Re: Critique of OA metric

["Anthony Watkinson" <anthony.watkinson@btinternet.com>]

Is this not already happening David? See the work of my 
colleagues at CIBER. However for authors the journal brand seems 
to remain just as powerful and in general there seems to be 
little appetite for submitting to a database though it is 
possible that this may be happening to some extent with BMC or 
PLOS?

Anthony

----- Original Message -----
From: "David Prosser" <david.prosser@bodley.ox.ac.uk>
To: <liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu>
Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2009 10:54 PM
Subject: RE: Critique of OA metric

> It is simple to conceive of a decoupling between the journal 
> 'quality' brand (is the research correct?) and the journal 
> 'alerting' brand (here is a group of articles that may be of 
> interest to you) as described by Sally.  In the print world 
> grouping papers thematically together made perfect sense; in 
> the online world where people increasing use search engines 
> (whether specific, like Medline, or general, like Google) to 
> find papers it is perhaps less useful.
>
> So, a journal table of contents e-mail may be useful, but 
> equally I may be more interested in seeing the daily digest of 
> papers with a particular tag in Connotea, say. That way the 
> community would define its own interests rather than having the 
> collection codified by an editor.  And different communities 
> could combine the content of different journals in different 
> ways.  This to me is what PLoS One has done - provide the 
> quality brand, but leave the 'what's this journal about' to the 
> readers.  It seems inevitable (and was once titles and 
> abstracts went online!) that the 'alerting' brand is going to 
> become less and less within the control of publishers and more 
> in the control of users.
>
> David
>
> David Prosser
> SPARC Europe