Re: Provostial Publishing: a return to circa 1920

[Mary Summerfield <msummerfield@yahoo.com>]

SPIE has had extensive discussions with librarians and scholars 
in our community of researchers in optics and photonics.

We have learned that researchers will go to great lengths to get 
a paper--or an equivalent paper--without paying for it if their 
library does not subscribe to the journal or conference 
proceeding.  (In fact given the value of the time of these 
researchers, the efforts they will expend seem a poor use of 
their time.)  They are likely to become adept at using IRs to 
access this literature (even if it is not the final form).

Publishers face the challenge of providing Web sites that have 
sufficient richness of utility and pricing individual (and 
institutional) access such that researchers find using our online 
resources a good value.

Mary Summerfield
Manager Publications Business Development
SPIE


----- Original Message ----
From: Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>
To: liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu
Sent: Friday, May 30, 2008 4:46:23 AM
Subject: RE: Provostial Publishing: a return to circa 1920

I agree entirely that one is not likely to start with an IR to
find the most important work in a discipline, unless one happens
to follow the work of a particular scholar, in which case one
would likely go to the scholar's own web site first, not the IR.

But I do continue to question what the institution gains from its
IR. Does Harvard really need, or will it gain, any more
"prestige" by having its faculty's work deposited there?  It
seems equally likely that it will lose some respect if too many
scholars post articles that are first drafts or occasional pieces
that would never appear in any peer-reviewed forum. It could
easily become a grab bag of miscellany that will not reflect well
on Harvard's presumed reputation for quality. Harvard authors, on
the whole, are no better writers than scholars elsewhere, I would
suggest, and their unedited prose will not do any good for the
institution.

And, as for the general public, what members of that public are
really going to bother spending their time pouring over esoteric
scholarship when they can go to Wikipedia to get the information
they need? This seems to me as false an assumption as the
expectation that somehow members of the public are going to
benefit greatly from reading the technical articles posted on
PubMed Central under the new NIH program. I imagine that very few
members of the public are going to be able to understand the vast
majority of these articles, let alone derive any useful lessons
for life from them. There seems to be a general fantasy that the
whole world is somehow waiting breathlessly for access to all
this highly specialized knowledge. I speak as director of a press
that has a hard time selling books that we think to be of
"general interest," compared with our monographs. The audience
just isn't there, folks!  And institutions that believe their
reputations are going to soar because of what their faculty post
on their IRs are just kidding themselves.