A misplaced and resubmitted post

["Joseph J. Esposito" <espositoj@gmail.com>]

It is generous of Heather Morrison to offer the brand name of the American
Diabetes Association for articles that it has not reviewed and approved,
but I would like to suggest an entirely different route to creating Open
Access journals that would neatly sidestep all the headaches of
versioning.

Most OA discussion focuses on making available the content of existing
journals.  For reasons too obvious and numerous to list here, this
objective meets with resistance.  The research community does not sit
still, however: new fields, not just new articles, are being created every
day.  Authors working in these new fields find it difficult to publish, as
the existing journals were set up to work with other (older) fields.  
These authors have a very clear incentive to work with some version of an
author-pays (including institution-sponsors) program.  This is a clear
opportunity for OA journals:  new areas that the legacy publishers aren't
yet moving into for the simple reason that there is as of yet no market
(that is, user-pays market) for these journals.

To put the matter baldly:  it is not enough for something to be OA; it has
to be OA and new.  When OA advocates seek to change established practices,
they are likely to be rebuffed.  When they truly innovate, they will be
applauded.

Joe Esposito