RE: Critique of OA metric

[Sandy Thatcher <sgt3@psu.edu>]

At 2:46 PM -0400 10/30/09, David Prosser wrote:

>If we disagree then perhaps it's only subtly - the 'wrapper' is 
>important, but surely the 'alerting wrapper' does not have to be 
>the same entity as the 'quality wrapper'.  PubMedCentral and 
>arXiv are 'alerting wrappers' - search engine place results from 
>them high in result lists.  However, they do not directly 
>provide a quality stamp for each individual paper.  That is what 
>the journal does.  But from an alerting point of view I may be 
>less interested in the fact that a paper has been published in 
>Journal A and more interested in the fact that my esteemed 
>colleague Joe Esposito has tagged it or given it five stars. 
>That's what I mean when I talk about alerting being less in the 
>control of the publishers.

And it may be that the "brands" of scholarly book publishers 
function more like PubMed Central, too, and that the reputation 
of the authors and those who blurb their books mean more to 
potential buyers/users than the publisher's imprint.  How many 
people actually long remember what press published a book they've 
read?

Sandy Thatcher
Penn State University Press