Re: The role, if any, of librarianship journals

[Joseph Esposito <espositoj@gmail.com>]

I think David has hit the nail on the head.  Note that there is no
reference to prepublication peer review in this formulation.  Instead,
peer review will be post-publication.  Scholarly communications becomes a
matter of discourse, not of published artifacts.  *This is how the
Internet thinks.* (It's the medium, not the whatever.) Tenure committees
will have to find new ways to evaluate researchers if the traditional
journals are permitted to decline.  I tried to make these points several
months ago and was roundly criticized.  I hope David fares better.

Joe Esposito

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 19:34:05 EST, David Goodman <David.Goodman@liu.edu> wrote:

> This continuation of Phil's important work brings to mind the following
> question:
> 
> His downloaded ms. is a preprint. The "real" article will not be
> published for 6 months.  Everyone who is likely to be concern will see
> it here, or when it is mentioned on other lists and blogs.
> 
> Nonetheless it must be published in a conventional journal to be part of
> the formally indexed literature (or to count for promotion or tenure,
> though I am not sure that is relevant for this instance).  There
> probably also are people who have not yet made the transition from
> reading out of date journal articles to reading up to date Internet
> discussions, and of course authors would generally want to include even
> them.
> 
> On this list, we talk about how people in other fields should publish.
> If instead, we ourselves published only like arXiv, then those would
> read the article either because the topic seemed interesting and
> important (which it certainly is) or because they recognized the
> author's name and knew from previous articles that it would be likely to
> be very much worth reading. Those are the ways I'm told people use with
> arXiv, and it would work just as well for us. If our database had a good
> index, and there are many examples, we'd have everything we needed.
> Those used to journals as such would soon make the transition.
> 
> Even if librarians were less clever than physicists, we could learn from
> their example.  I do know the physics journals continue. (It may not be
> irrelevant that physics research departments are inherently very well
> funded.)
> 
> Apparently physicists have not yet convinced either themselves or senior
> academic administrators that the journals aren't necessary for
> promotion. Maybe we will find aspects where we are the smarter.
> 
> Dr. David Goodman Associate Professor Palmer School of Library and
> Information Science Long Island University dgoodman@liu.edu