Re: "Overlay Journals" Over Again...

[Steve Hitchcock <sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

Sally is quite right about the two roles of peer review, 
evaluation and relevance to audience. The latter is often 
overlooked in these debates, and it's why arbitrary peer review 
panels conceived without purpose and audience (in the 
hypothetical debates, at least) don't stack up.

However, Stevan Harnad's original point was that for online 
journals the critical remaining function is peer review rather 
than distribution and access. In that case the second role is not 
to be discarded but at least reconsidered. Online, new audiences 
are being created on micro and macro levels. You can see this in 
action everywhere in this sequence: blog, twitter, open Web 
bookmark, open bibliographies, tag, feed, blog, etc. The 
definition of online audiences and communities is less likely to 
be journal-centred unless they are participating in providing 
open access.

Steve Hitchcock
KeepIt Project Manager
IAM Group, School of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r@ecs.soton.ac.uk
http://preservation.eprints.org/keepit/
project blog: http://blogs.ecs.soton.ac.uk/keepit/

___

On 03/07/2009 04:14, Sally Morris (Morris Associates) wrote:
> 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