct payments to the hosting service (reducing the 
overhead now found in the multiple/redundant payments from each 
and every current subscription organization).  How we efficiently 
funnel funds from a few big government revenue sources and 
endowments to this agent is a key question, but SCOAP3 is showing 
this approach might be viable. Remove author fees and use central 
revenue support, as the readers have a great deal to gain from 
the material and should share in the support costs.

One central server (or a few mirrored servers for backup) removes 
the redundancy, extra effort and unnecessary duplication within 
an institutional server model.  This central approach is best for 
published material ... locally developed teaching and research 
material can still be housed on institutional servers if we can 
guarantee long-term support.

(My belief is that discipline based servers have a better chance 
of long-term support as budgets get tight -- as there is more of 
a societal commitment to these collaborative approaches.)

Peer review separated from payment by authors, subsidized by the 
larger population, and housed on the most economical platforms. 
Overlay is apparently a loaded term, so let's remove it from the 
conversation but keep the conversation on target to show that OA 
WITH PEER REVIEW servers will impact commercial journals.

David