Re: Features in publishing systems

[<jean.claude.guedon@umontreal.ca>]

Clearly, the scholarly communication system loses all meaning in 
the absence of researchers and their needs. Consequently, they 
should decide what is best for their work. Every other category 
of people invoilved in the process should think of 
herself/himself as ancillary to this end. And what researchers 
want is the greatest readership possible with the greatest 
possible access to everything. Then second-order issues begin to 
arise, but only then. This si why scholrs and loibrarians should 
work very closely together to design or redesign this optimal 
communications system.

Jean-Claude Guedon

Le jeudi 08 avril 2010 Mary Summerfield a ecrit:

> Joe makes a very good point.
>
> Given the many people involved in the scholarly and 
> professional communications ecosystem--from researchers to 
> authors to editors and reviewers to publishers to 
> libraries--who should decide what features are provided in the 
> various elements of the system?  How should those decisions be 
> made?
>
>   Mary Summerfield
> ________________________________
> From: Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>
> To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
> Sent: Wed, April 7, 2010 4:49:08 PM
> Subject: Re: Gmail at Yale
>
> Quite an indictment.
>
> I use Gmail for both personal and corporate mail.  Indeed, my 
> company works entirely with Cloud applications:  Google Docs, 
> Salesforce.com, Skype, etc.  The company policy is:  keep 
> nothing on your hard drive. This strategy has its problems. 
> The problems are trivial, however, in comparison to managing an 
> Exchange server, for example, but there are other mail systems 
> out there. Of course, as a Gmail user, I do pine for the days 
> of Eudora and have not totally sworn off Microsoft Outlook 
> (yet).
>
> But I am no apologist for Google or any other company (except 
> my own, of course).  I was making a somewhat different point in 
> my post.
>
> As someone who works with digital research publications said to 
> me recently, it is not sustainable to have 80% of the cost 
> deliver 20% of the value.  In English:  some features cost too 
> much.
>
> I think it is a very serious mistake to design (and pay for) a 
> system that has the most demanding users in mind.  This results 
> in systems that are overbuilt and expensive to maintain. 
> While there clearly are exceptions, very often good enough is 
> good enough.
>
> Cloud computing is (mostly) good enough and getting better. 
> As it matures it will save institutions millions of dollars in 
> IT costs. Any my question is, Considering the cost of higher 
> education and the priorities of research universities, isn't 
> good enough good enough for email?
>
> Joe Esposito