RE: Journal overlays

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

This is a response to Rick and to Ann.

1. There's a current special meaning to overlay journals, which exist only
as a selected table of contents to parts of several existing journals (in
some respects like a blog). The American Physical Society now has 5: see
the link to them at http://publish.aps.org/ which will explain the concept
better than I can.

2. For Ann's main meaning, this is in some respects like Varmus' original
proposal for E-Biomed. For the various versions, see:  "A Proposal for
Electronic Publications in the Biomedical Sciences"
http://www.nih.gov/about/director/pubmedcentral/ebiomedarch.htm.

There were many objections to the original over-detailed superstructure
for refereeing and other matters, but the basic proposal was sound then
and remains sound. I personally still consider it the best way to OA of
all, but I would rather discuss it after I (and presumably others) have
all had a chance to go back and read the original proposal and discussion.
Checking, I find that this was a proposal from 1999, 5 years ago, and can
surely be made both simpler and better with what we have since learned.

The "the problem of competing credentialing bodies." mentioned by Rick is
no worse than the problem of the existence of multiple journals, with the
added advantage that one could choose to be credentialed by several.
Obviously some costs would remain. Someone would need to pay for peer
review and copyediting, which will always be a significant expense, just
as research and report-writing is.

This satisfies both routes to OA. It has all the advantages of a fully
"gold" OA journal system, similarly having no the library and publisher
overhead of access control. And it would also have all the advantages of a
fully "green" self-archiving system, as one could post articles both
before peer review (like the current "preprints"), and after peer review
(like current fully revised "postprints", pdf and links and data.  The
running costs would be similar to the extremely low costs of systems like
arXiv. The system like any good digital repository would be so organized
as to optimize indexing by whatever we choose to construct, including
automatic citation and readership measures.

Dr. David Goodman
dgoodman@liu.edu

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