Re: Parallel journals

[Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>]

On 5-Oct-09, at 8:49 PM, Klaus Graf wrote:

> 2009/10/6 Stevan Harnad <harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk>:
>
>> (5) A journal issue is just a hodge-podge of mostly unrelated >> articles; no
>> need to "reconstruct" that; open access to all the articles plus good
>> boolean search power is all that's needed.
>
> I do not think that you can prescribe readers how to browse journal
> issues. There are lots of theme-issues where browsing makes sense.

Then just retrieve all and only the entire theme-issue with a suitable boolean
descriptor...

(You vastly underestimate the power of online boolean search over an OA inverted
full-text corpus -- and you also overestimate the persistence of obsolete,
dysfunctional habits, once more powerful means become available. But the real
reason all this prognostication is missing the mark is the persistent absence
of most of the target OA full-text corpus. The latent power is not at all
evident from the arbitrary, sparse OA subset we have so far. Until the token
drops and we realize that the only thing standing between us and that full
corpus is author keystrokes -- and that all that is needed to inspire those
author keystrokes is Green OA self-archiving mandates from universities and
funders -- our imaginations will continue to fail, and mislead us.)


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